The Childhood of Malachi Lee (Chapter 1)

Introduction:

    This is Chapter One of The Childhood of Malachi Lee, written by Yo Makes and edited by Mei Makes. This is a fiction story, though very loosely is like a person that actually exists. Malachi Lee is the main character of this book. Malachi lives with his two sisters, his mom and dad, his aunt and uncle, his three cousins, and his grandparents. Some words or sentences may be in Chinese. Chinese translations are at the bottom of the page. Malachi is 12 years old. I hope you enjoy The Childhood of Malachi Lee.  Now lets dive in!

                                                                                                                                       -Mei Makes

    I was feeding our turtle one day as I always do, when she tried to bite me. I don’t know why it would want to do that, since it wouldn’t try to bite anyone else and, I mean, we had quite a bit of people in my family. 12 people to be exact. But then again, nobody really comes over here anyways, because it’s so smelly. By the way, it is not smelly in a good way. I used to also take out the turtle poop too, as well as feeding the turtle, but after awhile, I decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. Besides, the turtle’s coop was too gross! So much poop piled up that the turtle was living over a foot higher than she was originally living at! I don’t particularly like feeding the turtle, but it’s one of my required chores and at least I don't have to take out the turtle’s poop. 

All of a sudden, I thought of using my cool Arduino micro controller to feed the turtle everyday for me. Than, I would have much more time to do my other projects that are actually interesting. By the next day, I had connected my Arduino to some motors. The motors opened and closed a tiny door on the side of a wood box that Paul, my dad, made. Paul, Daniel, my uncle, and Ye Ye, my grandpa, love to carve wood. The wood box was used to hold the turtle food. My only concern was how to waterproof my little contraption.

The only problem is that I’m not very good at programming the Arduino, so I asked Ava, my older sister, to help me. Ava was a very good programmer, in fact, she makes tons of money programming. That made it very easy for her to program my Arduino with her I-phone 26. It worked as well as I had imagined! At least so far.

I ran outside to tell Paul and Daniel, who were weeding the vegetable patch. (One thing I don’t particularly like to do.) They started walking with me to the extremely smelly turtle’s nest. Right before we were about to get to the turtle’s nest, Paul and Daniel suddenly and abruptly turned around and headed back toward the vegetable patch. I was really confused. Why would they suddenly go back?

Then, it dawned on me, the turtle smelled really bad to them. It probably didn’t occur to me because I was used to the horrible smell. Now that I really think about it, it was probably a good thing that Paul and Daniel didn’t see the turtle’s poop mound, even if they had smelled it. If they had seen it, they would have ordered me to clean it up. I guess I have to put a tarp or cloth or something on the turtle’s large mound of poop, so ¹Ye Ye won’t notice it. 

While I was dragging the tarp over to the deck, where the turtle lives, I suddenly noticed that Clara, my sister, was having a ride on it. I was working really hard huffing and puffing the tarp to the deck, while Clara was having a wonderful time riding on the tarp. That slowed me down, like a thousand times. 

By the time I finally got there, Ye Ye had already arrived, wearing a respirator to try to filter out some of the smell. That was probably because of the turtle poop. Paul and Daniel had probably told Ye Ye how bad it smelled. As soon as he saw me, he said, “Malachi, you have to clean this poop up today. I’m not going to have this much poop on my farm.” I nodded my head. 

I was really angry at Clara because I wouldn’t have been in this mess if she hadn’t made me take so long by having a ride on the tarp. I should have forced her to come off. If that had happened, I probably would have gotten the tarp here and covered the poop mound before Ye Ye even arrived at the scene. I thought about asking Clara to help me clean up all of the poop, but I decided against it. After all, it wasn’t really her fault and she probably would have said no and gone off with Isabella, my younger cousin. 

Ding!  Ding! Ding! It was the bell on the top of our house. That meant it was dinner time. No time to clean the poop up today. I guess I would have to do that tomorrow. I quickly ran to our house and washed my hands. Then I walked over to the dining room, where we had dinner. Ye Ye prayed and we all started eating.

During dinner, I couldn’t focus on my cao fan, fried rice, because I was thinking about how I should get rid of all of the turtle poop. I could pay Austin, my cousin, to do it or I could also saw around it using a chainsaw. The only problem was that someone might fall through it. What should I do?

Translations:

¹Ye Ye

To be continued...