prop walk.

“I simply told him it wasn’t ‘fantastic.’ I said is was ‘nice.’”
“Jake was five.”
[The voice was like that of a woman’s. Deep and soothing. Some of the vowels evoked ancient rites, from times histories were passed on without the written word. There was ample space for misconstrued resentment.]
*
“Okay. So we weren’t supposed to teach him what words meant?”
“A bit of encouragement?”
“‘Nice’ was already an encouragement. The dog’s head was twice as big as the rest of its body. And there was a leg missing.”
[Despite apparent dissonance there was gratitude and forgiveness between us. Not all was lost. Although, in hindsight, a quicker demise of a fundamentally broken premise would’ve been easier on all of us.]
*
“There were four legs alright.”
“No. What you assume was the fourth leg was, in fact, the tail. Jake said that himself.”
[That’s two out of three. Opinion vs fact. Yet, I am now inclined to believe that, in fact, there were four legs.]
*
“It was a fantastic drawing of a dog. And you know it.”
“Well, glorify the past if that’s what you want. That is your choice. It was an okay dog at best—far as I’m concerned.”
[Closing an argument is an avenue for new reasoning, even if at the time all you see is a dark horizon, leading to complete obscurity. Humility is what you’d been seeking yet you were awarded cheap victory over someone you meant no harm to.]