1. A drinking fountain on a ship.
2. A cask on a ship that contains the day's supply of drinking water.
3. Informal. Gossip; rumor.
The name of my pet bug. Only I could see him and he followed me around everywhere. It's a good thing he was invisible, because if my mom had seen all the places he was getting up into she literally would have killed him. Mom was deathly afraid of bugs. She hated black flies, brown spiders and even little red ladybeetles with the little black spots on them. She either had a spatula in her hand or a fly-swatter, and she'd use them in just about the same way. Flipping burgers and puncturing eggs with the same quick movements as she would smash a housefly. Little did she know that Scuttlebutt was up on the counter or sitting in the sink or right in the middle of the kitchen table, watching her and wincing with every swat, looking at me with wide eyes and shivering. He never did get used to her viscous ways toward the tiny things that always scrambled to get out of her way.
In general I tried to avoid the kitchen for this reason - to protect Scuttlebutt. I didn't like to see him distressed and since he followed me everywhere I thought it might be cruel to force him to watch his kindred being shot down one after the other. Of course Scuttlebutt was different from any other bug I had ever seen or found squished under a napkin. He was a color that was a bunch of colors in one; he could blend in with anything. And I don't mean like a chameleon..it was almost as if he was every color all at once and he just became more solid of a color when he wanted to blend in with what was around him, when he wanted to hide. Like when my mom was talking directly to me, he would just disappear, become part of the sofa or something like that. And he was big. His shell came up to my knees when I stood up and if I laid down it was possible to hug him like a long pillow because he was soft too. Not squooshy or fuzzy but huggable, if you know what I mean. Anyway, he was my friend and so I kept him away from mom. I knew she didn't have a swatter big enough to pop him, and it wasn't like she could see him, but I wasn't going to risk it. Scuttlebutt was the only friend I had.
You'd think it would have bothered me to have a big bug following me around all the time, but it really didn't seem like he had anything else to do and I certainly didn't mind the company. I was 5 years old and had already given up on the idea that mom and dad might one day bring home a brother for me to play with and by that point I had already learned you couldn't play fun games with a baby. Couldn't build forts with them or climb trees or conduct contests to see who can do stuff faster or better or longer. Not that I did any of that stuff with Scuttlebutt. That just would have been weird. And mean. He just didn't have the legs for any of it. Mostly he just watched me do stuff on my own. I think he just knew that it was nice to have somebody else around, someone to talk to. When it's only you most of the time you start making up things to do and eventually I started to experiment with building things. I'd take bits of recycling and old newspapers and odd electronic parts that mom or dad were getting rid of and collect them in a heap under my bed. Piece by piece I would take this or that and see how I could stack it or fit it or glue it together to make something else. Things without an obvious purpose or logic about them, but that made me glad when I looked at them. Scuttlebutt liked them too. Of course I think part of the reason he liked them is because a lot of them would end up looking like him. Well, variations of him. Metallic bugs. Tiny ones. Medium ones. And Scuttlebutt-size ones. Those were the ones we both liked the best. I called them Scuttlebutt Sculptures. But then we'd always have to try to hide them somehow, or even take them apart and put them back together again later, because mom was always trying to throw them out.
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