The cost of a bubble bath

Once upon a time, in a land 1,500 miles away, lived two young sisters who loved to bathe together. Their red-headed mother would fill a large basin with comfortably warm water and bubbles, sparkly and white. The two sisters would slip into the foamy broth and smile sweetly as their mother left the room. Once she was well out of sight, the younger of the girls would take a large bar of soap, cradle it in her fleshy fingers and then purposely drop it beneath the sudsy film.

Then the real game began as each sister grabbed, snatched, and wrestled to retrieve the slimy block. It would squirt from one end of the tub to the other, weaving in and out of their grasps, narrowly avoiding toes and legs and bums. The sisters would slow their movements to complete stillness as if to not scare the illusive bar until the suspense became unbearable for anyone in the single digit years. Then the splashing, reaching, and laughing would resume. But the once full bar of soap was shrinking, rather dissolving, beneath the murky waves.

The sisters, undeterred, continued the game, and as the bubbles thinned the milky water became exposed. Still obscuring their vision, this fueled their excitement, and the shrinking soap grew harder to find and grasp. Soon, it disappeared altogether, and when neither sister could identify the whereabouts of the bar in the completely opaque water, they called a truce and drained the tub.

One must wonder if that red-headed mother knew the cost of a bubble bath included an entire bar of soap.