There Were Rules

Fake blood: okay. Bad language: not okay. ⭐️

While other toddlers were learning the alphabet and doing normal preschool stuff, I was at a neighborhood daycare in Denver, in a family’s house—where gallons of stage blood were simmering on the stove… like marinara.

I was three, just watching it all happen. They were making this homemade Hollywood blood that smelled like chocolate, thick and bubbling in giant stockpots, headed for a KISS concert or some low-budget horror film—I didn’t really know which.

My best friend lived there—it was her house, so it all just felt normal. We’d parade through the rooms like we owned the place, past the clunky props and the velvet boxes and shiny metal things we weren’t supposed to touch. To us, a bubbling vat of red liquid was just… part of the day.

But the best days were when the dad got home and said it was showtime. All of us kids would scramble down to the basement with that buzzy feeling in our stomachs, past the toys, into this little theater full of weird magic stuff… and then things would start happening.

He’d whip a tablecloth out from under a full place setting without a single glass wobbling. He’d pull his nose right off his face, or find coins hidden in my ears, or push a giant needle through a balloon without it popping. We’d just stare at him, completely locked in.

And then there were the bigger ones.

One minute, the mom who ran the daycare was slicing apples for snack time. The next, she was climbing into a box to get sawn in half. I remember feeling this little wave of panic the first time, just waiting for her to come back out in one piece. And when she did, I could finally breathe again.

I just sat there with my mouth open, and of course I believed everything… why wouldn’t I? When you’re three, the world already feels kind of magical anyway. This place just had better props.

But even in a house full of impossible things, there were still rules.

My 4th birthday at daycare with my best friend — 1970s. This was the actual kitchen where the blood would be simmering.

A couple years in, right before I went off to “real” school, I said something that got me into trouble. I don’t remember what it was, but I vividly remember what happened next.

In a kitchen where they made fake blood, the parents were surprisingly old-school. They were fine with gallons of it cooling next to our daycare snacks, but a five-year-old swearing… that didn’t go over well.

Next thing I knew, I was at the sink, the sweet chocolate-blood smell still in the air, and she was washing my mouth out with a bar of Ivory soap. It tasted awful. Not like anything else in that house.

Until then, everything that looked painful ended with a laugh—but this didn’t. That’s where the magic stopped working, at least for me.

So I left for kindergarten with a clean mouth and a slightly warped sense of how things worked.