It’s almost time for dinner. Little Petey is strapped into his booster seat, crying. Not an “I’m hurt” or “I need help” cry. Just an “I’m irritated and have had enough and don’t know what to do with all these feelings” sort of cry.

“Pete won’t stop crying!” Poppy calls out. As if it weren’t obvious from my macaroni-stirring vantage point. “Petey, stop crying right now!”

“No,” he wails, multi-syllabically. Unconsoling meets inconsolable.

“I’m trying to get Pete to stop crying, Mommy,” she says, whacking a decorative Ikea pillow against the tabletop. “He won’t stop crying. Petey, you have to stop crying, or otherwise you won’t go to music class.”

He doesn’t stop crying.

“Alright,” she says. “I’m through of ideas.”

She stomps back to the living room. He continues to wail. I look at the timer on the microwave. 2:34 I let him get down anyway. He goes to the living room to play with Leo’s Magic Baton.

“Conduct with me!” it shrieks. “Music by Ludwig van Beethoven!”

“Mommy, I want to play with the baton,” Poppy says.

“Pete’s playing with it right now.”

“Conduct with me!”

“Too loud, Pete,” she says. A new burst of wailing tells me she’s snatched it away.

“Mine!”

“You have to share.”

“No!”

“Yes, you have to share,” she says.

No one likes to share with a warlord, I think. But I don’t say it. I don’t want to talk politics with a four-year-old.

“Poppy,” I say. “Would you like to stir the cheese in?”

Crisis averted.

This week’s “[W]rite of Passage” prompt was, “Today post a dialog between characters, real or otherwise.” Here are some others who participated: