Short Story

I wrote this in one sitting


Dad comes in, almost ready for work with his untied tie wrapped around his neck and his briefcase firmly in hand, and the children do not break their anxious giggling. They're all in the same room but Mom is by the kitchen counter fiddling with some dishes and taking food out of its container. Dad's got red-rimmed morning eyes behind tiny glasses and in the trapezoid of orange morning light he is too pale.
He drops the briefcase on the table and drags the chair on its back legs with a low screech. As he sits he looks at the children clinically, for just a second. These completely incomprehensible beings that he has created and is slowly losing any sort of control over. When they were babies their list of demands was simple, if random. They could be appeased with things that did not require almost infinite analysis and reference to the current iteration of good parenting. They're now like six and four years old, thereabouts, and have achieved a sort of synergistic capacity for mayhem. The assumption with little kids, and you can see how this has failed in the way Dad reaches down to the kitchen floor to retrieve some toy that looks like a piece of abstract art, is that they are not cognizant of the world around them like an adult. Like if you aren't making eye contact with them then they aren't listening to you. But these kids are laughing, almost shrilly matching the timber of the pre-coffee alarm clock, and Dad knows they operate on their own insatiable kid logic. That they observe things that no one else sees, maybe just because they're shorter, and they can always be counted on to innocuously ask you the most penetrating and unwieldy questions. The six year old boy just the other day asking him what a gay person was, as though there wasn't an encyclopedia behind any conceivable answer. One of them blurts out a distinctly contrived word that sends both of them into hysterics.
Mom comes over now with an armful of food, every member of her little tribe requiring some dietary exception. And the kitchen is so immaculately clean and modern that the mental energy required to maintain it as an idea pulses in her long, smooth neck. You can literally see her heartbeat, whump whump whump, in the brief second that she stands still before sitting down to join them. She's ready for work, completely so you know that she's been up for longer than Dad probably, and impeccably dressed in khaki slacks and a blazer. Perfect collarbones jutting at the opening at the top of her blouse. Dad looks here, briefly, and then receives his bagel from her.
They're both of them relatively young, but there are wrinkles at the corners of their eyes and their cheekbones as they try to smile at each other. All of this has taken less than 10 seconds. The eyes. Both of them with eyes brown and soft and tired and with an anxious patina over them. You suspect that if the right piece of news fell through the skylight and onto the table that one of them would burst into tears.
The nine-year-old girl ceases her laughter immediately. The cereal or muffin or oatmeal that mom has put in front of her will simply not do. And this, of course, is just another part of the conspiracy against her childhood composed of school and homework and church and being nice to Aunt So-and-So. Of course crying is not the optimal strategy here, so she begins to yell, almost like that poor little girl in The Exorcist but of course the content is all different. But with that same growl in the bottom of her voice, a bit histrionic but primal and too Pavlovian to be considered inauthentic.
“I hate raisins!” she yells at Mom. Like this hate is part-and-parcel of her longstanding and traumatic experience with dried grapes.
And Mom's hair practically stands on end. She's got one of those short, encapsulating haircuts that work on some women and you can almost see the very end of each tendril stiffen. She breathes in through partially clamped teeth like this little kid loved raisins not three months ago, and her eyes dart around for some way to handle this delicate situation. Give the kid anything they want and they'll morph into whiney little brats (if they aren't already that at times), but how can they be encouraged if they're never able to determine their tastes? Mom finally shakes her head and takes the plate of Oat Bran with raisins or the raisin muffin or whatever back into the kitchen area for something else. Everything the parents do is rushed, this is a morning before work and over the years they've developed a very efficient schedule so that everything will occur on time.
Dad has no real reaction to the little girl's outrage. He just hopes she doesn't say anything about hating them. They throw that word around to get things, but for grown-ups, you know, hate is a big deal. The word hate can make you feel like you've failed for the rest of your life. It's important to remember how young they are. Dad's work is not dissimilar from Mom's but he's been convinced to think of himself as the provider of the family. In the briefcase he holds portfolios and business cards and Getting Things Done prompts that buoy these disorienting little people up above the morass. Dad's ability to keep his eyes-from crossing amidst the tedium is what will buy these kids used cars in ten years and send them away to college to drink their brains out.


But Dad's got no reaction because the children make almost no sense. Everyday he goes to work, and its not unlike what Mom does but he's a man so he feels like everyday he wades out into the morass is like a battle, and has to idly receive the absurd demands of his higher-ups and has learned over time that they are not interested in his innovative new approaches because they themselves have developed what they think is an airtight system. After a point the whole work thing doesn't require as many neurons as it does wholesome, plain-old “nerves”. A bit of gumption and desperation just to get through the day.
When Mom gets back with something else for the girl to eat, the children fidgeting in concert but sort of above the level of intervention, her and Dad make eye contact. Again the eyes. His red, beady eyes matching hers for a second. And she realizes that he looks just as tired as she is.
And Dad these last few months has been waking up every hour throughout the night in cold sweats. Some kind of psychosomatic fever dream that sets in when the dread of getting up in the morning has finally become a part of your lymph system. And inside his head he is screaming something that doesn't make sense by itself as a word yelled out but in his quickly forgotten dream is the endnote to some kind of collapse. Always in the dream this vague image of supporting some impossible mass above him, with rusty protuberances and loose-leaf documents being blown off and seagulls perched on top picking at rotten things. Sweating with the strain until it crushes him.
But now it seems they will have a relatively serene breakfast. The girl is satisfied with the bowl of cereal her mother has brought her and the boy is distractedly drooling as he watches something on the wall with great intent. Dad and Mom and Sister all bring one spoonful or fingerful of food to their mouth and chew it procedurally.
Suddenly, little Brother asks: “Why do you have to go to work every day?”
And normally he's so infectiously cute you want to watch him roam around in a sunny park all day. But in the morning, all misguidedly energized and crumbs caked to his face, all Mom can do is lean her forehead to her palm in a careful way that will do not disrupt her hair. She's got a top-notch manicure with longish, burgundy fingernails that make it difficult to type. And the kid gets no answer and moves on instantly to scooping out drippy cereal with his bare hand. Mom closes her eyes for a second like she'd been up all night cringing as Dad cold-sweated all over her and in the damp sheets she tried to figure out exactly how much she could tolerate and had to keep raising her limit. And all day she can feel this slime on her, no matter how hard she loofas or how powerfully exfoliating her apricot scrub is. Sitting at her desk at work thinking about Dad waking up with a moan that sounds so little, so infantile it makes her nervous the way the tiny body of her newborns did when they let them sleep in their bed.
Dad's reminiscing about something so distant that it might not have happened, that's how he stares at his breakfast and tries to ignore the briefcase. Like when they had gotten married he had felt so accomplished with the little pot of savings that he had scraped together and the cozy starter-home in the neighborhood with a great housing-cost/quality-of-school-district ratio. And he had even carried her over the threshold that smelled like fresh paint. And because they didn't have a bed yet they made love right there on the new carpet, little clumps of carpet fiber still scattered from when it had been put in. And in their rolling around they almost crushed some little wedding or housewarming gift and she just pushed it out of the way animalistically as he tried to unstrap elements of her dress. He thinks that now she seems disgusted by him, and conflicted by her disgust.
And the doorbell rings and Mom shoots up to her feet exclaiming “school!”. This doorbell being rung by whatever unfortunate mother in the neighborhood was currently in charge of the carpool. And the kids don't hesitate to try and run to the door before Mom can hand them their sacked lunches. Hoping that the boy doesn't think to shove celery stalks up his nose or fling the grapes (this one does like grapes, she thinks) at his classmates. Their days at school only long enough to rile them up and return them home. How some other adult, even a highly trained teacher, can hope to manage thirty-some screaming kids let alone navigate them through a series of exercises and projects, is mind-numbing to think about.
Brother dodges a ritualistic kiss on the forehead and stamps his feet after Sister who is pirouetting and swinging her lunch as they exit. A sign of human sophistication is that when a person leaves the room we realize that they continue to exist. Mom and Dad try to subvert this tendency. They look at each other with an uncertainty, a pause like “are they really gone?” and Mom pulls out a small medicine bottle, one of those translucent orange ones you used to get, and the purple logo flys off of it (you'll need some computer guys to get on this) and takes up the lower half of the screen. “Psoma” in purple, the font textured with the purple fading to lavender on the right edge. Soft and friendly. And the yellow slogan fades in as the sound fades out and Mom and Dad are sharing a glass of orange juice to swallow one down. “To Keep You From Freaking Out” or however it is your selling this damn thing.
I'm telling you. Run this between Hungover Housewives and Who Wants to Torture a Millionaire? and you won't be able to keep this stuff on the shelves.