/yesod

Tag: family

  • the apartment across the way

    We’re living in an apartment complex, a bit run down and seedy. But this is all we can afford.

    In the apartment across the way, a young couple live with their two small children. The woman is slight, dark haired and sickly. Her husband is darker, brows constantly knotted with rage. His mentally-challenged brother lives with them.

    It is a sad family.

    News spreads through the complex from neighbor to neighbor like crows carrying misfortune from field to field.

    I am work when my wife calls to tell me that the sickly woman has passed away, leaving the husband on his own to care for their children and his brother as best he can.

    The whispers don’t quite reach the point of wondering if he was the one who killed her.

    I see him walking, the baby in his arms and the older daughter — just only four years old — and want to offer to help. But I do not. I have a family of my own, after all.

  • brief reunion

    …we sit together in the small living room, balancing plates on our knees and doing our best to keep up the conversation despite the fact that there are some genuinely difficult conflicts unresolved between a few of us. And the fact that some of us are dead.

    It’s a surprise to see them, my grandparents. Odder still is the appearance of multiple versions of my grandfather — he sits with my grandmother, each of them in their late fifties, full of good humor and health . . . and he sits next to me in his early nineties, broken and cadaverous, his eyes pits of sorrow.

    My mother is there . . . but there is something odd about her. I can’t quite tell what it is and I don’t understand why no one else seems to notice or care…

    …and when I wake, I wonder what it means . . . wonder if a call will come today with bad news.

  • the promotion

    [This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated July 25th, 2001]

    Nothing good is coming…

    …and because my brother is being appointed to such a prestigious position as ambassador, our whole family has been invited to come and take part in the ceremony and reception.