He has been ignoring his mother’s call for dinner until he hears the screen door. He looks up but it is only Mariam, who wrinkles her eyebrows at him and mouths, “Father’s home.” He stands up, puts the stick in its place and walks woodenly in the kitchen door to the dinner table. He has no appetite but he knows he must prepare to clean his plate or else. He can feel Mariam looking at him at the dinner table as they bend over their meal to say grace. If their father catches her with her eyes open during grace, he might send her to her room without dinner. But soon grace is done and Father doesn’t notice and they begin eating.

Mariam shrugs her pink acrylic robe around her shoulders. She silently cracks open the door and tiptoes downstairs to the laundry room. Under the bare light bulb in the basement, bent over, Haig’s shoulders work the piles of fabric down into the washer. Just as he looks up to see her, they both hear the sound: the creak of the top step. Backlit against the bright kitchen light is the black outline of Father, the hairs displaced in sleep topping his head like curls of whipped cream on the top of a sundae. But Father is not like a dessert at all, he’s like the clawed demons Mariam feels living in the shadow of her bed that she must jump over at night. Father is a small man, but somehow his compactness speaks of a contained power, like looking into a well, the echoing stony dark no less mighty for not being an ocean. Haig was looking at the floor; only Mariam saw her Father’s mouth twitch, the lines around it deep parentheses. She could not see his eyes while he said evenly, in his baroque accent, rolling the r’s, “Don’t forget the detergent.” Her body was a board. She tried to shrink against the wall, away from the circle of light around her brother, not to disturb the air around him that somehow afforded this miracle.

Her Father turned back and shuffled in his slippers across the kitchen; she let herself breathe, once, through her nose. Her brother was slopping blue liquid copiously into the washer, dousing the sheets so much she could smell the soap wafting floral chemicals all over. She was about to open her mouth to say, ‘Not so much!’ when Haig said in a low, strangled voice, “Shut up.” His voice reminded her of their blind dog when he growled all the time at nothing shortly before he died; their Mother said dogs are angry and confused by changes in their bodies. It didn’t appear that he was speaking to her.

Vanessa Kulzer's fiction has appeared in the anthology: Women Behaving Badly: Feisty Flash Fiction Stories (Paper Journey Press) and in Transfer87. Last summer, she was one of the writers of Four Echoes, an experimental theater project produced by Shotgun Theater Lab in Berkeley. She is currently a candidate in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. She lives on Potrero Hill with her fiance, Lincoln, and her cat, Fat Boy.