[Segment 3]
Nov. 6th, 2005 12:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
that he realized she was talking to him, and scowled unfairly, backing away from her so that he could finish dressing himself. He was old enough. And post a long lecture the prior day about how mother and father were going to be so terribly busy with the new business, and how he was going to have to begin taking more care of himself in the coming weeks, he was a little annoyed that she had taken on the initiative to treat him like such a doll, this morning. Since their arrival in Greece, just a week prior, Peter had been uncharacteristically sullen and argumentative. He could tell that his parents were worried, but the parts of his mind that weren’t relishing quietly their concern didn’t care. The boy had retreated into himself, conjuring countless unspoken fantasies.
In the wretched phantasmagoria that his move had become, an endless stream of boxes and bags, hotel rooms that he couldn’t be comfortable in, sitting hot through stuffy business meetings, nothing was anomalous. So, being cleaned up and rushed frenetically out of the gaping, empty house this morning, only to be told to wait on the sidewalk for a few stretching minutes, did not alarm him. Mother had said something about a ‘big surprise’, but he wasn’t paying much attention all told. Peter didn’t think there could be anything properly surprising in this alien neighborhood. He paced from one spot to another on the walkway, staring down at the spaces between his shined shoes, waiting for whatever ‘surprise’ this was to come with increasing dread.
Behind him, a door of one of the strange houses opened. New neighbors, doubtlessly… Dad probably discovered a family on this stumped street that had children his age, and now wanted to introduce him. Needless to say, Pete didn’t want to be introduced. He’d already planned, in his needling mind, all manner of ways that he could behave with subtle awfulness, repulsing droopy-eyed the idea of new friends.
“Peter, come on inside! Breakfast is waiting.” That was his mother, the chime of her voice drilling against his frayed nerves. He turned on one heel, head down, and wandered up the short walk to the house where the door stood open to greet him.
This house, this home, was largely unfurnished… it had a familiar spartaness to it, not that of a home occupied by people who simple did not have the means to fill it with worldly comfort, but like his own new house seemed not-quite lived in. Like a new shoe; clean but not yet broken in. Hands jammed into constricting twill pockets, Peter stepped stiffly out of his shoes and onto the strange carpet, close and nubby through his socks. He felt scratchy and strangled in his clothes today, wanted to slouch into an old sweater and lounge the day slothfully into atrophy, but it was not his fate.
His stomach was growling, quite against his intention to absolutely, under no circumstances, be fed a welcoming breakfast in a strange house by a family he did not know. However, against his best resolution, Peter was being drawn onward by the redolent perfume of spiced rolls and black coffee, which rolled like open arms from the parlor ahead where voices spoke low, out of his vision.
He paused suddenly, realizing that he was looking at a vaguely familiar bureau. It had a look of ashamed loneliness about it, standing empty and black against a bare white wall, out of place in the widening of the hallway before the parlor. The pang that hit his chest, tightening around his boy’s heart, made him clutch his fists and scowl even more deeply. Unreasonable, irrational, but somehow he associated that empty, lifeless piece of furniture as a piece of the home he had lost. It looked like something out of the Marx household, their style. How dare these people, whoever they were, these Greek neighbors have anything in their possession that reminded him of what should be his. It was wholly unfair.
It was wrapped in these thoughts that Peter rounded the corner, blinking in the sudden brightness of a sunlit window.
“There you are!” His mother chimed, and then, running into the last notes of her voice came another… a hoarse, cigar-ruined but ever-jovial baritone that he knew from countless suppers, from holiday hymns in the rook-infested church, from the cupped hands of home.
“Peter lad!”
“Mr. Marx?” Peter replied bewilderedly, not initially computing exactly what was going on. There was his father standing just behind his mother’s petite frame, there was Angel’s barrel-chested uncle with the kitchen light shining softly off the bald spot on the front of his head. All the while, his hands were accepting a plate of sticky buns from Mrs. Marx as his brow furrowed, blue eyes glancing questioningly toward his beaming parents.
Angel shut off the light in the washroom, smoothing her fingers over her damp hair and sighing deeply at her scrubbed, white cheeks. Saturday morning, early, a dreamless night… normally, for something as simple and familiar as a family meal – even if it were a special breakfast of some kind – she wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to ‘freshen up’. But as it was, she was cripplingly weary, and had great – almost unreasonable – desire to conceal the fact from her aunt and uncle, as there was no explanation to be made for her state.
Glowering very briefly into the mirror, the child straightened, affixed a smile neatly to her features, and moved down the hall toward the kitchen. The bouquet of sweet vittles that bloomed on the olfactory sense, beckoning with seductive warmth from that direction, had all but driven her mad as she meticulously combed her sable tresses. Moving as lightly-footed as she could manage, though her knees felt leaden, she wound a piece of black organza around her hair at the nape of her neck and tied a clumsy knot. There were voices coming from down the hall, hushed and familiar laughter.
“Oh, Gene, it’s just such a windfall! I could hardly have prayed for better, myself. This is such a beautiful house! How has the move been? It looks like you’ve had a good time unpacking… everything in its place.”
“Hardly,” came her Aunt’s voice in response to the first. “Sometimes I think I’ve packed my own head in these boxes somewhere and I’m looking for it now!”
Laughter, before “My heavens, you should see our place. It’s a regular disaster area… I might as well be a construction worker rebuilding after a bad fire!”
Laughter, from several parties. Her uncle’s voice beckoned her. “Angel? Is that you, pumpkin?” She rounded the corner, her fingers trailing lightly against the wall. The parlor was softly lit, made to seem smaller by the five people already standing in it. A cozy surrounding, one that felt home-like and comforting. In the middle of it all, looking quite pensive and uncomfortable – which was not unlike him one bit, she thought – was Peter Collins, warm blue eyes greeting her expectantly, and an unsure smile teetering on the cusp of his countenance.
Surprise struck her, but it was almost more a surprise for her lack of alarm at seeing the Collins’s standing in her aunt’s kitchen this morning. If she’d taken nothing away from her week of eldritch nightmares, she’d taken some knowing – as she’d expressed, somberly, to her aunt a day before – that she would be reunited with her dear friend in only a short period of time. Angel smiled, though from the almost imperceptible change on Peter’s features, it was not the smile that he was hoping to see.
“Good morning, Pete.” She chimed, trying her best to sound more chipper for his sake.
“Angie!” The boy’s face burst into a grin. There was a moment that had stretched between them, then, that Angel had felt more keenly than she’d felt the rest of the morning’s press. It was a sensation not unlike that fumbling in the repeated dream that had weighed so heavily on each night but the one directly prior, of reaching for something that one knew was present and close, but not being able to touch it. She purse her lips, thinking for a moment that, if only the four adults hadn’t been so insistently present – her aunt handing her breakfast, her uncle saying something to Mr. Collins about how nice it would be that the children would have each other as friends to start at the new school with – she could have grasped the tendrils themselves, and made something rather unconventional occur.
It was gone.
“Come here, Angel, and you too, Peter. Here, have a seat.” Her aunt was murmuring sweetly as she orchestrated the seating of everybody around their small kitchen table; ever the hostess. Peter pulled himself up in a chair, swinging his legs a little and clutching the edges of the seat. He had never been a boy for change… and this new house, this new country, was not settling well within his belly – Angie could tell. Alighting herself and arranging her hands in her lap, as mannerly as she had always been taught to be, even in familiar company, the girl took time to examine his posture, which was softening as he came to the apparent acceptance that, yes, they were still living in the same neighborhood. There was certainly comfort in that fact, even for her. Suddenly, secretly, Peter reached across beneath the eve of the table and squeezed her hand. Not once did his eyes slant in her direction, it was a tiny gesture of childish greeting… something to actualize the fact that, after a brief but painful hiatus, the game was back on.
Breakfast was a serene oasis in the otherwise somewhat hectic and at the same time totally mundane process of moving into a new house. Everything seemed hotwired with some kind of stress or another; and there was no comfort one could take in one’s own material stability. Those things of one’s memory, those shadows familiar in one’s bedroom were all different, and for children as young as Peter and Angel were, there was a great but subdued terror in it all, drifting lazily in those hours closest to sleep and waking.
The grown-ups – close friends since they were not much older than Peter and Angel were at the time – bantered and reflected, talked logic and logistics, made business plans and vacation plans, skirted the issues of illnesses in both families, doted over their children. There was an extent to which Peter was the second child… the son to Gene and Maria Marx. Their baby boy, even though he was almost a full year older than butterfly-like Angel. So too was Angel a charge of Sandra and Joseph Collins; the two families had meshed, over the years, into a sturdy web of bandaged knees and shared dinners, country holidays and mediated children’s conflict.
Slipping cunningly between these words, choosing the careful rhythm of their conversation and using the advantage of their distraction as a lever, Angel excused the two of them from the table after two full helpings of sticky-buns, washed down with brimming glasses of milk to fortify the body. Glancing sidelong at them, smiling between sentences, Mrs. Marx gently reminded them to wash their hands before they got honey all over the house. Solemn soldiers, the pair filed
In the wretched phantasmagoria that his move had become, an endless stream of boxes and bags, hotel rooms that he couldn’t be comfortable in, sitting hot through stuffy business meetings, nothing was anomalous. So, being cleaned up and rushed frenetically out of the gaping, empty house this morning, only to be told to wait on the sidewalk for a few stretching minutes, did not alarm him. Mother had said something about a ‘big surprise’, but he wasn’t paying much attention all told. Peter didn’t think there could be anything properly surprising in this alien neighborhood. He paced from one spot to another on the walkway, staring down at the spaces between his shined shoes, waiting for whatever ‘surprise’ this was to come with increasing dread.
Behind him, a door of one of the strange houses opened. New neighbors, doubtlessly… Dad probably discovered a family on this stumped street that had children his age, and now wanted to introduce him. Needless to say, Pete didn’t want to be introduced. He’d already planned, in his needling mind, all manner of ways that he could behave with subtle awfulness, repulsing droopy-eyed the idea of new friends.
“Peter, come on inside! Breakfast is waiting.” That was his mother, the chime of her voice drilling against his frayed nerves. He turned on one heel, head down, and wandered up the short walk to the house where the door stood open to greet him.
This house, this home, was largely unfurnished… it had a familiar spartaness to it, not that of a home occupied by people who simple did not have the means to fill it with worldly comfort, but like his own new house seemed not-quite lived in. Like a new shoe; clean but not yet broken in. Hands jammed into constricting twill pockets, Peter stepped stiffly out of his shoes and onto the strange carpet, close and nubby through his socks. He felt scratchy and strangled in his clothes today, wanted to slouch into an old sweater and lounge the day slothfully into atrophy, but it was not his fate.
His stomach was growling, quite against his intention to absolutely, under no circumstances, be fed a welcoming breakfast in a strange house by a family he did not know. However, against his best resolution, Peter was being drawn onward by the redolent perfume of spiced rolls and black coffee, which rolled like open arms from the parlor ahead where voices spoke low, out of his vision.
He paused suddenly, realizing that he was looking at a vaguely familiar bureau. It had a look of ashamed loneliness about it, standing empty and black against a bare white wall, out of place in the widening of the hallway before the parlor. The pang that hit his chest, tightening around his boy’s heart, made him clutch his fists and scowl even more deeply. Unreasonable, irrational, but somehow he associated that empty, lifeless piece of furniture as a piece of the home he had lost. It looked like something out of the Marx household, their style. How dare these people, whoever they were, these Greek neighbors have anything in their possession that reminded him of what should be his. It was wholly unfair.
It was wrapped in these thoughts that Peter rounded the corner, blinking in the sudden brightness of a sunlit window.
“There you are!” His mother chimed, and then, running into the last notes of her voice came another… a hoarse, cigar-ruined but ever-jovial baritone that he knew from countless suppers, from holiday hymns in the rook-infested church, from the cupped hands of home.
“Peter lad!”
“Mr. Marx?” Peter replied bewilderedly, not initially computing exactly what was going on. There was his father standing just behind his mother’s petite frame, there was Angel’s barrel-chested uncle with the kitchen light shining softly off the bald spot on the front of his head. All the while, his hands were accepting a plate of sticky buns from Mrs. Marx as his brow furrowed, blue eyes glancing questioningly toward his beaming parents.
Angel shut off the light in the washroom, smoothing her fingers over her damp hair and sighing deeply at her scrubbed, white cheeks. Saturday morning, early, a dreamless night… normally, for something as simple and familiar as a family meal – even if it were a special breakfast of some kind – she wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to ‘freshen up’. But as it was, she was cripplingly weary, and had great – almost unreasonable – desire to conceal the fact from her aunt and uncle, as there was no explanation to be made for her state.
Glowering very briefly into the mirror, the child straightened, affixed a smile neatly to her features, and moved down the hall toward the kitchen. The bouquet of sweet vittles that bloomed on the olfactory sense, beckoning with seductive warmth from that direction, had all but driven her mad as she meticulously combed her sable tresses. Moving as lightly-footed as she could manage, though her knees felt leaden, she wound a piece of black organza around her hair at the nape of her neck and tied a clumsy knot. There were voices coming from down the hall, hushed and familiar laughter.
“Oh, Gene, it’s just such a windfall! I could hardly have prayed for better, myself. This is such a beautiful house! How has the move been? It looks like you’ve had a good time unpacking… everything in its place.”
“Hardly,” came her Aunt’s voice in response to the first. “Sometimes I think I’ve packed my own head in these boxes somewhere and I’m looking for it now!”
Laughter, before “My heavens, you should see our place. It’s a regular disaster area… I might as well be a construction worker rebuilding after a bad fire!”
Laughter, from several parties. Her uncle’s voice beckoned her. “Angel? Is that you, pumpkin?” She rounded the corner, her fingers trailing lightly against the wall. The parlor was softly lit, made to seem smaller by the five people already standing in it. A cozy surrounding, one that felt home-like and comforting. In the middle of it all, looking quite pensive and uncomfortable – which was not unlike him one bit, she thought – was Peter Collins, warm blue eyes greeting her expectantly, and an unsure smile teetering on the cusp of his countenance.
Surprise struck her, but it was almost more a surprise for her lack of alarm at seeing the Collins’s standing in her aunt’s kitchen this morning. If she’d taken nothing away from her week of eldritch nightmares, she’d taken some knowing – as she’d expressed, somberly, to her aunt a day before – that she would be reunited with her dear friend in only a short period of time. Angel smiled, though from the almost imperceptible change on Peter’s features, it was not the smile that he was hoping to see.
“Good morning, Pete.” She chimed, trying her best to sound more chipper for his sake.
“Angie!” The boy’s face burst into a grin. There was a moment that had stretched between them, then, that Angel had felt more keenly than she’d felt the rest of the morning’s press. It was a sensation not unlike that fumbling in the repeated dream that had weighed so heavily on each night but the one directly prior, of reaching for something that one knew was present and close, but not being able to touch it. She purse her lips, thinking for a moment that, if only the four adults hadn’t been so insistently present – her aunt handing her breakfast, her uncle saying something to Mr. Collins about how nice it would be that the children would have each other as friends to start at the new school with – she could have grasped the tendrils themselves, and made something rather unconventional occur.
It was gone.
“Come here, Angel, and you too, Peter. Here, have a seat.” Her aunt was murmuring sweetly as she orchestrated the seating of everybody around their small kitchen table; ever the hostess. Peter pulled himself up in a chair, swinging his legs a little and clutching the edges of the seat. He had never been a boy for change… and this new house, this new country, was not settling well within his belly – Angie could tell. Alighting herself and arranging her hands in her lap, as mannerly as she had always been taught to be, even in familiar company, the girl took time to examine his posture, which was softening as he came to the apparent acceptance that, yes, they were still living in the same neighborhood. There was certainly comfort in that fact, even for her. Suddenly, secretly, Peter reached across beneath the eve of the table and squeezed her hand. Not once did his eyes slant in her direction, it was a tiny gesture of childish greeting… something to actualize the fact that, after a brief but painful hiatus, the game was back on.
Breakfast was a serene oasis in the otherwise somewhat hectic and at the same time totally mundane process of moving into a new house. Everything seemed hotwired with some kind of stress or another; and there was no comfort one could take in one’s own material stability. Those things of one’s memory, those shadows familiar in one’s bedroom were all different, and for children as young as Peter and Angel were, there was a great but subdued terror in it all, drifting lazily in those hours closest to sleep and waking.
The grown-ups – close friends since they were not much older than Peter and Angel were at the time – bantered and reflected, talked logic and logistics, made business plans and vacation plans, skirted the issues of illnesses in both families, doted over their children. There was an extent to which Peter was the second child… the son to Gene and Maria Marx. Their baby boy, even though he was almost a full year older than butterfly-like Angel. So too was Angel a charge of Sandra and Joseph Collins; the two families had meshed, over the years, into a sturdy web of bandaged knees and shared dinners, country holidays and mediated children’s conflict.
Slipping cunningly between these words, choosing the careful rhythm of their conversation and using the advantage of their distraction as a lever, Angel excused the two of them from the table after two full helpings of sticky-buns, washed down with brimming glasses of milk to fortify the body. Glancing sidelong at them, smiling between sentences, Mrs. Marx gently reminded them to wash their hands before they got honey all over the house. Solemn soldiers, the pair filed