A thursday

It was a Thursday.  The baby was crawling around in circles with an unlit cigarette in its mouth and a Spork glued to its hand.  Mom, a few weeks ago, went to a yoga class and came home with one of those save the rainforest attitudes.  She threw away all the meat in the house, scrapped all the paint off the walls and changed her name to EarthChild; (One word) no one has seen much of mom since.

Daughter or as we have come to call her “the middle child” was charged with watching the baby but has recently passed out on the couch while watching one of Bill O’ Reilly’s shining moments.  He is yelling at an under aged mother working two jobs in a city far from home.  It was the only place she could find work in this ailing - economy twisted by big business, "Tax Breaks" and the - so called- American Dream; meanwhile her infant son had found his uncle’s gun and shot him in the leg.  Bill made up some statistic about working mothers and their children and proceeds to make her feel terrible while praising the gun companies.  Classic Bill.

Waking up, startled from a dream she just had, the middle child went to drink what was left of the alcohol and lay a few lines of the coke out that her brother got her for her birthday.  She was able to inhale one before she collapsed.  The baby was playing up on the table and may have gotten a whiff of some white powdery substance her big sis left behind.

 The baby’s still crawling around in circles �" though with much more enthusiasm - when the eldest child comes into the house with several of his friends, all of which have a beer in each hand, except one who passed his second off to a friend while he opened the door and never quite managing to shut it.  They all stumbled in the house and one even trips slamming his head against a marble pillar that served little or no purpose except to act as a large shiny obelisk in the middle of the room; I suppose to signify wealth as - if the exterior of the house and the numerous cars out front didn’t already give off that impression.

 Everyone just left him lying there while bleeding on the Persian rug.  “It’s no matter it happens all the time Daddy will buy another over the weekend” the oldest slurs while stepping over him then stumbling to his room.  The blood stain leaves an interesting pattern on the carpet that resembles, according to one of the boys, a naked woman playing a harp and spreading cream cheese on a cinnamon bagel.

They had a duffle bag full of weed, several zip locks of shrooms - and enough coke, heroin, and alcohol to kill Warren Jeffs all his wives and some of his children.  Daddy was an alcoholic but we don’t blame him considering the family he comes home to.  There was a constant blur, a sort of hazy grey fog surrounding Daddy’s brain which, on his bad days, would act as a kind of ozone - trafficking unwanted, nonsensical pleas from his less than upright family.  Sometimes he had dreams about what electrocution might feel like and still keeps a defibrillator next to his bed - just in case.

At work, all day, Daddy was busy signing papers between trips to the bathroom.  He kept his “stash” in a locked safe behind a painting on the wall of his office - The Cruc-I-fiction - He never thought anything of it though the family did attend a Christian service every week to ask forgiveness for their sins, and such. The kids would sometimes go numerous times a week; it was a matter of keeping up with appearances. Though Daddy couldn’t attend last Sunday he was on a “business trip" with his secretary Dana.  Dana was tall, blonde and somewhat ditzy though she made a hell of a coffee and looked fantastic in mini �" skirt.

The oldest son was now surrounded by a circle of his friends at his television; he was showing them a sex tape he and his girlfriend made. "But, I thought he was dating that other girl?" He has his videos labeled by girls name in alphabetical order.  He picked that up from that education Daddy was paying for.  Yale, I think it was.  Only the best.  Though that is a bit vague.

The middle child was still lying, unconscious on the living room floor a dog wondered in through the opened door and was licking her hands and nose.  The friend who had been left lying there while bleeding had now quit bleeding, and breathing �" he is now just as cold to the touch as the marble statue in the corner of the room.  The baby had fallen asleep on the floor, its right leg gave the occasional twitch, and the cigarette was still in its mouth the tobacco, by now, beginning to work its way into the gums.