literature

family portrait.

Deviation Actions

Daily Deviation

Daily Deviation

March 18, 2018
family portrait. by littleblueraccoon
Featured by BeccaJS
littleblueraccoon's avatar
Published:
5.9K Views

Literature Text

Your family tree simply grew this way.

Your mother’s tongue cut throats as well as stone walls, but it never reached your skin. You considered this a blessing, failing to account for the million praises you never heard. Since the moment you were born, she struggled to separate your face from her morning coffee. She lived in a slow blur and you were an alert inconvenience. Nearly every morning she faded through the kitchen and living room, reciting old sorrows to herself while you wondered what you had done to confuse her.

Sometimes she remembered to kiss you goodnight. Other times she pretended you didn’t exist when you cried for her. Soon enough you realized that it was better to stay quiet because then it hurt less when she didn’t speak.

You were too young to understand, crouched on the sofa with an innocent moon of a face. How could you have known?

One day when you had been left alone in the house, as you often were, you amused yourself by digging through your family’s things, and that was when you found the photo album. Its leather cover had cracked and its pages had yellowed, but you still stared in amazement at the old shots: the girl in the pictures was young, spindly, and bright-eyed, clad in a gauzy white dress as she leaned against a brick wall. She was a stranger but you recognized her at once.

For days afterward, as your mother ghosted her way through the rooms, you replaced her face in your mind with the face of the woman in the photo. You could never quite draw the line between when one transitioned into the other.

I like to imagine that your father tried; he had the heart your mother lacked, but none of her strength. Though he never told you he was proud of you, you recognized his face in a crowd of seven hundred and the truth struck every bone in your body. By then you were too old, and its impact was dulled with the years, but you promised yourself you wouldn’t let that feeling escape you. You’d waited too long and the fruit was too sweet.

He taught you kindness. Every time you stayed up late comforting a friend or held someone while they cried, his voice was the one in your head telling you to stay. Even now, whenever you catch a spider and free it outside instead of crushing it, you know that it was his influence.

You wished you could have seen him more. Your childhood days were spent waiting at the door, and nothing made you happier than when he trudged in at dusk with his hands blackened with grease and his tired smile camouflaged beneath his grey-flecked beard.

“I want to be you when I grow up,” you told him one day, in the untroubled tone kids use when describing a future they could never possibly comprehend. He nodded quietly and kissed you and sent you to bed, so you never saw the tears in his eyes. You were the son who loved him.

Your brother was gone before your memory was strong enough to grip. He sent you a letter once every six months and when you replied, the words felt like sand in your mouth, the dry pleasantries of strangers pretending they have any ties aside from blood. To you, he didn’t seem like anyone you’d ever like: he was too tidy, too formal, already married to some clean-cut girl you’d never met and living in some faraway suburb in a peaceful bubble. In spite of this, you sometimes wondered what it would have been like to grow up with him anyway. You liked the idea of having a brother, and though you always had one, he was more often a figurehead than a family member.

He invited you once or twice to visit him and his wife, but you let the letters collect dust. In some alien way, you knew you didn’t belong there, and you were too awkward to go and try pretending that you did.

To this day, you never even knew his middle name.

Meanwhile, your sister used to lock you in the basement while you squealed childish threats and pounded the door in fear of whatever imagined horror was bubbling up behind you in the darkness of the steps. You later flushed every lipstick she owned down the toilet, and she ignored you for two and a half weeks. In a particularly heated fight, you pulled out a long blond clump of hair in each of your small fists. In retaliation, she smacked you back so hard into the banister of the staircase that you had a multicolored bruise inching up your shoulder for what seemed like months.

She only apologized because your father forced her to.

Still, the night she drove home drunk you kept her secret from your parents, and when she left for good, she kissed your forehead and you were forced to acknowledge that you would miss her.

And you were born in the middle of the night in the middle of the summer. They named you after algae ponds and insects chirping, and when they took you home, you slept in an orange crate beside both cats, who looked upon your tiny pink shape with uncertainty and something like protection.

It seems at times that you could have matured better in a different place surrounded by different people, but doubtless you wouldn’t have become the same person. And while the world called your sister a whore and your brother a fool, it never called you anything, which was somehow the worst insult.

Yet you, by miracles, eclipsed the sun. You built the thin structure of your body and lived off the soil of your heart and the hope for something bigger.

You will survive, and when you leave, every hummingbird and superhero is gonna know your name.
This is a little older. Never posted it. I wrote it for my school's literary journal. My creative writing teacher hated it and mentioned that when the boy finds the photo album, he "should have felt attraction for his young hot mom" and I was like "wtf dude no" and he got pissy and refused to publish it

anyway, I liked it, even if he didn't. he literally hates me.

I'm workin on responding to all of your messages. Again, sorry for the absence. I'm hoping coming back to dA will help me get back into writing and find myself again after all the shit that's gone down.

thanks for reading!!

-Kat c:
© 2016 - 2024 littleblueraccoon
Comments54
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
This was absolutely beautiful!
Thank you for this!