THE BOY HAD GOTTEN UP to look out the window five times in as many minutes when his father told him to sit still, he was making him nervous. So the boy, all knees and elbows and anxious energy, sat on his hands in a worn recliner and tried to think patient thoughts while he rocked himself back and forth, back and forth.
Later, when his mother stood up at the kitchen table, smoothed out her house dress and said, “Looks like they’re here,” the boy jumped up and let the chair hit the wall behind him with the kind of thump that would have inspired a stern lecture from his father just six months ago. Instead, his father sighed and said, “Alright, let’s greet ‘em proper,” as he eased open the bent screen door and hitched his way onto the whitewashed porch, the door held open behind him with the four-and-a-half dry, cracked and crooked fingers of his right hand. The boy and his mother stepped through the offered opening. The screen door squeaked shut behind them.
Framed before the bright porch lights and their orbits of desperate, deluded bugs, the boy and his mother and his father formed a shadow of the perfect family. All three raised their hands in a collective wave to welcome a silver SUV making its lumbering way down their long, uneven driveway.
The boy blinked as the driver of the car flashed the brights on and off – on and off – and a pit opened
…
Kirk Vanderbeek is a writer of fiction, poems and screenplays. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, Forge Literary Magazine, Alternative Milk Magazine and elsewhere. He lives in Michigan with his wife and son.