PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

The jeep looked horribly out of place in the quiet suburban driveway. It was large and bulky and packed with memories and bits of a family’s life. Said family stepped out of the jeep and onto the hard blackness of the drive. They looked up at their new house, each of their expressions different. Kail Temple quietly passed the housekey to his wife, who snatched it out of his hand and danced to the front door. She spun and smiled at her family.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” she sang. Kail grunted and walked past his sons to pop the back hatch. Rhys was elbowed by his older brother. Smile faltering only a fraction of an inch, Tanya walked back toward her children, her feet thumping against the ground a little harder than they were comfortable with. She wormed her way between them and grasped both of their arms, sighing up at their new four bedroom, three bath, flowerbox bedecked home. “Isn’t it?”

“And we’re here because…” Rhys said. Tanya shot him a smoldering look that told him exactly why they were here.

“We’re here because that little condo was just too small for us, silly!” she chirped. She marched herself and her sons up the walkway and onto the front porch. “Kim and Jake, being the absolute peaches they are, kindly offered us this house. Downsizing is good for some people. But it’s the perfect upgrade for us!” She shoved the front door open with her sneaker and pushed her sons inside.

“Master bedroom’s mine, fight amongst yourselves for the others,” she told them. “And try not to get blood on the carpet. Haven’t brought the steam cleaner with us today.” She all but skipped back to the jeep. Kail already had a small stack of boxes piled next to the vehicle. Tanya leaned against it, ignoring the heat it put off, and gazed at her husband. She crossed her arms and sighed. He looked up at her from the box he was currently unloading.

“They’ll like it here,” he told her simply. Kail was a man of few words, and Tanya knew that what he really meant was Stop. Don’t even start yammering at me or I will find the nearest bar and put it on speed dial one. They’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, and I will exist.

“I love you,” she told him quietly. Tanya was a woman of many words, and Kail knew that she was really saying was You’re my best friend. Let’s try to find some happiness here. He smiled at her as warmly as he could muster. The trip here from their condo in the city had been tense and cranky.

While at first Rhys thought that moving was a great idea, he soon regretted it once he actually had to move to pack his shit. Then he began complaining. Loudly. He started whining the minute he started packing and didn’t stop until Kail told him, on the drive over, that if he didn’t keep his trap shut, he would stuff Old Lena’s scarf down his throat and sew his lips together. Liam, on the other hand, calmly weighed the pros of moving to the suburbs, knowing full well that it would irritate Rhys to no end. Kail could feel the seething waves shooting out of his youngest son the entire drive over.

The Temple family was a strange one. Tanya had been taking care of her little brother, Liam, since she was fourteen years old. He was six when their mother ran off with a black jack dealer and never looked back. Her father put meals on the table and worked twenty five hours a day. Liam recalled him as more of an invisible benefactor than a father. He was never cruel or abusive to his children, but he never loved them, either. At the age of eighteen, Tanya filed for emancipation from her father for both herself and her brother, and they moved to a tiny apartment near her college.

During her sophomore year while working part time at the local café, she met Kail through a mutual friend. He was twenty-three and already a retired government agent, but that was all he was allowed to reveal (or so he said. Tanya maintained that he still worked with aliens). Over the next two years, they nurtured a friendship that grew well under bowling and three am trips to the nearest Piggly Wiggly to satiate the need for sugar.

When Kail proposed, Liam had his doubts, and grilled his sister for days until she snapped and threatened him with castration if he kept on her. He clamped his mouth shut, as his testicles were considered important to him. Liam didn’t doubt Kail - he was a nice enough guy, had never hurt Tanya, but had never showed any romantic interest in her, either. So Liam was rightly confused, but the situation was out of his hands.

And so, three years ago, Tanya married Kail. She was radiant and splendid, and maybe Kail did fall a little in love with her that day. Liam was the best man, and he couldn’t argue that his sister, whom he had come to regard as a mother (even before their mother left, Tanya had all but birthed him), was content and pleased, if not hopelessly happy. The three of them lived a quiet life; they moved into the condo because it was close to the farm where Kail kept his horse. It was here in this condo that Tanya suggested to Kail that he participate in the Big Brother program at the local HOME. HOME stood for Housing for the Orphanage of Mother Entra. Mother Entra had been a baroness of the city when it was still a town on the cusp of industry, some hundred years ago. She opened the orphanage that soon spread to a chain of them all along the coast, and her legacy had helped thousands of orphans.

It was there, living in that condo, that Kail Temple brought home the grumpy teen that Liam would eventually call his brother.

Rhys was fifteen years old when he first arrived at the condo. He’d been working with Kail for a month, and Tanya had insisted that he be brought back to the house for a good old fashioned home cooked meal and a movie. Anyone who knew Tanya, however, knew that this was simply an excuse for her to press her motherly claws into another victim. Here she was presented with the opportunity to smother another with her endless waterfall of love. She saw this opportunity and pounced rather like a wild jungle cat pounces on a quivering rabbit.

Rhys entered the condo with narrowed eyes, and began to criticize everything he saw immediately. He criticized the decorations and the paint, the plant in the corner and the fruit bowl on the table. He was cranky and unsociable and Liam wanted nothing more than to casually shove him off the four story balcony. This, naturally, didn’t daunt Tanya in the least. She accepted his challenge and flung herself into it gleefully.

And then the night was interrupted when the security guard of the condominium called up to Kail for damage control. It seemed that Lawrence, the belligerent Hispanic man on the ground floor, had brought in something that might have been a large rat or a very small and foaming dog, and could he please please please come down to lend his assistance? Kail couldn’t refuse - he was excellent with animals, and he dragged Liam with him, who had a weird sort of calming effect on animals, despite his distaste for them. This left a very testy Rhys with a very determined Tanya. They were alone for fifteen minutes.

When Kail and Liam returned, they found Tanya in the kitchen, babbling happily about boxing and its validity as a sport and waving a sauce covered spoon around to emphasize her points, and a very subdued Rhys sitting ramrod straight at the kitchen table, listening raptly and nodding. To this day, Tanya insists that he simply turned over a new leaf. However, every time she waved that spoon, Rhys’ left cheek would twitch almost imperceptibly. Liam suspected that threats had been made involving Rhys’ person and that spoon, but he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that Rhys stopped complaining about their home and ate his spaghetti without another word.

A few months later, the adoption papers were signed and Rhys was brought home like a new puppy. Tanya, who showed all the enthusiasm of a new dog owner, happily set him up in his new room, which was exceptionally small, she admitted, but had a bed he could call his own.

They remained in this condo for three years, until Kail finally blew a gasket and demanded that they move. No one ever figured out what caused the vein in Kail’s forehead to pop and pulsate so violently, but everyone took a collective step back and nodded fervently.

And so the Temple family found themselves in this modest house with this huge yard that backed up to a forest and an in-ground pool. Tanya hadn’t wanted to live in a suburb, but there was enough land to build a small stable for Tonto, Kail’s horse. Kail was happy when Tonto was near, and a happy Kail meant the world could continue spinning.

“You’ll be happy here,” Kail said. Translation: This is a good place, Tonto will like it. It’ll grow on you.

“I know,” replied Tanya. Translation: I hate you, you sadistic tramp.

---

“Sera, when did Kim and Jake move out?”

The woman in question, one Sera Litz, looked up from her book and gazed at her nephew. “A week ago. Why?” Spencer jerked a thumb at the window.

“’Cause there’s a car out there and people are getting out of it. The house hasn’t even been on the market a week and someone bought it up?”

“I think it’s a friend of Kimmi and her family,” she said offhandedly, turning her gaze back to her book.

“They’ve got boys. Looks like one of them is my age,” Spencer continued casually. Sera looked up again, amused. She knew that tone in her nephew’s voice. That was his ‘Oooh, a new toy!’ tone. Fresh meat.

“You sound like a slut, Spence,” she told him. The seventeen year old just shrugged and sat back down at the piano. The Litz family dynamic was less than normal, nearly even rivaled their new neighbors.

Sera Litz had never worked a day in her life. She’d inherited a buttload of money from her parents when they died, and she lived in this house comfortably with her dog, Joker, and her numerous fish. She lived a peaceful, solitary existence. That is, until her three nephews and their cat were dumped on her doorstep a year ago.

Her brother had gone and gotten himself in trouble with some federal agent - it had something to do with trying to set up the President for embezzlement and petty theft from a Victoria’s Secret. Secret Service had gotten involved, and he disappeared from the face of the earth. His wife had been dead since the boys were very little. So when a social worker had arrived at eight in the morning one day with three confused teenage boys and an irate cat, Sera had wanted to slam her head in the oven.

She hadn’t seen her nephews in years; she didn’t even know the youngest one’s name (which, as it turned out, was Kasey). Spencer was no longer in diapers, and Luke wasn’t screaming in the middle of the street anymore. Hamlet the cat leapt from Kasey’s arms and went streaking under the entertainment center. With a forced smile that more closely resembled a grinding underbite, she ushered her nephews inside.