My mother is an unusually large woman, large in circumference and found wanton in height; with stern expressions and eyes of a religious zealot. As a wife, she also happens to be an absolute antithesis to her husband.
Father, on the other hand, is a skinny figure with stubble and restless pair of eyes, that of a gambler or a dreamer. If you ever happen to shake hands with Mr. Harper, you will notice a slight tremor in his hand when he happens to shake yours. He also has an overly keen way to greet you, with upper part of his body thrust forward, on-your-face-forward, with a smile that wants to please you so much that you can see a set of narrowly aligned teeth. He is also a sort of a man who always avoids eye contact. Such a demeanor reduces his way of greetings to more of an act of submission.
The men of this world like my father, but they fail to respect him enough to care. The women on the other hand, see in him the most despicable kind of a man a woman can imagine; the kind that don’t make their women feel protected.
But my mother, a moral and emotional dominatrix of sorts, didn’t care much for protection. Interminable in her reach and girth, for years she has continued to command the lives of everyone around her.
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We are a group of three siblings. A tribal of vastly diverse personalities joined together by blood and convictions and affirmed by a chain of constraints instilled in our fledgling lives by mother with her unwavering sense of righteousness. The sermons and the Sunday visits to the local church have, over the years, helped formed our subconscious to think and behave in a pattern that has now become the only norm in the growing perceptions of our individual worlds. Or so mother would like to believe.
My brother Jamie is a youthful doppelganger of his father, who one day wishes to change his fortunes by making his mark as a writer. Madeline my sister, youngest of all, supposedly a child prodigy of my mother’s upbringing, wants nothing more from life than to be saved by mother. Both Jaime and Madeline, being held stranded for years against a stoic Godlike of her holding that little red book by our bedsides, have managed to keep a part of themselves reserved, unhinged and unharmed by the lashings of a mad old woman.
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