Abstract Noun
Isabel stood up on the warm pavement beside her brother, Jack, who had just finished his sandwiches. An image of elegance, she flicked her hair to behind her shoulders.
His feet moved slightly in the sunshine as he moved forward to scratch his knee. His face looking upwards toward the sky, he raised his arm in order to block his face.
"It's far too hot" he spat. She, in turn, engrossed in her book paid little attention to him. Not knowing exactly what was said, she ruffled his hair affectionately.
"They'll be here soon, don't you worry."
By “they”, Isabel meant their parents. A perplexing tapestry of stories, games and a never-ending supply of hard boiled sweets, their parents, the Rossettis, were due to arrive any moment.
"I've got time to kill" she muttered under her breath as she lit a cigarette with a match.
"Never light a cigarette with a match" smiled Jack.
"Oh?"
"By the time it will take you to light the match, the enemy would have seen you by now and th-"
"Calm down, I've got it, I've got it. Nobody follows that anymore, the war's over. It's been over for years."
"I sleep with my boots on."
"I know you do. Not out of anything for WWI and the trenches, you just come in late after going out, only to collapse upon the bed until the morn." spat Isabel.
Where one would have blushed, Jack lazily turned his head to one side to scratch his neck. The sound of a car in the distance grew ever-more loud until out of the smokeless heat came their father, Edgar Rossetti. In a plume of thick cigar smoke, he lent over the passenger seat to open the door. Out of the door, behind the smoke was a smiling Edgar with a carefully placed cigar in between his teeth to happily exclaim "Jack! Isabel! Hop in!"
Isabel, who had never gotten on with her father, put out her cigarette, adjusted her hat, grabbed her suitcase and moved towards the car. The battered suitcase adorned with. . . well, I wish I could say stickers from various parts of the world. Exotic and cold, but alas, it wasn't. It was old and battered. Isabel slung it in first and sat next to it.
She looked into the mirror, self-consciously checking her hair for anything wrong, sitting with her legs crossed and her arm resting on the now closed car door. Jack picked up his bag and walked rather nonchalantly towards the front door where he occupied and sat in the passenger seat.
Edgar insisted that it was colder in the car with the air conditioning on than it would be with the windows open. In the midst of the worst heat wave they'd had for years, children had swapped jeans for shorts, women long skirts for short skirts and men were going about their daily business in the least amount of clothing physically possible, without of course, causing offence.
The town was effectively paralysed into submission by the heat, begging for redemption as her streets fell empty. Life only lived during the evenings when it was cooler to manoeuvre one's self. From noon until three the streets were dead; the heat was unbearable as people tried nearly every method known to cool the body during extreme heat.
Edgar started wittering in the front seat. An owner of many businesses, his idiosyncratic vocabulary was littered with specialist economic and business words. Nobody in the car quite knew what a 'prime mortgage' was, but that didn't seem to deter Jack's participation in the discussion. He paused to take a drag of his cigar and eyed Isabel in the car mirror, smiling. Isabel returned the smile, but gratefully he turned to Jack.
"What happened to that gal?"
"What gal, pa?" Jack furrowed his brow in confusion.
"What's her name? Chris? Christina? Ended in 'a', that's all I remember, kiddo.'
"Yeah uh. . Amanda. I don't know what happened there." He winced at the term 'kiddo', remembering how his father used to call him that often in his younger days when he lived at home.
"I'll tell you this much kid, don't talk to women. Just don't."
"Right."
"Not like that! Just talk as little as possible, make 'em think they're in control. It works like a charm every time."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"Women love to think their in control. Let me tell you," he paused, inhaling a puff of his cigar that was nearing its end, "that's how I got your mother! I tell you, listen to me, your ma, oh what a-"
"That's all I wanna know Dad, that's all I wanna know!"
Taking a sharp right into what appeared to be a series of hedges, Isabel glanced out of the window to her right when she saw the field of sunflowers. Sunflowers upon sunflowers upon sunflowers, the Sun's very own representative on Earth to bring you some yellow even if you don't like them. Fields of them surrounded the Rossetti residence which had only a few neighbours.
"Tranquil isn't the right word" muttered Isabel, "creepy is".
"Roll 'em up, we're here, we're here!" Edgar cried as he extinguished his cigar. His wife, Beatrice, affectionately came out to welcome them running into the arms of her husband who, with much love, picked her up in his arms as he brought her closer to him to kiss her.
Between all the kisses given from mother to children, tearful reunions and pinching of cheeks, both the children found that their mother's accent, although living in her host country for many years now, had not changed one bit from its endearing German accent. They felt pangs of guilt in their stomach for not visiting more often.
Jack bent down to pick up his bag, meeting his sister's gaze from the other side of the car. She sat in the back seat and had her suitcase beside her.
"What exactly happened there? Didn't you love her?"
"Love is an abstract pronoun, little sis" said Jack, melancholy smiling. "I don't want to be here any more than you do, I'll promise you that."
Isabel's mouth quickly opened, ready to interrupt, only to meet a shaking of Jack's head which told her that he wasn't quite yet done talking.
"I don't want to be here. I don't want to be here any more than you do with the gruesome twosome, but it's just a week."
They turned to face the house. A Victorian mansion of sorts, it had ivy growing across the front to its left, a set of stairs to access the front door.
Flowers ran meticulously up pillars at the front, matching those of the sprawling garden Isabel and her brother walked through.
Nothing was out of place. Nothing was ever out of place in the Rossetti family; parents groomed children into exactly what they wanted to be. Nothing different otherwise, unless you could prove that you, as a child, had failed both of your parents simultaneously.
I suppose that's why neither of them ever told their parents really what happened.
IMAGE: otrocalpe
