#microdrabble

Perhaps it was his quirk, perhaps it was just him. But he always had such an exact sense of his surroundings.

And whenever she talked to him, without fail-

He's the eldest, and the skirt is his sister's. Ended up in his laundry pile accidentally.

Paul is alone in the house. It's empty.

His sister's room is across the hall. The one she shares with the third - the twins and the baby are in the last room they have to offer, but they're not here now. Doors open but rooms just furniture and silence. And what stories a bed could tell about dreams aren't heard by human ears.

He's as tall as his closest sister, something she laments. The skirt fits her, made for her. Flesh like hers but in a different mold.

The cotton is very soft from wear, the lace itchy where it touches the bare skin of his thighs. She'd laugh at him to know he finally understands that, her complaints.

Roy stood impatiently in the waiting room, because he had no other choice.  There was sign on one of the walls indicating that it was recently glistened with a new layer of paint. It was a muted color of blue. And as many times as he had been in the hospital recently, he couldn’t remember what the color was before it was painted over.

"I didn't know it went all the way north."

"It was made in 1978! You're grandpa enough to know when that was a cowpath from one hill to another!"

David sighs, turning his eyes upwards as though some heavenly power would grant him the strength to deal with Paul tonight. Michael thinks it's worth asking anyway.

Dwayne's head and most of his upper body is stuck in the open front of the van, banging around in the guts of the machine to some end that Michael can't guess at, but can only assume isn't going well thanks to the snarled mutterings that may or may not be in English. They'd pulled over to the farthest side of the road they could manage before the van had given up the ghost and while their in-house mechanic waged his epic war, guided by the flashlight Marko was holding to the situation, Paul had decided to unload his directional frustrations on David.

None of them had anticipated spending yet another night crammed in the back of the cab, but hey, that's shakes in the big city. Or. The antithesis thereof, Michael assumes. Looking around, there's only trees, hills, and a long, empty stretch of road. He has no idea where they are.

"If we'd have kept to the interstates we'd have ended up at the border," David answers.

"So?" Paul shrugs. "I remember suggesting we try Canada two months ago."

David levels him with an incredulous glare. "Sure thing, Paulie. Hang on, let me just-"

He begins patting his pockets, exaggeratedly digging around in them, turning even to the inner ones inside his coat. He turns back to Paul, placing a 'surprised' hand on his face.

"Oh dear! It seems I've left all my legal documentation from social security card to passport in the same place I left all my giveafucks!"

Michael stifles a snort into his shoulder, avoiding Paul's wrathful glance at the answer. To be fair, most of the bluster goes out of him at the reminder that aside from Michael himself, none of them do have any kind of certification of their existence.

"You were born before social security," Paul snipes instead, crossing his arms and looking every bit the role of the chided toddler.

"We're not looking to cross country boundaries unless we have to," David says flatly, dropping his act.

There's a bang, and Dwayne curses the loudest he has yet that night. The three of them jump with it. Marko peeks his head around the open hatch of the motor well, giving them a silent, dismal face in response.

Paul wipes a shaking hand over his face, blood from where it had crushed the casing streaking with it.

He had meant it. He regrets it. It had satisfied the screaming in his head and as a ghost in his hoarse voice when the boombox had cried out in static and then silence. Torn apart to appease that vicious need to see it come apart in ways it couldn't resist or recover from.

He hated it. He hated them. He hated..him.

He hated.

"Note that I'm going to stick my foot so far up your ass you'll be tasting boot black," David responds, just as bored as he looked.

Paul waves a hand. "David love, there are children."

From across the cave, Dwayne shoots them a look where he's watching Laddie try (and fail) to build a single layer of a card tower.

"Are you pissing me off like it's your job because you're bored, or do you want something?" David asks.

"You'd be willing to give me something? Well, since you offered-"

But tonight, he felt like he'd like one.

He sits on the porch, the cabin quiet behind him. The long day of rearranging furniture and clearing out the second bedroom ached in his shoulders and knees, and he was thankful it was soon to be the height of summer. If his daughter had waited any longer the damp of fall and winter would have slowed him considerably. He might still have to ask her, and his older grandson, to help him lug the heavier boxes out when they get here.

He fills the briar-wood bowl of his pipe. A gift, for his last birthday. She had been mighty generous lately, and he had to wonder if she knew something he didn't.

She always did as a matter of course, but maybe it was something specific this time.

The night grows around him. Clouds skudding in from the water signaled there was going to be a hell of a storm in a day or so, if not sometime the next morning, but for now, they show him a rainbow of reds and golds and pinks and purples in the last of the day's light. The sun dies with a last gleam.

He can't say he expected the footsteps as they move up his drive, but he also can't say he's surprised.

...It's the eldest. As far as he can tell, anyway. Looked so, turned in their mid forties, at the earliest. The skin lays over the muscles and bones like glove, rouge and warm enough. The hair lightly tousled in a style that might fit someone a decade or so younger, the middle-aged trying to capture what it had only just lost. The smile is white, wide, and fits into the face like it could make no other expression.

Fits better than the suit, in any case. Alive for who-knows how long, and still can't be bothered to look into a good tailor?

Jonathan watches it as it comes out of the gloom like a shadow itself, detaching from the darkness under the trees that line the road up to the yard. The yellow of the shed's security light shines off the edge of the glasses like a pale copy of the sun long gone behind the hills.

For a moment, it stops at the arch of the fence, the entrance to the property. Above, the name Emerson sits burned into ceder wood and wreathed with old barbed wire, an both sides of an elk jaw.

It steps forward and crosses.

Jonathan takes another long puff of his pipe. The tobacco was also a gift, given at the same time. It burns as bright in his lungs as the embers in the bowl.

"She said you tended to birth smarter whelps than you could afford for yourself," he says.

It stops just short of the porch steps. The shined leather loafers dusty from what must have been the short, performative walk up the road.

The smile doesn't leave its face when it tips its head to him.

"Mr. Emerson."

Jonathan tips his head as well.