flashback

f i v e

Sarai

Ceon was super mad for the rest of the night. He walked around slamming doors and cupboards. He snapped at Mattie when he asked for something to eat. “Ask ‘Danny’”, he said in a sharp, biting tone that made Mattie cry. I sat beside him on the linoleum floor and patted his curly head. Ceon stormed into the storeroom, and when Fletchie tried to follow him, he growled. So did Mattie’s stomach. “What are we going to eat?” he asked Fletchie when he finished crying in the storeroom. I got a sense Ceon didn’t want to hear us. I closed the door and Fletchie ran a hand through his hair and didn’t say anything.

“Sarai, Matt.” We looked at him. “Pack your book bags before you go to bed. We’re getting out of here.”

Danyelle

            My blood boiled as I walked down Edgewood Avenue. I turned right on Edgewood and Studebaker. Ceon had angered me and apparently I had angered him too. Who did he think he was, yelling at me and accusing me like that? He seemed really upset, about their living conditions and whatnot, but there was no reason for him to treat me that way. And Fletcher. My skin became hot with anger as I walked crisply down the sidewalk in the crisp fall breeze. My mind chewed on the things that I had blurted out to Ceon. Things like my reading issue and stuff. I gasped out loud and couldn’t believe that I said all that stuff to him, a complete stranger!

            I remembered the deli as I walked down the sidewalk, my head low. It smelled musty and a little like Lysol. It was in surprisingly good condition, having one bathroom and an open area and a small “storeroom” where all of them must have slept. They kept it well, considering the years Joe had died, but still. The deli, the alley, as a matter of fact, was no place for little kids like Fletcher and Sarai and Matthew to live. As for Ceon, I couldn’t care less. I couldn’t believe I thought he would have accepted me easily. He was tall and lanky, about 2 inches taller than me and had a button nose and wavy, dark brown kinky hair. He was the color of a latte and his eyes were bright, light brown and wide and he had long eyelashes that cast feathery shadows against his cheeks and sent shivery little creatures up my spine. In fact, he was very cute, and I remembered him looking down at my pointed finger, and I shivered. And not because of the crisp air. He had a way of tilting his head to the side and blinking rapidly, even squinting a bit when he was about to be a jerk. I noticed that when he said, “I am the owner of this home”, he puffed out his chest and seemed… proud about it. I would have been, I knew it grudgingly. I would have been proud in the exact way he was. He didn’t look proud about owning the home. He looked proud about being alive. Proud about the accomplishment, not the home.

Ceon had a strange agility in the way he moved. He was like a bird, ready to fly away at any moment. He had a hunger about his face, and I got the feeling that he gave up meals so that his siblings wouldn’t go hungry. And yet there was strength in his face that I grudgingly admired, too. It was like defiance. Like, yes, I ran away. Yes, I’m starving, and so are my siblings. Yes, we’re half dead. But I’m going to be a pain in your butt and not die anyway. I’m going to live, not because you want me to, but because I want to. This insubordination was in each of their faces. He looked just like Matthew in an older way, while Sarai and Fletcher had longer faces. Fletcher’s hair was the curliest, knottiest, unruliest hair I had ever seen in my life, and I loved every strand of it. Sarai was identical to Matthew, yet different in her own way. The way I told them apart was because of Matthew’s haircut. Sarai’s hair was lighter than his; while Matthew’s hair was dark brown just as his older brothers’, Sarai’s hair was so brown it almost looked red. Just looking at her face made you know she was intelligent, a precocious little girl with sharp eyes and a way about her that made me shiver a bit; her level of intelligence was unexpected, for a six-year-old.