A Descent into Darkness

A Family Breakfast

I'm flying. The wind is in my face, but it doesn't bother my eyes. The ground is an unknowable distance below, but I have no fear of hitting it. There's no pressure, no darkness, just a state of pure joy as I soar through the heavens, my problems nothing more than a distant, fuzzy memory.

Out of nowhere, my blissful state of rest is shattered by the roar Ed Sheeran's Castle on the Hill, as my alarm clock, tuned to KISS 92.5, goes off. The blissful feeling of flight is replaced by the feeling of my mattress beneath me, and the realization that it's time to face the world again strikes a devastating blow. Without opening my eyes, I reach over and hit the snooze button from muscle memory, restoring silence to the room.

My eyes still shut, I roll onto my side, considerably happier than most people my age when there woken from a wonderful dream by the ungodly loud alarm. Despite the horrors of what I was seeing last night, the dream after I went back to bed was bloodless. It was nothing but happiness, and a happiness completely independent of someone suffering. I will take anything that shows there is more to my subconscious than the pure evil I sometimes worry is in there.

I'm suddenly jolted upright, my eyes opening at last, by a pounding on the bedroom door. "Up and at em, ugly," the voice of my annoying little sister, Liza, comes through the door, followed by the sound of footsteps as she scampers away.

"Fuck you!" I call after her.

"Language!" I hear Mom's voice from her and Dad's room down the hall.

"Shit, sorry!" I reply, very deliberately including the profanity. Mom apparently decides it's not worth wasting one of her trademark witty comebacks on this one, so the back and forth ends there.

I throw off the sheets off and swing my feet over the edge of the bed. The shock from the pounding basically guaranteed I won't be falling asleep again this morning so I may as well get up. Of course, I have to get up anyways. Class and all.

I disarm the alarm clock, so it won't shrill again in eight minutes and pick my phone up off the nightstand to check the weather. It reveals that, despite being the middle of January, it's going to be unseasonably warm today, reaching fourteen degrees.

Returning my phone to my pocket, I exit the room and head downstairs for breakfast, still in my t shirt and pajama bottoms.

"Look who decided to join us," Dad notes from the stove as I enter the kitchen. "Since when do you get up when your alarm rings?"

"Since it turns out we have poltergeists in this house," I reply as I sit at the table, shooting an icy glare toward Liza who's seated opposite me at the table, texting. Without looking up, she raises her middle finger at me in reply.

I flip her off in return, before leaning on my elbows and asking playfully, "How you doing after last night, Miss Piggy? I imagine no one would be doing too well after coming in last that often."

I see her try and fail to suppress the smile that emerges as a result of her childhood nickname. She looks up from her phone to face me. "I know you were hacking somehow. My car kept glitching on the track."

"Why is it," I say while Dad walks over with the frying pan to deposit parts of ham and cheese omelet onto each of our plates, "that when you win, it's from pure skill. But when I win, it's because I'm hacking?"

"Because you would have to have skills in order to win because of them," she replies, starting to cut her omelet.

"Oh, I have skills!" I retort. "How else could I knock you off the track like that and not lose any speed at all? I swear, anyone who would fall of like that as no skill."