Barnacles
Mr. Spangler, Bob, left shortly after Lauren was born; not that he had been around much prior. He had been notorious for his long business trips and fishing excursions with his work buddies, absences which Mrs. Spangler, Maggie, would either ignore or openly hypothesize about with anyone who would listen. Emmy would hear her late at night on the phone with her grandmother in Myrtle Beach, �I wonder what she looks like, I hope she is everything he thinks he wants. Lord only knows after one kid and with another in the oven I must be a real trophy wife� men are always thinking with their dicks anyways� he�s a real asshole if he thinks he can keep this family on the side. If I weren�t fucking 7 months pregnant, so help me mom, I think I would kill him in his sleep.� He went on a business trip one day and just never came home, he never even called, that is until a good thirteen years later�
Grandma Margaret moved in, driving all the way up from her little condo in Myrtle Beach; Maggie had intended for it to be only temporary, while she figured out what to do in Bob�s absence. Truth be told, Maggie really wasn�t very good at sharing her space with another authoritarian figure, especially her own mother. She had moved out at seventeen and lived with boyfriends and stray hookups until she married Bob at twenty two and had Emmy a year later. Grandma Margaret was a bit of a narcissist and it wasn�t a stretch to see how Maggie would grow up to be a chip off the old block. The whole house was brimming with estrogen; female camaraderie at it�s lowest. Women can be each others worst enemies; viewing anything else with a vagina and two breasts as competition, as another opponent on the psychological battleground. The mother daughter relationship is either the exception to this rule or the very embodiment of the archetype� now imagine, three generations living under one roof and four witches stirring the family pot. Emmy grew up wishing that her little sister Lauren had been a boy or that her father had taken her with him, stashed away in his suitcase on their way to a business conference in Chicago that would turn into a permanent vacation. It only got worse as Lauren got older.
When Lauren was six, Emmy now fifteen and far too old to be pulling such a stunt, took Lauren for a walk down the block. It was February and as usual Bellmar was empty as they walked down to the beach. The cold wind mercilessly blew the fine particulate, little specks of rock and shell, up against exposed flesh, leaving red, raised, raw skin in it�s place. Lauren oscillated between complaint and her constant babbling while Emmy tugged her further down the beach to the jetty. Once they reached the stretch of big black hexagonal blocks of granite piled out into the ocean Emmy let go of Laurens hand and told her to listen. �Okay, here is what you have to do to get the twenty dollars� Lauren are you listening� okay, you need to walk out to the end� out there where the posts are, wave, and then turn around and come back�. You can do that.�
Emmy got behind Lauren and pushed her out onto the first of the big black boulders and screamed chicken into the oncoming wind as her little sister plodded out further down the quarter mile jetty out onto the grey Atlantic. Lauren made it half way to the end, just to the point where Emmy had planned on running away and leaving her without looking back, when the little six year old bundle of pink down parka and orange skull cap sat down on the rocks and began to wail. Emmy was frozen, unable to run away and leave her there, she hadn�t really thought about what would happen next, once she left her sister there, clinging to the rocks like barnacles. Between the roar of the ocean and crashing of the waves against the jetty, she could barely here Lauren cry, but her tears were salty on the biting wind. Emmy must have stood there for a good ten minutes before she started out onto the rocks to retrieve the little blubbering gullible mess she had sent out there with every intention of leaving behind�