(no subject)
She wasn't really nervous but she dreaded her active imagination and the images it conjured, like a zealous magician dedicated to pulling out an entire burrow of rabbits from his magician's hat, one furry successive creature after the other, to no forseeable end.
Her father wasn't talking to her today although he was a generally untalkative man who stood in sharp contrast to his wife who was all too aware of what God had given her and made sure she put her vocal blessings to tremendous use.
She normally didn't mind her father's silence. She much preferred it to the loud, blustery ways of her mother (although this was wisely never declared out loud).
Silence was good. Silence was agreeable with her. She liked the silence because silence normally meant a declaration of nullity upon their household.It meant nothing had been shaken, nothing had been stirred; the peace was still being retained, and everybody could live happily, if not contentedly.
Today however, he was silent in a different way. It was a strange, cold silence. Sharp and highly-strung, it moved calculatingly from room to room. It was like a cobra that was choosing its appropriate moment to strike or a drumskin waiting to be punctured. The day had initially started off as a normal one, until her father checked the letter box and found the letter. Now he was stony and sullen and most of all, getting angrier by the minute.
Nobody liked to get her father angry, and for good reason. He was a mad, spitting creature when he became upset or furious. It was even more frightening because people were more accustomed to hearing nothing from him. This, the girl had learned, was a pitfall of living with a quiet person.
Quiet people are highly dangerous. This is a fact. They are unpredictable and volatile because they are quiet. They keep everything within themselves. They are nature's poorly manufactured grenades, destined to go off at the wrongest of times. Never under-estimate the quiet ones. They tend to go off like bazookas.
With that in mind, she trod carefully about her house as if the entire place had been littered with barbed wire and eggshells. She avoided her father by staying in her room, writing emails to her friends and practicing her French while he in turn avoided her by shutting himself in the study room where he fixed computers for strangers.
She could still feel the anger burbling underneath it all. Her mother felt it as well and at one point she clucked worriedly to her daughter: "Be nice. Be nice."
It was an ironic thing to say, really.
She wished her mother could've said something more comforting, even if it meant saying untrue things like, "Everything's going to be OK. Don't be afraid. He's not that angry."
In her room, she waited.
He couldn't be quiet forever. Eventually it was going to have to come out somehow.