Atomic Living

Any modern interpretation of long standing family traits is bound to me misunderstood,
overreaching. My mother was modern. And used a golden wheat pattern china like a
flying saucer, while crooning to Sinatra. That was the year my brother discovered that
science was fun and also when he started snacking on his own fingers, while my mother
shouted him down about germs. He knew how to make the best of things. Life was banal
that way. I told fortunes from the dimples of my sister’s hands; placeholders where her
little knuckles would come to live. My father wandered like everyone in his line before
him, but maybe he was just lost. My grandmother’s basil withered in incandescent heat
and my grandfather burned the clock, like men of his generation seemed to do. On
Sundays, while we waited for my father, my mother added cold water to the boiling pot
on the stove. I grew into the kind of person that nurtured my theories into existence, one
deeply melancholic day at a time.