Shade

Hello again, my fellow Blurtlings!

_{We clean up good. Except for George. Poor George.}

I love this picture of me (left) and three of my four siblings. I should be saying "poor Greg" because he was not present, which pissed a few (one) people off. And we had a good time so there's that. Douche. Let me cast some light on this situation.

We are, all five of us, children of alcoholics. We learned to hide in the evenings as soon as Dad came home. The more invisible the better. If we dared to have a scuffle of any kind, we would be punished for aggravating Dad. We did not learn to talk to one another, nor did we often hear two adults having a two sided discussion. We heard one scary side yelling at the silent other.

It was hard to be a part of this family for me. Some of the others feel differently. These others think it was a swell house to be a child in, went on to organize their houses in a similar way in one respect, and raised their kids just as we were raised: to be drinkers.

The final picture of my father was of him and four of his five children (I was the douche that month) raising a glass to his life in his hospice room. He had been there a few hours and "martini" was his final request. My brother George (pretty obvious which one is George) snapped a shot of that celebration and texted it to me. I'm told one of my sisters went on to get very drunk in hospice after my father's death, and insisted on handling the affairs.

The next day I spoke up in a safe room, my first.

"Hi, I'm Stacey, and I am here today because of a photograph that was taken yesterday."

The story above is a freewrite for the prompt shade. It was previously published elsewhere

I started out wanting to talk about the light and shade in the photograph above, then went to one of my darkest places. I spent quite a bit of time after the five minutes. I actually stopped the timer and carried on as long as needed to get the essence of this story right. Thank you for reading.