Some more words.

I turned to face him, his face now merely inches from mine. His sticky
breath biting at my face, its temperature a clear contrast to the
breezy air beneath the trees. We're going to the creek tonight, if you
want to come. I shrugged my shoulders and raised my eyebrows. Stepping
to the side, I began to walk away, pushing the scratching undergrowth
out of my path as I moved slowly along.

"Ten o'clock!" he shouted.

When I turned to look at him, he was gone. Only the violent death of
fragile branches under his boots could be heard.

I walked towards the back of the gray house, approaching its
suffocating walls hesitantly. Pausing a hundred yards away, I looked
into the harshly lit windows and saw the smiles on the faces of the
creatures that were supposedly related to me. But as I got closer, the
smiles all became very different things. The baby sat in the high
chair, my mother shoving liquefied carrots into its mouth, which the
baby promptly spit out and then contorted its face into a demonic
grimace producing a sound that could be heard through the screened
windows that was something like shrill laughter. My mother just shook
her tired head, looking defeated but she still persisted in her
motherly duties. My father sat one room over, yelling angrily at the
television. It is baseball season which means our lives revolve around
the home team's schedule. The yelling eventually became comforting
background noise. The other sister, four years old now, wrestled the
yelping puppy into her arms, her face falling into terror when he lept
from her arms to the safety provided by the kitchen table. For a mere
moment I thought of just turning around and walking away until I found
some other place. I didn't know what felt so wrong about this all. I
didn't belong, not here. Not with them.

I forced the screen door open, just wide enough to slip by. I wasn't
hungry but dinner is mandatory in this household. I slumped into the
chair across from my father's. It provided a physical barrier
necessitated by his random physical outbursts. But that did not mean
my dinner would be consumed in any manner of peace. The dinner hour
provided this man with a captive audience to torment and criticize. My
sisters were young enough to escape the scrutiny and my mom was
world's away in a stupor of exhaustion to care about what came out of
this man's mouth. That left me. Having learned to remain as silent as
possible, to avoid eye contact, and to clear my plate as not to insult
his generosity, one might imagine I could escape any sort of
confrontation.