Pieces that precede can be read in order here:  FAMILY: A FICTION

section three closing thus….

They build a monument, calling it travel.  Stripping each other of context, providing a different forum.  Humans tend to revert to familiar.  Habitude of experience.  With no experience, alteration comes to bear.  Predictable as weather.

No one’s leaving home.

Other words coming to mind.

4

            Resistance.

There is, it seems, in families, this propensity.

Whatever is said, corrected, even when agreed.

 

Existing to clarify his spouse – to illuminate and exhibit.  In turn, she elucidates him.  Providing bases or cause – extrapolates.  Siblings arguing each other, united they stand, all as deserters.  Seven eventual versions of the parental wake-up blare: AWOL.

It’s good to be king.  Graph the assassination attempts – looks like innards of clocks.  A searing clap of surprising betrayal each time.  Unlike the spurned and necessarily nutrient mother.  Shagg proclaiming the law (as devised and developed by nature – read lifegiver/lawgiver “mom” – female coupling nurture and structure within dependency).  He handles rebellion, warding attacks and spying the skirmishes, she breeding resentment from ongoing need.

These are general patterns, biologically driven, no symphony the same.  With eight keys plus a half, on a twelve-tone scale, the songs recognizable according to differing orders.  Typify and characterize.  Declare it false.

Scraggydad is nurturing, allowing/confirming resistant responses and recumbent emotions, shame-shirking under her gaze.  In other words – as one of them – a remedial complicity.  Which she echoes into her drama – the leadership, the guilt, the collapse.

Each wanting to be cradled – rock, paper, scissors style – with an occasional simultaneous Bingo.  However unlikely, it’s what probability’s for.

Thus every level its lingo.  Select a word (sex or heaven, death or boy) and provide a taxonomy of related meanings from the eldest parent through littlest child.  It comes clear.  There are altering thesauri of usage.

Family as a game of Scrabble on the board of Life, each settling Catan.  With beeps and whistles and a slew of avatars.

A technique known as mapping provides lay of the land, similar to a geneologist’s tree applied to the present.  A thing to be explored or verified.  Corrected through each journey.  In several dictions.

The family edition.