Happy Family
– Abir Saha
Merry often used to have cupcakes after coffee in the evening. Some would find it strange since usually, it goes the other way around but for Merry, this was perfectly normal. She loved how the bittersweet aftertaste of the coffee would beautifully complement the spongy texture of soft-baked cupcakes and their fluffy mushroom tops.
Merry could easily be said to be the most beautiful lady in the entire neighborhood of Vancouver. In fact, whenever it snowed, her neighbors used to think it was she who had a mysterious mutual understanding with nature and was able to maneuver it according to her sweet will. Having said that, when the coin was flipped and it was Merry’s turn to be on the other side of the fence, it was, as she said, “a big NO-NO!” She had the ability of convincing everyone except her stubborn self, and for that reason, some of her colleagues apparently found it logical to call her “a frustrated spirit.” Besides, some would say that she was emotionally unavailable as well, if not physically there. For instance, her brother, Rosen who had already offered her to move into the old apartment with their parents, paid a visit to her place on a sunny Sunday afternoon. But to his dismay, he discovered the house empty as Merry was having a tight schedule till late-night with her house being mortgaged and what not.
Somewhere around 3 am in the morning that day, she managed to reach home. The cupcakes were placed beside the wooden shelf and were surprisingly moist inside despite being set aside carelessly out in the cold for one whole day. But Merry was too tired to notice these minute details, feeling a terribly hungry monster of a stomach growling inside. Breaking her ritualistic routine, she ate up all the cupcakes without having coffee first. In the meantime, the street outside was slowly being covered with layers after layers of fuzzy snowflakes, ready to fall asleep at the hands of the ever-awake snowmen, the temporary guardians of the Crescent Lane.
When Merry went to her bed though, a lucid dream in the form of a lightweight mirage silently glided itself onto her sound slumber. She saw the apparition of her dead mother, a skeleton, followed by her father in the form of a deadly snowman. In her dream her parents somehow showed her a hidden way of letting go of all her frustrations by repeating an eerily unformed utterance- “snow & air never mix,” “snow & air never mix,” “snow & air…” She woke up feeling anxious and rushed to the kitchen to have some water. As soon as she finished drinking, her ears started buzzing, reliving the same words again and again. Suddenly, her phone rang and it was Rosen on the other side, trying to talk bullshit, which she had never been a huge fan of really. For now, she rather preferred ending up being a melancholic nobody with fragmented memories of her once happy family.
The temperature soon began to decrease outside while Merry murmured a silly nonsensical saying of her parents, “The more the chill, the more the fear in the air.” But as a “matured” woman she refused to pay attention to this momentary glitch in the brain, shrugged it off and went on to fetch her sleeping pills. While moving from one room to the other, she realized that she forgot to buy the pills in the first place. Her head began to spin around the quote her parents injected in her head within the dream. As she had the habit of occasional smoking, she decided to light a cigarette and think about what she saw all night long. Thankfully, the next day was her day off and so spending an entire night awake would not cause much harm.
On that very day, her brother decided to show up again with what she deemed to be his “bizarre” proposal since she was already in her mid-twenties and living with the entire family while everybody knew it was not an option for her. After a harsh negotiation with his sister, no fruitful conclusion was to be found. He went back half-heartedly but forgot his dirty bag. After a few minutes of his departure, Merry noticed that bag and discovered an ancient looking dust-covered book in it titled Snow & Air. She stopped for a moment and decided to give her brother a call so he could come and take it back with him. But the phone line was dead. With some spare moments on her hand, as she was turning over the pages in a random order, she noticed a letter inside the book where some seemingly irrelevant poetic expressions were written by her brother,
“My soul was the faded snow
Impaired now by a known spirit.”
Reading it out loud was an indefinable experience for Merry. For some reason, she found it unsettling on multiple levels precisely because her exclusively prosaic younger brother literally loathed poetry and called anything close to it “purely idiotic.” She thought it was better to ask him directly about this enigmatic scribble and the unnerving undertones it was carrying within.
She went to the old apartment, found it locked and saw a worn out wooden box in front of the door, resembling the yellow “treasure kit” she used to own back in her childhood. Inside it, she found two old envelopes one of which had some much-handled vintage paper cards with the names of her father, mother, brother and her own. With an immense curiosity, she opened the other and found some sleeping pills along with a letter addressed to herself. The letter contained an old picture of her entire family captioned “From 1965 to 2016,” and the two words, “Happy Family” underneath.