#1.Hidden Rainbows

The rain was drawing translucent tears on the window of the car.

Cheryl adjusted herself on the passenger seat,her neck was aching and the little white pillow was not much of a relief against the luggage. The blue and white stripped blanket held around her as if it was the only belonging she had left,her stubborn shaky grip on it.

She couldn’t tell exactly how she felt, she was just aware of this fleeting emotions stinging her each time with different memories.

It was as thought she was in a limbo, and on each side of the path lied hell and heaven. “Which one is my destination?”, she murmured to herself.

She peered once again at her mother. Laurie Tend looked pale and worn out by the hours of driving and interrupted sleep. She was humming an old song softly. Cheryl could not recognize it even thought the girl was sure she had heard it before. And all of a sudden she knew how she felt. She was mad. She was bitterly angry.

She didn’t want to leave, she wanted to go back home. A nostalgia for her room filled her eyes.

Even if she had always hated the yellow painting behind her countless posters, picture and drawings.

It came to her mind the day she was finally considered big enough to sleep by herself.

The first odd sensation of having been abandoned, the vague repulsion of growing older, was eventually replaced by the excitement, the dreams of million projects she could now fulfill along with a sense of accomplishment she couldn’t account for.

She closed her eyes,trying to hold on those happy visions.

Johnny yawned loudly and stretched in the front seat. Cheryl heard him asking her mother in a low but gentle voice if she wanted him to take over. Before she could hear her mother’s reply, Cheryl fell in an awkward state of trance where everything was dim, no word really made sense and each rule had no benefit at all. A world in which mountains and stairs were perennially crumbling down.

She woke up with a gasp, trying hard to recognize where she was, who she was. She waited for reality to take form, for normality to slowly sink back  in her head.

Her brother was behind the wheel, his hair slapping insistently his right cheek bone.

Cheryl studied him attentively now. He had the ghost of a smile on his lips. He looked relaxed,even serene, his hands casually controlling the car. Cheryl hated him all the more for the ease with which John seem to adapt himself to every situation. Secretly she believed he behaved so due to cowardice. Due to his inability to change what life forced him to deal with. Secretly she hoped that was the reason.

Their eyes met on the rear window, both feeling uneasy. Almost as if he could read the accusation in her eyes and somehow couldn’t bring himself to deny it.

“Are you comfortable back there?”, he asked fixing his concentration back to the road.

“The contortionists Cherry…Everywhere comfy! ” she said with unmasked sarcasm while kicking a couple of bags that were burying her feet.

The vehicle filled with brief, dry laughs. Her mother’s as if to say:”Oh Sha, Sha, you never change, do you?!”. Cheryl could even picture her shaking her head.

Her window was open, the breeze dispersed the smoke from her mother’s cigarette fairly in and out, uncertain as which direction to take.

John turned up the volume of the radio and performed and enviable duet with the ads announcers which brought his sister to chuckle despite herself. Johnny looked significantly at his mother.

“You should be proud, you have an offspring of skilled artists”

“Absolutely”, replied Laurie teasingly “too bad you never met them!”. She smiled and stretched a hand to mess John’s black hair.

“Don’t be too hard with the kids, Laurie, that’s my job”, her father would have said had he been there. Or something alike. And the absence of his comments lingered on, pushing a surreal silence on to hang between them.

Cheryl wondered if they could be considered a happy family. She wasn’t sure.

Could a sad individual belong to a happy family?