Eyebrows

By Yuli Atta

(This was a practice piece written for one of my modules at university. We each had an adjective and had to write a character who is described by that adjective without actually naming it. Try to guess mine. The individual whose POV I chose is a real-life person whom I call the Eyebrows.)

It was late at night; the silence of the house was deafening. The only thing I could hear was everybody’s relaxed breathing and the dog’s occasional whimper in its sleep. My stomach growled. I turned on my bed trying to ignore it and go back to sleep and accidentally bumped into my sleeping wife. I didn’t apologise, she was fast asleep so why would she need an apology. My stomach growled again. This was so annoying; why would I get hungry in the middle of the night again. I grunted and got up. I opened and closed the door to our bedroom and could hear my son’s talking in his sleep. I went over to the kids’ room to check on him. Weird, the older one wasn’t there. My step-daughter? No, no, she was my daughter… Or was she really? After all I had adopted her only to make her mother stay with me longer. That bitch refused the first time I proposed but I knew she wouldn’t after she got pregnant. Who would want a kid outside of marriage after all? Certainly not me.

But where was her kid? I swear to god if she was staying until three in the morning again I would tell her mother to have a word with her. She wasn’t disturbing me or anything, I just didn’t want her to see me eating because she would tell that bitch again and I would have to listen to the same old lecture about not eating the wafers or breadsticks because ‘what would your son eat at school?’. Food, he can eat proper food. I’m so tired of always having to think about him and his needs. What about my needs? What about what I want to eat? I’m forty years old and what? I have to ask a nine-year-old for permission before I have a dessert? Like hell I am. These things come from my money.

I turned on the light in the corridor and went to the living room where I also switched on the light. I heard the fridge door getting closed. Oh, great. She was there. What was she eating? She’d better not be eating the lasagne leftovers. But also, why was she staying in the dark? Why not switch on the lights? I continued on in the kitchen and saw her drinking a glass of water. She smiled slightly and went out without saying anything. I heard her turn off the light in the corridor. But why? Everybody was sleeping anyway.

I opened the fridge to check if the leftovers were still there. They were, good. I closed the fridge and moved on to the cupboards to look for some wafers. I didn’t want the lasagne. I wanted something sweet. I rummaged through a few of them and couldn’t find anything until I remembered that that bitch, my wife, tends to hide them in obvious places so I wouldn’t see them. She thinks she is oh so smart and oh so good and oh so perfect. If she was so smart, why would she hide the wafers where I can see them? In a box under a receipt. What kind of a hiding place is that? There was only one wafer. My stomach growled for that chocolate divinity. God, I love wafers. I would get a lecture tomorrow if I eat it but oh, who cares.

I ate the wafer and went back to bed.