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.
