The nuclear family (by Heather)

Your protagonist unexpectedly sees an aspect of himself or herself in someone who is overtly very different from him or her. Include a door in the story.

It would have been even funnier if it weren’t actually in my own family.

But it was funny enough.

Mum and I were sitting on the sofa, each of us curled up reading a book, when suddenly there was this weird growl from the general area of the bathroom, and then a series of clunks and bangs. We looked over our shoulders in some trepidation and there was Dad, ferocious expression on his face, carrying our bathroom door under his arm and heading out the back door. He stood on the patio and flung that door as far as he could. For a second, it caught the wind and look as if it might come back at him, but fortunately it changed its mind at the last minute and just dropped to the ground.

Dad came back in, face white and brow furrowed so deep it practically folded over itself. He headed back for the bathroom, and before Mum and I had even exchanged troubled glances, he stormed out again, a bunch of my brother Glen’s clothes under his arm. They followed the door and scattered rowdily around the garden.

Mum and I looked at each other. “Obviously Glen has knocked the bathroom door off the rails once too often,” she said. “Your father is handling it with great maturity,” she added, quietly enough that only I heard. I remember thinking I was glad I take after my mum and have a completely even temper.

Seconds later Act II took place.

You could hear my brother’s door open to find out what was going on, then you could imagine him doing a quick inspection of the bathroom. And then he came roaring out.

“Who took my clothes?”

I leaned over the back of the sofa and pointed helpfully in the general direction of the back lawn.

In a fury, he raced out, then stomped back into the house, casting a dark look at me on the way. The men in our family opt for few words and childish violence.

I made the mistake of laughing at his glare, whereupon the whole thing took a darker spin, and began to move very fast.

My brother headed outside, grabbed up a few of his clothes and stomped back to the bathroom. This time he came out carrying MY shampoos, cosmetics and perfumes and first thing I knew he was hurling them out to join the door and the clothes on the back lawn. Worse, the face cream jar bounced on the patio tile and broke.

By this time, I was on my feet and screeching. I stormed past my idiot brother, running out to look at what had happened to my precious bottles. I think what happened at that point is that I slipped in the face cream, courtesy of the broken jar, and went flying at high speed through the air myself. I landed as hard as I’ve ever fallen in my fifteen years and heard and felt a horrible crunch in my leg as I hit the footpath. I remember my mother shrieking at everybody and sliding through the face cream herself. I tried to get myself into a more dignified position but almost blacked out from the stab of pain that shot through my entire body. I think I groaned and then next thing I remember there were these three faces gathered over me, all of them looking worried and none very angry.

“Don’t try to move,” my dad said, a tear dangling on his cheek. “Your leg looks broken to me. We’ll carry you.”

They took one pull at me and I yelled in pain.

“The door!” my brother shouted. “Get the door!”

The next thing I knew they had brought the bathroom door over, shuffled me on to it amid my groans, and were carrying me around the side of the house to where our van sat waiting to take me to the hospital.


Hours later, we were all sitting in the hall at the hospital waiting for the plaster to dry on my cast. I’d been given a Nembutal or two and was feeling a low-key discomfort throughout my body. Across the hall was a metal panel running the length of the hallway, and I could see us all reflected in it. There was my sarcastic mum, my hot-tempered Dad, my even-hotter-tempered brother, and then of course there was me. We weren’t saying much and we all looked just the same: wretched. I could see the back garden on everybody’s mind, and the shampoo and the broken leg and the next few months. And the tempers.

The family temper.