Family Ties

By Ellyn Bache

In these five vivid, unsettling tales, Bache has created flawed characters who might be related to any of us. They are the family black sheep you helplessly love or hate — here so finely drawn you will never forget them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordrunner eChapbooks
• Release date: Sep 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310166464

Ellyn Bache

Ellyn Bache's fiction has appeared in dozens of commercial and literary magazines, ranging from Shenandoah and Ascent to Seventeen and Good Housekeeping; been collected in a book (The Value of Kindness) that won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize; and been a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award in short fiction. She has also written nine novels. One of them, Safe Passage, was made into a film starring Susan Sarandon, and another, The Art of Saying Goodbye (William Morrow, 2011), was an “Okra Pick” from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA), and a SIBA Book Award nominee.

Book preview

Family Ties

Five Stories

By Ellyn Bache

Published by Wordrunner eChapbooks

(an imprint of Wordrunner Press)

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 Ellyn Bache

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Siblings

Cousin Calvin

Cousin Cindy

Wife

Husband

About Ellyn Bache

About Wordrunner eChapbooks

Siblings

The boy, Calvin, was handsomer than his sister. His hair was dark and his pale eyes were hooded by long, straight lashes that made him seem to be peering at his object of interest with special intensity. He would grow into a brutal man whose beauty remained undiminished even after his charm faded, which happened early. But as yet he was a boy of twelve and small for his age. He stared out of the big kitchen window toward the street.

Where are the kittens? asked his sister Min, finding their box next to the stove empty.

She must have moved them again.

The mother cat strode past in the hallway, making a short murmuring sound in her throat.

She’s looking for them, Min said. That’s the sound she makes when she’s looking for them.

Maybe she forgot where she put them.

Very funny. The girl downed the rest of her Diet Coke and went into her bedroom. At her dressing table, a gift from her mother for her fourteenth birthday, she fingered an assortment of creams and makeups and applied a pale pink lip gloss, almost white, that she had admired in a music video. In a little while, she would walk down to the playground to meet Josh. Her mother worked two jobs in the interest of keeping their house — a shabby rancher, and on this busy road, which had made it a bargain — and paid the children little attention. Min didn’t mind. Calvin did. He stole beer from the supermarket, lifting single bottles from a six-pack and shoving them under his jacket, waiting to be caught. Once a manager cornered him at the end of the refrigerated aisle, took in his small stature, his pale gaze, and let him off with a lecture.

The cat was patrolling the hallway, back and forth, her murmurs growing ever more frantic. There were three kittens, one black, the other two gray tabbies. There had been four to begin with, but Calvin had stepped on one and crushed it.

Who let it out of its box? Min demanded.

It was an accident. I didn’t mean to. Calvin sounded sly at first but then broke down and wept piteously. Their mother wasn’t home. Min, allergic to cats, had to admire them from a distance, but she wept, too. She took Calvin in her arms, patted his back. Calvin’s wish was to get even, never mind for what.

At the playground Josh would be waiting. There was an overgrown tangle of junipers on a hill behind the tennis courts. You could make a nest on the ground underneath and no one would see you. Min’s wish was to climb into someone else’s chest — someone male — and snuggle there.

She uncovered the lip gloss and put on another coat. Outside her window, the