The Myrtles.

It was helpful to pretend it was a democracy.  As dysfunctional families go, the Myrtles ranked somewhere between benign anarchy and corrupt police state, depending on whether Jonathan had drunk himself unconscious yet.  Meredith and the children inhabited a world apart, and while this arrangement allowed them no access to the process of family governance, it at least also meant they were sometimes overlooked by the immense destructive power of the ruler.

But as Martin Luther King said, the oppressed will not stay oppressed forever, and when the opportunity for nonviolent resistance came, Meredith seized it, knowing how long it would be before the chance came again.  Jonathan came home rageful and bellowing, which meant that within an hour he was in a deeper alcoholic coma than normal.  Working quickly, Meredith and the kids wrestled him into the empty burlap potato sack from the corner and wedged the ramshackle sled underneath him.  They dragged him over the sooty snow to the tracks, where a train stood at one of New Jersey’s many anonymous waystations, waiting for freight to be loaded.  The conductor would never know about the extra burlap sack his train carried to Rochester that night – nor would the conductor of the next freight train headed the opposite way ever discover the extra passengers he unwittingly carried all the way to North Carolina.

When Jonathan came home, if he came home, he would find the house empty save for the broken bottles that constituted the detritus of his scrawny fiefdom, while his erstwhile subjects had escaped to freedom.  He would stagger, uncomprehending, from room to room, and maybe – just maybe – it would dawn on him that the putrid wreck in which he stood was the sum total of his life’s work.  As the train’s gentle rhythm rocked her and the kids toward warmer climes, the thought gave Meredith a bitter smile.  She had waited her whole life for this, and now she was missing it.

--Wayne Aaron Sandholtz