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By Root 524 0

Since Annie had left for Los Angeles to become a movie star, Caleb and Camille and Buster had spent the past six months sinking deeper and deeper into the crowded interior of the house, unsure of how to proceed. After the Romeo and Juliet incident, which had hastened Annie’s departure, Buster wanted no part of the spotlight. He was content to observe and, even then, he would rather keep his eyes closed and simply listen. Camille insisted that it wouldn’t be the same without Annie, that they were a family and it was this unity that had made the art so successful. Caleb continued to proclaim that Annie was no longer necessary, that they were entering into a new and productive phase of their career. He only needed time to figure out what it would be. So they waited, and Buster felt himself becoming invisible in the house, his parents sometimes shocked to find him in the kitchen, as if they thought that he had left along with Annie. To Buster, his parents seemed edgy, every object in the house likely to explode in their hands. They were, in short, a family in flux and they were unused to being in such a state. They caused flux, for crying out loud. Flux was their thing.

To occupy his time while his parents fretted over their next piece—he had heard the word crossbow whispered more than once—Buster focused on his writing. Before she left, preparing him for life without her, Annie had encouraged him to do something artistic, something that wasn’t associated with Caleb and Camille. “You need to find something, like playing the guitar or writing novels or arranging flowers,” she told him, “so that you can see that creating something doesn’t have to be as fucked up as Caleb and Camille make it seem.” Of the suggestions, writing seemed the easiest to hide from his parents. He held a fistful of pencils as if they were a bouquet for a date way out of his league. He flipped the empty pages of a notebook and imagined symbols bleeding into the paper. And then, nothing.

He was unsure of how to begin. He had no idea what to write about. What else was there but his family? Could he write about his family? That seemed like a bad idea. But he would write about a family. The Dang family. The parents would be midgets. The brother would be older than his sister. This seemed, to Buster’s nascent powers of imagination, to be enough to hide their true identities. And then he simply placed the Dangs in all manner of trouble. Inside the belly of a whale. Locked in the trunk of a car about to drive off a cliff. Falling through the sky, not a single parachute opening. All of these calamities were the result of bad parenting, Mr. and Mrs. Dang dragging the family into danger. And, just when it seemed the family would be saved, thanks to the calm and inventive actions of the children, one of the parents would make some critical mistake that would doom all of them. Every story ended the same, with the family spectacularly dead, only to be resurrected for the next tale. When he first read one of these stories to Annie, she had been silent and then said, “Do you think you might want to play the guitar instead?” No, he did not. He had found something that he could do. He could create conflict. He could see it through to the end. And when it was over, he was the only one left unharmed. He was, he decided without anyone else telling him, a writer.

Buster would call Annie late at night so as not to arouse his parents’ suspicion. Not that his parents would care. Annie had not been exiled. Unlike Camille’s family, Mr. and Mrs. Fang did not disown their child because she had disappointed them. They would support her, but, if she was not going to be a part of their own work, they could not spend too much time thinking about her. They had, in fact, handed over to her a large sum of money to help her get started in California. “It was a lot of money, Buster,” Annie had told him once on the phone, “like rich people kind of money.” It reminded Buster that his parents were, technically, rich. In addition to the yearly grants and fellowships that they seemed to receive