Another Writing Sample

 Here's another sample of my writing, enjoy!

It snowed the night before my Uncle Nicolai was released from prison. I had gotten up early that morning, and ran around the front yard for an hour before joining my mother on her walk to the grocery store. The stores in Brighton Beach were crawling with scarved babushka women on their emergency shopping trips after the first snow of the year. I danced around them, retrieving things for my mother as she steered our cart through the mass of people. The other boys my age did the same weaving dance, it was a strange tradition of modern day hunting and gathering.

  We were walking home, when my father’s green station wagon pulled up into our driveway. He was dressed nice, going to work nice. He never worked on Sundays. The passenger door opened, revealing another man in the car. He exited, standing to an impressively tall full height. That was when I saw Uncle Nic for the first time.

Tall and weedy, blonde and pale, he was a stranger with a face similar to my father’s. Broad grey eyes, hooded, wide and searching, until they settled on me and mother. He was bundled up tight in one of my father’s coats, with my mother’s scarf wrapped around his neck; he waited at the end of the drive with a battered blue suitcase…my old suitcase.  He smiled and waved a gloved hand at us…I bet they weren’t his gloves.

“He’s wearing the scarf I got you for Christmas.” I grabbed her hand defensively as we got closer. “And he has my suitcase!”

“It’s okay, Gannon.”

“Did he take it from you?”

“No.”

He helped us carry in the groceries, setting each item on the blue Formica countertop in little rows. I watched him pick at the plastic packaging of the cheese and frowned as his longer fingers poked and prodded other things.

“Who is he?”

Mother sighed and put the milk away. “Your uncle.”

“Oh…Dad has family?”

“Unfortunately.”

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His second night with us, my parents moved Uncle Nic into my room, and by the fourth week he was in there, I had started to refer to it as his room. He barely fit on my bed. His ankles hung over the edge. So he usually curled into a tight ball under my cowboy rodeo covers. His belongings were scattered all over the blue, shag carpet. Everything he owned had once fit into my little, carry-all suitcase. However, I found myself marveling at the amount of stuff he pulled out of it each day, adding to the growing piles of garbage; more and more random knick knacks and letters.

After the fifth week, I knew I was never getting my room back, and I settled into what had once been father’s home office. I missed my room, but would never tell him that. Weeks six and seven consisted of father moving my dresser and other miscellaneous items into my new room.

On a Tuesday, Uncle Nic stood in the doorway to my makeshift bedroom, arm pushed up against the fake wood panel frame. “Sorry for kicking you out of your room, Kiddo.”

His voice in English was different that I made-up in my head, and that was possibly because I’d never heard him speak any language but Russian until now.  “It’s fine.”

“Well…ummm…thank you.”

He was more awkward that I imagined him being, and I felt strangely in love with him.