“Oh there you are, sweet heart! How was practice?” Sadira’s mother set out dinnerware for what appeared to be no more than a crumbled family.
“It was good,” Sadira nearly choked on her words when she entered the room to see both of her parents in the same house. Her father was there to her surprise because he rarely was. He smiled at her when he looked up at her, though he had confessed to her that he was seeing another woman. Of course Sadira knew why he was. Her parent’s marriage had been a joke from the moment on they had given birth to her. However, Sadira’s mother would do anything in her power to provide the illusion of a functioning family towards her political group. A party that would prosecute those who were not like them.. However, both her mother and her father held strict beliefs about whom Sadira could be friends with. Heavily indoctrinated as children, Sadira’s parents had been brought up by parents who had been part of the Nazi Youth Group.
Her parents were Nazist radicalists and they made sure to recite that fact at every chance thrown out towards her. Sadira had grown up reciting the blessing of supper, thanking the ‘’Führer.’’. When Sadira came to question why this was so, her mother simply shrugged her off with another praise from Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. This drove Sadira away from her parents. They had both been bred purely Aryan, there was not a ‘’taint’’ of another race in their DNA. Her parents were proud of that, however, Sadira could not find any pride in being part of a race that was praised by terrible people.
Sadira had covered her tear streaked, flushed face with concealer to appear somewhat approachable towards her father. He looked at her suspiciously when Sadira pulled out her chair. She feared that his eyes might penetrate into the secrets she had covered with a blanket of Cheshire smiles.
Her father, a man of business had always held the figure of a willow and the grace of a carriage horse within his step. He was rather slender, however it did not water down his lanky figure. A man of his forties, his lion mane had begun to gray with age and stress. Sadira had always admired how well kept. her father was.
She was barely holding it together when her mother wandered into the dinning room, carrying a pot of stew their way. The room was permeated with hatred when Sadira caught her mother staring at her father. However, within the blink of an eye, it had vanished without a trace.
The silence was eerie while everyone ladled themselves a portion of the stew into their bowl. However, it was no peaceful silence, it was a silence that was static with unsaid words and arguments. The evening was bound to come to a terrible ending.
“Sadira, tell your father about your studies in law school.” Her mother suggested a conversation and Sadira shrugged while she picked up a spoon,”What is there to say? I have come close to finishing an essay on the rights of a poor citizen on trial.”
Her father cocked an eyebrow while he spooned the stew and swallowed a mouthful,”Oh really? They still make you write those essays? I remember in Germany they made me write several essays on the Soviet Union and learn Russian on top of that!” He stomped his fist on the table in a very dramatic gesture.
Sadira nodded and looked back down at her plate, the stew-- a combination of root vegetables, beef and potatoes, thickened with broth-- did not appeal to her senses as much as she would have liked. Nonetheless, she made the effort not to disappoint her mother and swallowed it. Its warmth coated the path down her throat and towards her pit-less stomach. However, the stew still could not cure her agony that wedged further into her nervous system.
