Gemotions

The afternoon sun beat down, baking the asphalt. He sat in his beat-up pickup truck, parked across the street, watching the workers clear out the last of the furniture. He hadn’t gone inside. Couldn’t. The thought of stepping through that door again filled him with a potent cocktail of grief and rage.

He’d inherited the house after his father died, a house he never wanted. His sister, the golden child, would have loved it. But she was gone too. The truck's air conditioner wheezed ineffectually. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, a nervous rhythm.

He watched them heave his mother's antique piano onto the back of a truck, and his chest felt like it was being squeezed in a vise. He wanted to shout, to stop them, but the words wouldn't come. He just wanted it all to be over.