Epiphany-revised

Revision of first chapter

Epiphany
In a flash, a bright red minivan turned into a driveway followed by a bulky moving truck. A mahogany painted Honda became the caboose of the collective rolling stone.
High-profile letters ‘Glendale Oaks, A Shining Community’ glis-tened on an oaken wood post situated on a mound of green. And upon seeing that universal welcoming, it provided all hopeful pas-sengers in the van, the car and the mover a new phase in life.
There were opportunities dreamt of, even though moving was full of every uncertainty able to occur. As for the twenty fourth of August, any anxiety about it wouldn’t be so similar.
Glendale Oaks was a vast, prestigious place built for the legion estates and manors. From the first glance up the hill, star-studded views had stimulated each imagination. A mansion had spoken vivid tales prior the move, a pool, malls, school life, a place worth enjoying...
All motors were laid to rest onto a wide, gray driveway, their expectations unlimited.
One brown topped, lanky teen leaned against the van. He showed faint signs of muscle growth from his tight, fatigued party shirt, that very day the reason he wore it.
As far as his ending years of school were concerned, all hopes hit home.
Standing five foot nine, he once stood tall among peers and was never caught without a crowd. However his periodic actions resulting in his wealth of allies had caused him to fall.
‘Shun hard and relentless’ became all classmates’ attitude against him. It had all been ripped out of his body, fiber that con-sisted of being the ear lender, talk less of those that made him a universal friend.
He had to be sewn up from the old.
All he had was a family that didn’t quite understand why he’d need that rehab, parents only caring about the academics.
Given that as a large, cumbersome stick of gum to chew and cope with, the boy knew no glossy label would boost fallen status, especially one who recognized how partial it was. It was only reform that could suffice; and enough of it in order to get back on track with his life.
“Well, here we are now.” He said faintly, lounging against the van door, gazing upon the light blue sky with a hopeful muse… I really don’t deserve this, or this good feeling.
He felt as content that second, until then feeling a bittersweet feeling over their voyage. But it’s going to end when I get to die in that moving truck….


Moving Cramps

“Alright! You people, get ready for some action!” A shaking body staggered out of the van as she palmed the driver door shut with anything left that consisted of energy.
A tall, middle-aged lady staggered out of the van, an eager air around her. One wouldn’t really have the urge to be eager, bearing through traffic jams and junk food that fed off so much time and money.
“I’ll be the happiest woman alive once we get done, ASAP.” She said in an exhilarating gasp, putting up her hands that made a rec-tangular barrier around her view of the home.
“It’s hard to believe this… Glendale Oaks!”
This woman knew that necessity for the family to share e-mails and personalities with a new set of faces. People grew spiritually with other people, what it meant to be truly content.
“Yeah, but this is going to suck.” The reserved boy kicked a piece of light gravel, watching it skip and collide against the shaft of a telephone pole. Working outside for countless hours in humid weather was the spinach, okra Brussels sprout medley that had to be eaten in his banquet of summer.
“HERE IS A BEEEEEAUTY!”
Onto the gray, rocky driveway a faintly burly man leaped out from the moving truck. Unlike his son, he was built for the burdens that life had thrown at him.
Intentions toward moving we’re almost identical to his wife’s, future, opportunities, and surroundings. He sought for more of a community approach, applying to be a handyman for the high-school.
“Hey! You made it without crashing into anything!”
“You’re telling this guy.” He chuckled deeply, nodding at his wife. “The hard stuff’s just begun.”
“That’s for sure.” She gave him a hug from the side, ready for the worst of worn out joints.
“So, are we ready?”
She looked up at his face to respond, “I don’t care how tired I am, as long as I’m sleeping on a nice bed!”
“That’s the spirit, my Vivienne.” Mr. Everstein’s voice trailed off to the truck’s rear. “Hey…your request will involve a heck of a lot from everybody, I hope you know.”
“Like it already hasn’t.” She said to him, walking behind hastily. “Trish would’ve been great now. But college is a priority.”
“Exactly, hoping to start her own family.” He laughed, despite his faltering eyelids. “Let her be happy with that, you know?”
She made a scoff. “She better be happy. I mean how much did Yale and this move swipe out of our wallets for Pete’s sake?”
A hand was placed on her upper shoulder. “I have a feeling we will stay alive without Mrs. Hercules!”
She sighed. “How crazy is this going to be?”
“As crazy as this gets. For one thing, we should’ve hired Adrian’s and all his pals to come along.” He chuckled, yet to coincide with her while looking at the funny truths about it. He watched his faithful wife go back to the family vehicle.
“Well, I’m heading off till Adrian’s done dozing off.” He walked up to the back and opened up the metal back door. “You know he deserved that.”
She pushed him aside, diving at him for a big hug.
“Michael! This day has been so unbelievable!” She bellowed through the cloth of his bicep.
“Yeah, it has been. Although, I would make it better if someone owes me for spewing out toll money.” He said with a laugh.
She laughed, very vibrant. “You are such a cheapo, hon.”
Her weary sight glanced at the Honda behind her, two, inac-tive, broad arms crossed against the dashboard, windows securely wound up.
She turned just to get her eyes to freeze at the white and yel-low attachment from across. She stood erect to prevent falling over, shaking her head in awe.
“Holy hogs…Michael! Come! Come look at this!” The ecstatic mother called out, still marveled at the golden orange facade. Star-tled, the reformer leaped into preparedness and raced toward her mother as if she saw a Leviathan menace armed with a heavy club and a bazooka aimed at destruction of their modest palace.
“Yes, dear?”
“……we have a three…car garage…attached to our home.”
The boy rolled his brown eyes, adrenalin slowly returning back to Mt. Kidney. He left it to his mother to always react to the mun-dane, thinking she must be losing it if she didn’t notice that struc-ture as she parked before it.
Her husband had brewed a slick smile on his face.
“How’s that for a two month surprise before we arranged to get here!”
She patted his stomach hard.
“This—is so spectacular. Just think about our lives in this place.”
With awesome happenings like their house of future residence, one would feel the need for a compromise.
Still in awe of the shift in surroundings after the passage of many miles, the boy sighed. His head filled with every possible situation—if neighbors were conservative hermits or how the family would expect to haul back a mover without extended family to take it home. The house seemed to intoxicate.
So despite the volatile moods marinated from all the excite-ment, there was nothing that a rest wouldn’t cure for each of them. Yet to earn it involved the iron man medal around a neck.
“Let’s get working, everyone.” She declared.
Figuring an extra ten minutes of their son’s inactivity not in re-gard and he’d be apt to work, however reluctant it would be to him. The time for hide and seek seemed perfectly ideal for such a situa-tion.
As the game commenced, the radar scanned the van, two sleepers using each other as pillows, and material that she was going to move herself. However, no sign of a stationary blinking dot that stayed hidden behind his brother’s car.
The game lasted two minutes. Once the radar pinpointed the slacker’s exact location while on the lookout for pots and pans stowed behind his hiding area. Instantly, the radar upgraded into MomRadar-Reaching-Menopause-Without-Her-Coffee-That’s-Ready-For-Cruel-And-Unusual-Punishment, version 42.5.
She jerked back her eyes at an angle, walking hastily at him, about to do something about it on an easy subject.
“Darren, Reginald, Everstein!! Why isn’t your rear in the truck with the other two? Do you think I will play this game?”
He breathed and exhaled through his nose, a little trembled, nodding without any regard until the verbal storm had passed.
“Your butt needs to get working!” Her finger was a lightning bolt striking the hauler. “I’m finished fooling around about this. You should know that!”
“Okay...” Darren groaned, hating his name used in such a de-gree of contempt. He slouched toward the truck, an effect he used to demonstrate how useless he was in the lines of work.
She exhaled through hot nostrils. “Think you always have to have it easy…”
It sucks that I have a bipolar mom right now…He groaned, walking up the ramp that led to human torture.
“Well Darren?” She continued, stopping in front of the metal pathway to the monstrous hauler.
“I warned you about what was going to happen when we came! Jonathan, Evelyn—”
“Right! Right! Mom, I understand.” Darren was never meant to act the role of contender to his mother, the cavern full of cardboard ogres that needed a new home.
“Then show me that you understand. We’re made it, we didn’t get wasted on the highway, so let’s kick this afternoon to overdrive!” She started towards the lawn, back and forth.
If getting henpecked after a long trip wasn’t spirit draining enough, heavy cubical stalagmites filled the entrance. No way at all could he become bulldozer material, the fridge, numerous chairs and dressers and any megaton that was essential for living in a house cluttered the cavern as his very shoes were lucky to hold a good balance against the flat surface.
So overwhelmed, he was about to wet himself in both his pants and his cheeks—or roll down the ramp in a dramatic fashion to claim a sprained ankle voiding him of slave work. Either one was acceptable, but irrational to even himself.
Mondays kept a keen sniper rifle on hand loaded of all discomfort whenever it felt, and so did the director of affairs, his mother.
“Mom, there is no way I can do this.” He started. “…Can I wait till Adrian’s done sleeping and dad’s willing to help me?”
“Darren, you’ve got to be kidding me. You can not be that lazy.”
“If you went up there, you would be. It’s impossible.” He spoke back, but at the tone that barely triggered “bend over and feel my wrath” tenacity. At least that day, anything that was an objection could activate her moods.
“Do you think I care what the stupid truck looks like?” She spoke, slightly angered from his attempt to defy the system. “Go in there and do what you can do, let alone what you need to do!”
“I will. I hope I can.” He answered bitterly, one of his rare moments of a bleak retort. What he would give for this family to hire moving men instead of frequent trips to fast food stores and his sister’s youth center expenses.
She glared at the accident in front of her toes, blowing a frus-trated sigh on it.
“Breed lazy kids, or at least you attempt to get them active, and see what happens.”
She cupped her hands to the opaque skin of the truck. “Darren, we spent tons of our time and money. So you better be a hauling and a lifting, or else you will see the beast! It could be called Glendale a million dollar suites, and I wouldn’t care I’m the master of good ol’ tyranny in any neighborhood!”
“Nag nag nag… She doesn’t stop.” Darren whispered, hands on his sides, glaring at the organized mess within the hauler.
Sighing, he didn’t regret the change of heart from old to new, seeing nothing else to miss beside their faithful house that held many memories. His weary, ungloved hands pinched a small desk that he needed to tug between the refrigerator and the upright sofa. Even that was too much for him, pulling at the oak with tenacity but enough to be careful from damaging it. Unfortunately, his left leg slid off the surface and met the friction of truck metal. Hopping painfully to the side, Darren decided for his butt to check the en-trance of the driveway.
“Uhhhh.” He let out, fighting the air with a quick fist to show how much he hated pain. “I can not move this crap!”
His mother heard the cry, a band-aid emerging from her front jean-pocket.
“Told you I would need this—sooner than later.” She licked her finger to aid the sore, placing it on his purplish red scab form on his lower knee.
He seethed indignantly, even the slightest amount of pressure from the adhesive irritating every inch of him.
“Thanks, mom.”
“I’m out of bandages. Watch yourself, all right?” She walked back. “You have yet to show me what you can do!”
“Darren, I’m coming!” The father came out of the front of the mammoth, working gloves applied for the action. “It’s a storm in there isn’t it?”
“Yeah! I could barely breathe even looking at it.” He brushed off pain, firing lasers at the simple desk he came close to hauling away with.
Standing on the edge of the ramp, the father took a stare at the problem. He shook his head.
“Come on, there is no sweat to this.” The man marched up the warpath. “We’re going to get a handle on this sofa.”
His wife shook her head, a hand on a pasta cooker in the truck.
“It’s about time. Let’s see you two start something.”
He got a go ahead from his father, and in no time, the two made a sofa train that glided past the ramp and onto the lawn. Each step, the boy saw a speck of light continuing to grow from within despite the ache in his tendons that accompanied every one.
Mrs. Everstein watched the two in partial delight. “Those are my soldiers, and my General.”
“Here’s private D. Everstein, ready for the depths of the forbid-den …” The soldier groaned, going back for more the truck offered for him.
They all flew—shipping off things into their destinations in the home for that sun lit portion of the day. Mrs. Everstein inevitably be-ing their main source of revitalization once one of the three decided to stop and catch for air, Darren doing the brunt of all that. The four feasted on subs the Mrs. had purchased from a store that brought her the hard earned espresso fix. However, the mistake from that day was one of the boys decision to ram a heavy, black sofa through the front door, which made it more of a mental dilemma.
Nevertheless, the dusk settling in before they do was a con-cern, but this family understood endurance.
With much anticipation for a new life and the hectic rush all in one, Darren wanted to hibernate in a tropical island until the blizzard ceased for the day.