Chekhov’s Gun

The Merritt’s exemplified a nuclear family.

Daniel Merritt, Dan for short, toiled as a mid-level manager at with a well-known insurance company. The employees under his watch generally liked him because he showed them the sort of geniality and comradery as that as a co-worker might show another, utilizing empathetic tools rather than totalitarian ones to motivate his team. However, he labored with an energy and dedication to his work that surpassed the compensation that he was receiving so that the company perceived him as an asset rather than just a liability. Even more beneficial to the company, Dan found satisfaction and contentment in his work.

Dan’s son, Kyle, possessed a certain creative curiosity and playfulness which he expressed in his constant need to touch things, the signs of which appeared when an adolescent Kyle, no more than 2 or 3 years of age, would twist every knob, flip every switch, press every button, he could lay his chubby digits on, observing and noting the change that occurred. Even at that young of age, Kyle possessed what could be called “a scientific mind.”

When old enough, Dan purchased for Kyle an electronic kit, composed of wires and knobs and lights, powered by a simple battery that engaged Kyle’s need for experimentation for hours on end. Kyle would wire the kit in a configuration resulting, when the right buttons were pressed and switches flipped, a coordination of lights and sound.

Kyle’s older sister, Karen, did not possess his scientific mind, though she possessed a brilliance of her own that found expression in the manipulation of words and ideas. She read avidly, engorging any text she could lay her hands on. While Kyle held onto a certain vitality and rotundness mirroring a cherub floating aimlessly in a renaissance painting, Karen appeared more sickly and dark, traits emphasized by the sadness drifting in her pupils and the raven hair worn plainly and pulled back with the simplest of barrettes clipped on the left side of her head. She wore large spectacles colored in the gaudiest translucent pink and which enlarged her grieving eyes. Her sad eyes belied her true condition, a terminal shyness verging on neurosis, a condition that her mother and father felt might be healthy for a young teen girl considering the stories Karen’s parents heard from other parents of a teen girl the same age.

Despite her shyness, Karen was happy girl and expressed that happiness in a slight smile out from under which the slightest sliver of white teeth could be seen. The paleness of her skin highlighted the pink blush of her cheeks, the blueness of her eyes, the gentle curves of a developing woman, all of the things that made Karen the apple of her father’s eyes.

If Karen was the similitude of quiet, her mother was quiet the opposite….