There were a lot of cats, five to be exact, sprawling themselves across the recently polished wooden floor of the spacious house. I sat among fifteen other animated attendees, seven people on each side of the long linen covered table, and one sitting at the head. The majority of the people were unrecognizable, probably because I had never seen them, or at least, never paid any attention to them previously.
We ate together in the softly lit dining room, as we chatted about the turn of the economy and the results from the recent election I suddenly started to catch glimpses of the familiar features of my kin. I thought that perhaps some of these attendees could be the children of my relatives!
One tall, lean man, who couldn’t be anymore than twenty-five, had the distinctive fine hair and light eyes of my brother. His broad shoulders could hardly fit between the corpulent blonde woman on his right and the edge of the table. The blonde woman, whose face had increasingly became redder the more she drank lit up a cigarette. She couldn’t be the fair haired man’s wife, she resembled my dear cousin too much, especially when she started hacking between drags of her cigarette.
The more attention I paid to each of the attendees, the more my suspicions told me that I knew these people. When I eventually inquired to their identities I felt like a fool as they started to reveal who each person was. I asked myself if it had really been that long since I had sat down to dinner with my family?
Ashleigh Gamboni Diehl 