Chris Brandstatter

“Melody began to mumble incomprehensibly under her breath as she worked frantically on securing her most important papers into bankers boxes.
Her father stomped into her room, eating a banana.
Melody looked up at him with a sweaty and nauseated look on her face. “What are you tramping around so heavily about?” she asked him.
Bernie finished the last of the banana, and then held the peel in his hand as though it were a washcloth he had just found on the floor of a gym locker room.
Melody pointed to her trashcan with her eyes.
“I make an insane amount of noise when I approach you, because you once yelled at me claiming that I was 'sneaking up on you',” Bernie replied, using finger quotes on the last phrase. “That kind of treatment stays with a guy.”
Melody shook her head. Her father knew how much she hated finger quotes. Why he insisted on using them was beyond her. “I was five at the time”, she said.
“Ah,” Bernie said, with a knowing grin on his face. “The angry period.”
― B.M.B. Johnson, Melody Jackson v. the Hound from Hell It happened on Lafayette Street Season One