Atticus, through icy blue eyes masked by a mop of dark hair, penetrates a glare into his father who is "rat a tap tapping" on the family dinner table. Father's fingers pound down on the plastic, the plastic that wishes it was wood and imagines itself so with brown paint and darker circles and lines attempting to mimic the grain. Father's thumb is the bass drum leading the beat with a pounding rhythm inside of one of those faux circular grains. Father even leans into it with his upper body, as if pushing down a pedal, but Atticus can't see his father's feet through the railing from his spy perch on the stairs.
Atticus watches as his father's ring and index fingers, the hi-hat and snare, join almost automatically with the upper body convulsions and bass beat. Atticus' icy eyes glare with increasing intensity at his father's fingers and the fake wood of the dining table, while father's eyes look black and empty staring off in vacancy. Father's hand continues pounding rhythms in a mathematical fashion that makes father an automaton connected only to the fake wood with a long string of zeroes and ones.
From the beige carpeted stairs that grow out of the living room, Atticus sees his father through the doorway to the kitchen and dining room. Suddenly, the tapping stops. Atticus shoots up on his two legs and bolts down the steps. Without a word, he heads straight out the front door that beckons him at the bottom of the staircase. With Atticus gone, the tapping continues.
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