I slop the corn onto Julie's white plate with a clank. The dark outside floods through the windows like fog, like a negative halo.

"Corn again?" Julie whines.

"Yes, corn again." I turn to put the pot away. "I don't have enough time to work and cook gourmet meals everyday, you know."

"Mom never made corn."

"I'm not mom, ok?"

She shrugs and then blushes. "Sorry," she says. It hurts me when she says that. She doesn't do it to be mean. It's just a fact to her. My sister Julie's the sort of person that barges on through regardless, never thinking about the next step, never even thinking about the present step. It's probably why she's so happy, regardless.

Julie's content with what she's got, even if it's corn. I can see that now as she stuffs loads of it into her mouth. In a few moments she'll ask, 'more please' and I'll get up and give her some. I like being mom, but it's hard...and I'm bitter.

I begin to eat my corn.

"More please," Julie holds her plate up.

"You want more corn?"

"Please"

"Just a minute ago you never wanted to see corn again."

Julie just shrugs, "More please" I get up and put more on her plate.

"What'd you do at school today?" I ask taking some more corn into my mouth. I love corn, you can never grow tired of it.

"Oh!" she said and her face brightened up, she ran from the dinner table and disappeared from the kitchen. A few mouthfuls of corn later she returned with her battered-up, grey back pack. One of the straps on the backpack is ripped in half and the other is too long for her. But she continues to wear it. She doesn't care. I'm glad for that because I don't generally like spending money, seeing as I never have much.

She pulls out a small cardboard figure that has been mangled and maimed inside the recesses of her backpack. She hands it to me by the string that is attached to it. It is a group of four people holding hands. The smallest person on the end is holding something that sort of dangles in the air barely attached to the cardboard. It is black and looks like something burnt or terribly mangled; it looks like a large, burnt cookie.

"Oh," I say with enthusiasm, "Is this a cookie?" referring to the charred object.

"It's a cat!" she says proud of herself, not even noticing my big mistake. I'm glad she never does.

"Oh..." I pause for a moment, trying to see it, but I can't.

"It's my cat!" she says.

"Your cat?"

"Yeah, that's me on the end." She points.

"Well," I say, "it certainly looks like you. It has the nice dress and pig-tails too. And this is me...," I say pointing to the taller figure next to her, "and this is...mom, I guess." She got mom right. An elegant, proud, emotional dark skinned woman of Middle Eastern descent. Funny how a mangled cardboard character could capture all that.

"Yup" she says and stuffs her face. There is one more figure left on the cardboard, but I can't figure it out. I thumb it, and then its cardboard hair. It is a handsome rugged-ish figure.

"And who's this?" I ask.

"It's dad!" she says excitedly.

"Oh." The father figure is holding hands with our mom. That's something I'd never have expected to see. Of course, I never really knew my father that well. He left before I really got the chance to. At least Julie can love him. She doesn't know enough of him to hate him as I do so she loves him unconditionally. But I know one more thing than Julie, that he left us. He just disappeared. Mom was heart-broken, I could tell. But she never said anything of it. Never mentioned him.

"It's a Christmas ornament!" she says, "you can hang it on the tree."

I nod and peruse it. It's a nice fairy tale. I look at the man on the side. It must be nice to have a father, I think, even if he doesn't exist. Lucky cardboard characters. "More corn, please," she asks politely. I take her plate and mine. Filling hers up I hand it back to her. I turn back to fill up mine.

It was then that I saw it there, as I turned back from the kitchen counter. You couldn't see anything out those windows, not even silhouettes of trees. But out there as I turned towards the table I saw the red light, small and distant, sharp and clear. And it gave all the nothingness out there a proportion. The flash lasted for no more than four seconds. But I saw the word, red and alone; a neon sign. Cold, it said, and then was gone.

Nothing else appeared so I turned back to the counter and got some corn, my movements mechanical, my mind focused on what I'd just seen. I try to let it pass; strange things happen. But as I turn back to the red and white checkered tablecloth the image is engraved in my brain and everything I see brings the word back into my mind: the red of the cloth, the tint of the wine, everything. Almost like a dream, half-remembered. I find myself looking out into the pitch black to find it, to see if it appears again, but there is only pure darkness. "I'm gonna go out and make some snow angels now ok, Amaljia?"

"What? Oh, no you're not. It's eight o'clock. Look how dark it is outside. Find something else to do. Watch T.V. draw. Go to bed."

"Ok," she gets up and gets more corn.

"Have some toast with that. You can't live on corn alone."