Micro-fiction: energizing characters

My sister hears the car from her bedroom and dashes downstairs. Hearing her feet ping across the wooden floor in a frenzy, I leap from my chair and follow behind. She is almost done setting the table by the time I enter the kitchen. I grab some drinks and place them along the plates as my mother storms through the door. Her face is sunken, her eyes untrustworthy. The hairs on the back of my neck stand. She demands to know what has gone on all afternoon. My sister stumbles all over her words, dissolving into the child that she always has been during these times. High shrieks pierce the air from my mother’s mouth, reverberating through the hallway. The echoes summon my father from his room, who wipes his eyes and rub his messy hair with hands that are too clean to be a real man’s. I swallow hard, eyes averting to my sister’s, which never seem to rise from the floor.