Uncle Mo’s Gastrointestinal Tract

Published by Kimberly Pauley

Copyright 2011 Kimberly Pauley

Smashwords Edition

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Uncle Mo’s Gastrointestinal Tract

Allie hated it when Uncle Mo came to visit. It wasn’t so much Uncle Mo himself, though he was a giant and slightly repugnant slug of a man with a bald head and creepily non-existent eyebrows. No, it was what happened to her family and their shabby house when their rich uncle came to visit.

The preparations would start as soon as her mother got the call that Uncle Mo was gracing them with his presence, ostensibly to check up on them and see how they were doing. He was her father’s only living relative and, since her father’s death a year ago in that freak accident with the pig, possibly their last hope. Andrew Strand had left behind a frazzled but genteel wife with no marketable skills, two very stupid dogs, three slightly stupid boys, four average to above-average girls, and over five figures worth of cold hard debt. The fortune he had started out with had been dribbled and drabbled away over the years until the only reminder of it was the imposing but gently decaying family house.

Allie was exactly the middle child in a family spaced evenly in two-year increments, the only thing that it could be said her father had planned with any success. Gloria was sixteen, astonishingly average, and pretty in such a way as to marry an accountant someday. She had already picked out the names of her 2.3 children. Ryan, the oldest boy, was sporty and determined to break every bone in his body at least once, preferably in the pursuit of a home run. He was followed by twelve-year old Rose, who was as simple as she was beautiful and did not seem to understand what she was doing grouped in amongst the rest of the Strand family.