Treat & Street: A Comedy of Terrors
an excerpt

“For crying out loud, just put it all down and go away! Nobody wants you here!” Garvin cried.
His siblings weren’t really doing much of anything, but each of them was holding something they had picked up off of a bookshelf or an end table somewhere. They had to know. There was no way that they could still be oblivious of how much that irritated him after all these years of messing with him.
As always, they each smugly turned toward him and quietly placed each object in entirely the wrong place, glancing slyly at each other, savoring the joke. There were certain to be at least four other misplaced objects.
“Are you okay, Garv?” Mattie asked, solicitously, “You look like something’s bothering you.”
Garvin said nothing.
“It’s his third quarter figures,” Blair said, ignoring Garvin altogether. “It’s like I’ve always said, ‘you can’t milk a dead horse.’”
John sniggered. There was a hesitant pause in the conversation.
“Right,” Mattie said. “On that note, Garv, we’ve been keeping an eye on your little domain since Dad entrusted it to you last spring.”
Garvin rocked forward onto the balls of his feet, his fists still clenched at his side. Mattie raised both hands defensively.
“Now, don’t be like that, Garv,” John said, “that’s not what he meant. Not quite. You know we’ve always got your back, little bro. We really just stopped by to see if there was anything we could do to help you out.”

Right. These three condescending pricks never did anything that wasn’t to their own benefit, and now the three of them were apparently working together. Great. Garvin knew what this would be about, though. If only his father would stop fucking around with his power games, they might actually have stood a chance of functioning as a family.
As it was, on the very day that Mattie was handed his Masters in Business Administration, Steven Hount had redistributed the company stock. Each of the kids had been in legal possession of five percentage interest in Hount Corp. International since the day they were born. It had been an empty gesture at the time, but when Steven Hount redistributed the stock, the games had begun.

“Yeah,” Garvin replied, “always ready to help me. I’m guessing that this is about my profit margin last quarter, then?”
“You don’t seem concerned, Garv. We all know that you didn’t make it, and you’ve only got seven percent left.”
“That’s none of your business, Mattie,” Garvin growled.
“It’s exactly our business, that’s the point,” Blair pointed out. “Losing half of your stock to Dad’s little system of rules has lost us the majority control. We’ve each still got our fourteen percent, but now Dad’s repossessed seven percent from you and he’s up to fifty one. By the rules, he’s in charge. He can do anything he wants regardless of all of the work that we’ve invested in our subsidiaries.”