The Dining Table Thespian

Your arm is hurting like hell. The pungent fumes rising up from the volcano don't make it easier. You've been hanging on the cliff edge for what feels like forever now. You're feeling so weak that letting go seems a pleasurable act. The fear of falling down hundreds of feet into molten lava has lost it's dark sheen and seems like a cloudy & fluffy end.
You look up and you see him. Your dad. The man who's responsible for your being here, and is looking at you with empty eyes. Unyielding, unmoving and not reaching out an arm to help.
But still, with the last vestiges of energy, you speak "Pappa, ... I just can't do it. I'm done". Your voice chokes and falters towards the end as more acrid fumes rise up. Your eyes tear up - not sure if it's the burning, or the emotion.

The emotion is true, although the scene is marginally different. Replace the volcano with a half-eaten dinner plate, and fumes for that horrible food our cook prepares. Ok, it's not the arm that's hurting.. it's just my butt, from sitting at the table for so long. I was done with these vegetables even before they were planted in the ground, but this cold & heartless Dad seems to not care. For all his fancy degrees, he doesn't seem to have a vocabulary beyond 'No'. How many ways of saying 'No' are there? He 'No's them all.
Actually, I'm mostly done. I've carefully spread out the food so at no individual point is it more than 1 cm high. Then he says he wants the plate cleaned out. So, I created smaller clumps of food so some plate surface shows beneath. But it still fails his 'plate surface area percentage' metric.
I've even 'accidentally' dropped some food. Still, it's not enough. Doing a 'Shawshank Redemption' without raising suspicion requires some freedom of movement, and moving is hard when you're under observation: searchlight beams trained on you, and probably machine guns behind them ready to fire. To add to this, the chair I'm sitting on is rigged - it squeaks & groans when I try moving a little. Thankfully Dr. No doesn't get on the floor and count morsels.
You might have sniggered when I said  "search lights & guns". That's only half the picture. There's the vengeful watch dog. He sits almost next to me. He's big, growling, watching, and ever ready to get the aforementioned Captain Negativity's attention. He derives great pleasure from my pains. So, he's ready to get his revenge by calling out 'Pappaaa.. '.
At this point you're either googling 'talking dogs', or have surmised I'm talking about my big brother. His desire for revenge has a grain of validity, although grossly disproportionate. I might have told on him to the aforementioned authorities. I have also been generous in not telling on him for many days. But instead of gratitude, I get called a blackmailer. I called it exchanging favours, but this guy adores Sensei No No - being his son and all. So, the negativity is not at all surprising. I might have done other minor things - breaking his model airplane, irritating him continually, teasing him on everything he's embarrassed about, breaking his painfully constructed lego superstructures, etc. But that's what loving brothers do. He just doesn't get it.
Both of them look through my carefully constructed film of tears, and Father No says: "Finish it! You're a bag of bones already! Soon you'll get shipped to E****ia". Seriously, I've heard that for the past 5 years -and so have my play-buddies. I guess fathers memorize from shared cheat cards- given their rather limited vocabulary.  

Just then the doorbell rings. My despair turns to joy. Enters my dear Mother from the gym .. and sees me in my agony. I bring back the cliff and the volcano to my mind, and the tears I shed are enough to douse one.  "Let him be!" she says. "The food is cold already. He can't eat this anymore. Torturing him like this .. that food won't even digest". I don't bother to correct her distorted sense of the digestion process, but quietly start to slink away. "But he does this everyday!" retorts Captain Negativity, but he doesn't hold a candle to the brightness of Wonder Woman. That war was lost long before I was even born. These words are like those American Civil war reenactment battles - shooting blanks.

It's only 15 minutes later she yells about the amount of food I've spilled off the table, but I pretend to not hear. This isn't the first time, and she will never connect the dots, though; those cliff-hanger-imagery induced tears have the power to cloud all logic that moms can muster. One hug from me erases all irrelevant data and she's composing poems about me.

Wonder Woman is putty in my hands. Heh Heh Heh.