My father’s mother, who after leaving home at eighteen, he never spoke to again, had hands like barbed wire. Everything she touched bled. Every word she spoke designed to cleave. My father has often compared her to a shrike. They after all, share the same modus operandi of impaling their victims on thorns, to make picking the flesh off bones easier.
This was the kind of love my father was weaned on. One where you are pinned down, flayed open for all to see and sneer at. The kind of love when loving someone only means that you know exactly where to twist the knife. Despite his best efforts, my father inherited those hands, that boning knife tongue, which had only sharpened under the tutelage of a life lived on the margins.
It’s difficult when you love someone who can’t help but hurt you. You have to ask yourself how much harm is forgivable when you know that love and violence are synonymous in their mind. People get too caught up in the version of love that Hallmark and Hollywood try to sell you. Love isn’t always caring, isn’t always gentle and sweet. Love is a knife which cuts both ways. People forget that love, after all is what separates sacrifice from everyday butchery.
My father loved me.
…
I stare at the antlers above my bedroom door at night. Ever since I was old enough to hold a knife, the act of butchering the deer he brings home has always been a special bonding activity between us. I can still recall the weight of the knife we shared in my hands. His larger hand wrapped around mine, guiding it along the joints, the warmth of that red blossom spilling out over us. I never once stopped to think how the deer had felt in the last seconds, before that dark flash.
I can’t remember when he last brought home a deer for us. I do remember the last time I scrubbed blood off of his hunting knife. I don’t think about all the guns in his bedroom. I don’t think about how thin our conjoining wall is. “My father loves me,” I think to myself. “He would never kill me.”
…
He had been gone for two days. I had gone to the hunting cabin to search for him. I found someone else instead.
The tarp in my hands was just one of many covering that shallow hole. Inside cradled by earth were five bodies of young women. Each naked, each in various stages of decay. Two of the bodies near the bottom had mushrooms sprouting up from them, like some kind of macabre garden.
However, the topmost body is the one that struck me the most. She was lithe and willowy with dark straight hair wrapping scarf like around her torn neck. Her milk white eyes fixed upon the canopy. She was my mirror. A totem that my father had killed and discarded in place of sacrificing me.
It was dark before I was able to pick up my feet and move again. I walked back towards the house.
…
There is a place inside of you that you store every bad thing that ever happened to you. As time moves on so do you, and you begin to think that you’ve left that place behind you completely. But then one day you realise that you never left, you can’t. It’s still there, under the surface, buried inside you. Some places and people become tainted, stained by the memories that exist within.
The house is like that now. He came back later that night. He sat down at his place in the kitchen. He smiled at my reflection in the toaster and began to turn around to greet me when my knife opened his neck. My father died not looking at me, but the splattering of his blood marring my face and throat. A thousand little fingerprints marking me as his forever.
I have finally become my father’s reflection. Maybe that’s what he wanted all along, not a daughter nor a child, just a reflection of all his worst impulses, in a form he could finally love. In the end it doesn’t really matter what he wanted. Five girls are dead because of me.
My father loved me. I have to live with that.
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