Spoiler! :
Her.
I wake to my own cries of despairing horror. Cold sweat flows from my skin and my tears are lying relentlessly on my face. Downstairs, I hear Mum shift position and then silence. I can’t help that she isn’t fazed by my screams. I scream almost every night because of the same interrupted nightmare.
I crawl off my bed, ripping my curtains apart, staring accusingly at the moon above. It is mid-spring and it is cold. The Canadian air is rarely consistent, I’ve noticed since moving last year. Bathed in moonlight, the flat plateau of dying grass stretches before me, leading the way to the small town that forces me to visit daily for school.
I peel off my tank top mercilessly, screwing it into a tight ball and throwing it to the clothes basket. I grab a black stretch top from my open chest of draws and pull it over me. By the time I climb back into the suspicious refuge of my bed, I can’t sleep.
It’s that night that I see him for the first time.
His skin is milky in the dulled light and the hollows where I assume his eyes hide, are darkened shadows. He wears a t-shirt, which I find strange for the current weather. His hair is a shock of brown, so dark that it takes all of my focus to register its true tone in the dim light. He is walking through tufts of grass mutely and it seems he’s staggering.
For a moment I consider him to be drunk, before remembering that this is not only four in the morning, but it is also Chetwynd, which says enough by itself.
It is a good three more barely-registered steps before he stumbles.
He falls very gracefully, I think, his arms flailing as if in slow motion, his legs dipping from beneath him.
I wait patiently for a whole second. No movement.
His body lies breathlessly on the coarse ground, his arms flung out beside him. He seems to be unconscious. Unconsciously waiting for something.
The moment the idea plants itself in my mind, it grows as primroses do on summer evenings back in Texas. I’m undoubtedly scared. The cold sweat shimmers down my spine again and I wonder briefly where this notorious audacity – or perhaps idiocy – has been inherited from.
The answer is deliberately painful.
My father, of course.
Whoever he was.
My fists clench at my sides in determination and without stopping to put on a jacket, I steal from my room and out the backdoor, terrified and unexplainably drawn. He’s closer than he had appeared from my bedroom window and even from where I stand, I can see that his arm is bleeding. I stop and stand where I am, petrified in the silence of the night, heavy clouds as my appraising audience.
Spoiler! :
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