Hand Rest
When I ask, “Who did this to you?” her eyes barely bloom, veiled as they are, in bleak weather, no different than a smear of confused crows.
When I start, “Honey—" she snaps back, “Fucking don’t call me that anymore.”
When I reach for her hand across the couch, it morphs into a limb of disparate, squirming tentacles swimming toward a seafloor.
When I say, “It would probably help to talk,” she crimps her teeth, chipped on top, like fake diamonds, into my forearm, gator-gripped.
When I say, “Shit! That hurts,” she doesn’t loosen her grip, even as a spool of our shared blood oozes onto the hand rest between us.
When I say, “If you can give me a name, or anything, anything at all, we can get to the bottom of this,” she squirms off her chair and melts in place like a warped pastiche portrait.
When I begin to consider all of the bad men who seem good, I get dizzy, jaundiced, and depressed, like God juggling six billion pathetic prayer requests.
When she releases, and curls in for a cuddle, the world, for once, smells antiseptic, sealed in a hood of safe cloud cover, sunflowers blooming somewhere.
When I hold and breathe, cathartic-slow, like a kite breaching Heaven, she says, “Dad, it was him. I love him, okay, don’t hurt him. But it was him.”
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