Elisabeth Edley's father has three skeletons in his closet. One is aged taupe and named Olivia. The second has a dent in the skull and has been donned A.P. The third is a photograph of a blonde, dead girl.
~ A five part story that I wrote for my Cre...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Father had three skeletons in his closet.
One was aged taupe, with a crack in the spine that forced its mangled mess of bones to lean to the left. It was older than I was; sixteen, maybe seventeen years old. Father told me it once resided in his first classroom, when he taught human anatomy at a college in Kentucky. That had been before my mother left, before Rebecca and I had come to be. He called it Olivia, and when I asked him why he kept it, he just shook his head and laughed.
The second was newer, but in far worse condition. Father had had it when he taught physical science at my middle school. Those had been the worst days. Those had been the years that Momma left, the years that the kids teased me for having a father that talked too much and never ironed his clothes or tucked in his dress shirt. The skeleton's right arm was missing and there was a dent in the side of its skull. He named this one A.P., and when I asked him what it stood for, he shook his head and laughed once more.
The third and last skeleton Father kept in his closet wasn't a skeleton, but rather a photograph of a young girl. She had flaxen hair and choppy bangs, and whiskey colored eyes, and her family wrote Jessica on her gravestone. I never asked Father about this one.
