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.
It seemed to me that everyone that I had ever encountered found my name to be a burden. I couldn't blame them entirely.
Elisabeth was merely the ugly and envious counterpart to Elizabeth. There were princesses and queens and important women named Elizabeth, and the only people who I knew that shared my name were my mother and my grandmother.
The epithet I was awarded at birth would forever be an inconvenience to my peers, my teachers, and anyone else I would meet.
"Elisabeth."
"Oh, Elizabeth? Do you ever go by Lizzie?"
"No, Elisabeth. With an S."
"That's odd."
In all honesty, the misspelled, mispronounced, and terribly awkward instances that surrounded my name didn't really compare to how I felt whenever I was called upon. Elisabeth wasn't just a blend of sounds that I answered to, it held heaviness in the heart of it. I could have been named after any European royal, but instead, the sharp corners of Z were gently wound into an S, and the title made me my mother's daughter.
To many, it didn't mean anything, but to my father, and to me, it held a resentment. An unbearable bitterness. The day my mother left, was the same day that my father's world fell apart.
"Elisabeth," he said that morning, and although he didn't look up, I knew he had that look of depression that he always carried when he spoke my mother's name.
I looked up from my book to meet his head bent over his gradebook.
As if he knew he had succeeded in disrupting my reading, he demanded without looking up, "Start walking over to the high school, class starts in seven minutes."
I sighed and hopped down from the stool at the back of the classroom. As I gathered my school things, I took notice of the aging skeleton in the corner.
"What are you going to name this one Father?" I asked curiously.
Finally he looked up from his work and met my eyes with a grin. "Jessica."
I furrowed my eyebrows, but he didn't bother to address my questioning stare. He went back to his work and I rolled my eyes. Father never directly answered my questions.
I didn't waste my time to ask why he had chosen the name, I simply shrugged on my backpack and left the classroom.
The familiar potent scent of middle school breakfast invaded my senses as I marched through the halls. When I had left junior high, I had thought I would never see the place again. When I graduated eighth grade, Father had informed me that he would be going back to a college to become a professor once again. However, as time passed, he changed his mind, and stayed at the hellhole that was my middle school. Although I left for the high school, every early morning, I had to wander through the halls once again due to my father's teaching job.
