Two Spaces

Prologue

"Mama, I won a trophy today!"

"That's nice, baby. Can you fetch your father a glass of water, please?"

8 pm. July 2nd, 1996.

The last time I saw my father alive.

My little sister, barely three, toddled behind me as I took long strides toward the kitchen, still wearing my powdery pink leotard, my pointe shoe ribbons tied together as I slung them over my shoulder. My bare feet hit the tile and a wave of nausea went through me at the thought of seeing my father struggle to survive another cold night. He leaves his window open too often, I thought to myself, as if that were the source of all his health problems. Not the heavy drinking, the eventual liver failure. He only had months to live, if that.

"Why does papa need water, C?"

"He's not feeling good, E. Go back to mama, it's past your bedtime."

She, at first, protested. Said she didn't want to leave me alone with our sickly father. He always was close to the brink of death with every breath he took. Every smile he gave was a grimace. His room was bare and dark, housing his future corpse. 

When he breathed, his chest rattled. When he spoke, he coughed up phlegm and blood. When he wept, he would struggle to breathe. Any one of his breaths could be his last. He could choke on the blood. He could die from the tears that streaked down his face every night from the pain he was in.

I told her to shut up and go back to mom. And that I wasn't asking again. 

She pouted. She cried and wailed about how "it wasn't fair" that I could go on to be without her. Her screams hurt my ears, but I was feeling so upset about the whole thing that I shooed her away despite her insistence. Called her a child. And she left, slinking off to mom downstairs where she waited with bated breath. Wondered if I would finally find my father's dead body in the bed, resting just how he meant to.

I filled up a red plastic cup halfway with water. He wouldn't drink all of it. He wouldn't be able to, anyway, his throat always bothered him too much to really be able to take all of it in. His stomach tore itself up long ago, and nothing would remain.

The water sloshed over my wrist as I tripped over the threshold of the kitchen doorway. Dammit.

Still, it wouldn't make much of a difference to him. Water was water, no matter the amount. Anything to soothe his drying mouth. He was like a fish out of water, quite literally, the way he drank it, and it always filled my heart to the brim of sickness and pity whenever I had the misfortune of watching him gulp it down and eventually puke it back up again. 

As I ascended the stairs of our disgustingly grandiose house, I heard a scuffle, coming from dad's wing of the second floor. Something was happening. Was dear old dad finally kicking the bucket? Could I finally be free of this waking nightmare I called my childhood, watching and waiting for the man who made me to finally keel over and die? 

I ran up the rest, skipping two or three steps with each foot planting on the surface below me, hardly making a sound. The water was the least of my worries right now, though it splashed onto the back of my hand as I booked it to dad's office. Call it morbid fascination if you want, but I wanted to see the body. Something in my feverish little child's mind made that the first thing I wanted, out of anything else in this whole world. I wanted to see him dead. I wanted to see his corpse, rotting above ground, as an eternal reminder of what he'd done to us--

I flung open the door. I could feel the embrace of my pointe shoes leaving my shoulder as they clattered to the ground beside me, but I couldn't care. What I saw before me was enough to live in my nightmares forever. 

A man stood with my father, who hadn't been able to move from bed in months. He had a particular grip on my dad's neck, choking the life out of him with an ease I've never seen before, holding my father above the bed so high his legs were contorted into a sickening kneel. His hand was ginormous. His grin was even larger, constructed from pure evil and joy from being able to cause so much hurt.

And he was wearing... this sort of mask...

I gasped, the cup falling from my hand and crumpling to the floor as my hands flew up to my mouth to muffle my eventual screams. I didn't want him to be murdered. I swear I didn't, God, I didn't want this to happen, I didn't, I didn't--

A hand fell on my shoulder, and I whirled around, my deep brown hair curling across my face as I tried to view who had been behind me all along. Who was watching me from behind the door the entire time. A hand forced its way around my face, grabbing my cheeks and making it impossible for me to cry out for help. 

"Hey, beauty. Let's let your dad work, yeah? I have some things to talk to you about."

I was six years old. And I never knew happiness since.