IN THE SERVICE OF HEAVEN

the wicked cupids pen a memoir | 02

{ a daughter's crooked memoir }

part two || a father

The things my mother never taught me

I learned from my father.

He never wanted to teach me—why educate a doll—

So I snuck into his room of dark oak behind the door he kept sealed.

The key was slipped between two books in the dusty library,

And the twist of it in the lock was a gunshot.

I didn't notice the wound screaming crimson onto my pale skin.

It grew up with me, fed by my father's words, his absence, his atheism,

His rage.

I hid inside his wardrobe and watched through the smoke

My father being happy around people I didn't know,

The kind of people who smelled the same as him, like the liquor

That burned every time it touched my skin, like the cigars

Whose smoke curled and twisted inside of me, breathing the stench of death

Through the pores of the skin my father called porcelain.

The only lesson he ever taught me was to watch and listen

And "Keep quiet, puppet," he used to say with his yellowed teeth,

Breath reeking of the poison he was made of.

His study was a sanctuary of my strangled dreams

Where I dipped careful fingers into the glasses he left on his table,

Where I breathed in the smell of the noose that was closing

Around his pale, old throat along with my mother's fingers.

I kept quiet as I grew, turning into a doll that nobody wanted

While he remained unchanged, still happy with the same people,

Still teaching the same old lesson.

And the poison that was my father poured into me as well, the death

That I've been nurturing inside of me, finally settled in the lungs

I only ever used for crying into the glasses I never thought I'd hold.

In this story, I was no starving queen with her pale crown,

In this story, I was my father's reflection in the dirty mirror

Of the lies he called youth. My teeth grew yellow, too,

Because the study that used to be a broken sanctuary became a tomb

Of my twisted sanity instead. And the wound that was still flaming

Across my scorched skin never stopped bleeding. My mother cried

When she attempted to sew it together with her trembling fingers,

But the skin kept ripping with each glass, each cloud of smoke.

Was there magic in the click of the lock to my father's study,

All those years ago?

Or was the gunshot that now hides in the clinking of bottles

Telling a story my father didn't care to tell and my mother was too afraid to?

My father's last glass was filled with the blood my veins spilled

Across the perfect floorboards of his study that became the grave of my youth.

I often wondered how he felt, seeing all that death, as he walked in.

I ravaged his holy church with the hellfire he set to burn inside of me.

I sprawled myself on his altar, clothed in the colors of the gash in my heart

That he'd carved out while my mother wasn't watching.

And all that, all the years I spent drowning, trying to be his perfect little doll,

They came at the cost of the soul that hid in that wardrobe.

A lost and broken puppet that he cast aside

When he filled his glass with the screaming crimson

And tightened that same old noose as I made space for two

In the grave they lowered us into.

[ flaming crimson ] - a gap in the universe she'd grown into with bonfires on its edges and flowing space matter the color of dawn

[ his holy church ] - a sanctuary of drunken men and high women stuffed inside a room of old oak in which a shadow quietly watches

[ was there magic in the click of the lock? ] - yes (.)

[ father ] - you will never know