Daughter of Fire | I ✓ [ SAMPLE ]

chapter I

WHEN I WAS a little girl, my mother would braid my hair with the wild chrysanthemums we would find in the forest, while my father prepared turkey sandwiches for lunch. A few stray petals were nestled in my hair now, even though we had not been to the forest in eleven years. The chrysanthemums in my hair were tame; they grew uniformed and orderly in my mother's back garden. They swayed gently in the breeze and seemed to beckon, like they were asking to be freed. Sometimes I had half a mind to dig up the earth and throw them outside of our fence, into the street. I knew they would get trampled, but it did not seem to matter to me.

It would still be the same if I were one of the chrysanthemums. I would be free for only a moment; before the reality of life outside of the protection of a small house ran over me like a car tyre.

I stared out to the stream that ran past our house and the neighbour's, squinting at its murky waters in hopes of spotting a fish. I had found a golden koi fish the last time we had ever went upriver to the nature reserve, and I had named it Goldie —very creative.

There were no fish as far as I could see in the stream. My legs ached to leave this place; to run back to the river and just escape the loop that was my life. But routines are comfortable, my mother insisted. And she was right. They were extremely comfortable —dangerously comfortable.

I sighed and glanced up, just in time to catch the sight of a man holding a briefcase who was walking down the street. My heartbeat accelerated and I breathed shallowly —but I knew it was not him.

It could not be him.

My father had left long ago, but his tall form and black suit still flashed in my subconscious in fuzzy static images, like an old television with bad signal. It was as though he was trying to send me a message. Which I would be very open to receive, because it would establish some kind of connection between him and me. I missed being part of a three-person family, but my mother's attempts to appease the issue with another one of her boyfriends, did not put her down in my good books.

Phoebe Green did not like me talking about him —my father. I could not even ask about him. She tried her best to erase the proof of him from everywhere: there were no photographs, no postcards, no text messages, and certainly no birthday and Christmas presents. In her perfect world, he did not exist, and they had never met.