(Implicated TW: lowkey sa)

From an elementary stage of my life, I have been mothering a fifty-year-old man into complacence. Very little of him still exists in my mind, but vaguely, I remember hands splayed over my stomach like the claws on a palm frond, with the same burn and bite. There is a blurry, candid shot of his mouth, cruel and uncanny, and a still life portrait of his baby blue eyes peering into mine, reflecting a flush-cheeked little girl with mottled knees and honeysuckle curls. She flinches when a door is slammed and tries to imagine the creases in her father's knuckles as hedges of coral, if anything to placate the daunting rawness of them, and the drywall polka dot that patterns his skin. Her mouth hangs open on a word, and she learns that it must be a terrible thing to listen to her complain, if it fondles his trigger so easily.

So, to speak as a child felt to perform an autopsy on my character, find something about me that could conform from rot to something daddy and his short fuse blues would suffice to spare a glance. It felt like dressing a wound when he'd smile at me over the rim of a Bud Light, and ripping the stitches out when the barking would start again. I tried my best not to speak, but found silence was something he hated too, because his response was in filth, and in a descriptive sense, amorous. It is something I cannot speak, and something I cannot stomach. And it is the reason I revere hands, no matter if they're feeding.

He means more to me than anyone, not because I love him, not because I ache for him, but because I dread him. If there is a gauge in my heart, turn it to an angle that will make him hold me, and I will wear his arms around me like a garland. I am a venue for his cruelty and a witness to his sobriety, it flickers like the flame of a candle and resolves for somewhere in between. To get too close to my father is to get too close to the Sun.