Page 5 of Iron Blade

My father coughed into his white linen napkin. He cleared his throat with a terrible, disgusting, phlegmy sound, then bunched the napkin in his hand and pointed a finger at me.

“I won’t live forever.” I wasn’t sure why that was an accusation against me, but apparently it was. “You need to get yourself straight, before our women are as broken as your mum was.” Aoibheann flinched as my father looked at her. “If I hadn’t let your mum have so much freedom, she’d still be alive. If I had made her more aware of the danger, or forced her to care about…”

He suddenly stopped speaking. It wasn’t because every word twisted at my heart, like he had stuck a noose around the organ and squeezed it to its breaking point. He’d show me no such mercy. Not after my mother died. No, I think he stopped talking because his heart was getting squeezed.

He was feeling the pain of her loss the same as me.

The woman beside him was just a sad, pathetic approximation of what my mum was.

Aoibheann was never, and will never be, anything like Isla Green.

“I’ve made you soft,” my father said, low and under his breath.

He looked at the paintings - my paintings - on the walls, and smirked. Without a word, he reached for the candelabra, and plucked a single white candle from the arrangement.

Malinda’s eyes narrowed. We watched as the old man got up and walked to the nearest painting.

Aoibheann opened her mouth in horror at what he was about to do.

Both women’s eyes darted to me, and I lifted a hand to calm them.

I felt nothing. I was numb to him now.

Not even my heart rate changed as he took the candle to the bottom of the canvas - the one of my mother, sitting on a green, velvet chesterfield armchair. She held a rose and a copy of Beauty and the Beast on her lap, her hands elegantly caressing it with love.

“You’re soft, just like your mother.” With a frightening amount of purpose, he placed the candle at the lowest part of the canvas. It took a while for it to light to his satisfaction. For several long, slow, agonizing minutes he placed the flame where my mother’s hands were crossed over her beloved book, until it charred. The smell of burnt canvas and oil paint stank up the room, tickling my nose. But I knew I could not sneeze, or cough. That would be another weakness in his eyes.

Malinda looked at me in horror, then back to the painting. Was she about to weep?

Why was I surrounded by crying women all the time?

I stared at her, and when she finally made eye contact, I shook my head. It was a small tilt, that begged her not to show interest in my father’s destruction.

It was better to pretend that none of this was happening. That this was an ordinary dinner occurrence – just the run-of-the-mill paternal vandalism.

I grabbed the drink in front of me - the Redbreast 21. My father’s choice. Not mine.

I took a sip and tried not to wince at the burn.

The burning painting had taken hundreds of hours. I had poured over sketches and photographs of my mother. I studied the light and spent days tilting my sketch book in many directions until I had figured out how I would do it. Then another hundred hours so that I could paint the freckles over her nose just right. I used a single haired brush to paint on the small flickers of light in her gold and auburn locks until it was perfect.

Now, it would take a hundred seconds for my father to destroy it.

I didn’t look. Not even when ash floated in the air around me, speckling the white tablecloth like a malevolent, black snow.

I wasn’t worried about everything catching fire. Not really. If it got out of control, a guard would come in and put it out with an extinguisher.

It was best for me to just block it out.

My father took his seat, replaced the candle, and speared the pork on his plate.

He looked at me, searching for a reaction to the destruction of my final homage to my mother.

We ate in silence, the high-pitched scraping of our forks against the porcelain was the only sound until my father silently came to his feet and retired to his office for the evening.

“I’m so sorry, Eoghan,” Aoibheann whispered, her strange little voice adding irritation to injury.

“It’s nothing.” I got up, my chair scraping as I took one large gulp of the whiskey, feeling the burn in my throat.

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