Page 2 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“Three days,” I observed quietly. “Is that a new record for you?”
He turned slowly. His eyes were foggy, glazed by the liquor, and he strained to pull his focus onto me. “What?”
“It’s been three days since you last threatened me,” I clarified, my cheeks swelling with a vitriolic grin. “If you don’t count when I was a baby—which I don’t, because I can’t remember any of it—or the months you spend on the run, I’m sure this is some kind of record.”
The air between us trembled and pulled taut.
He clenched his fists, eyeballs swimming in his head, and spent a moment searching for something…
Alas, all he could come up with was more anger and irritation. Shoulders twitching, he shook the beer bottle in his hand and screwed his nose up at me.
“Shut up,” he spat, droplets of saliva spraying from his mouth.
Silently, I lifted my middle finger in the air between us.
The atmosphere cracked.
“Shut up!” he roared again. The bottle went flying and exploded against the wall behind me in a spray of beer and glass that tickled the back of my neck. “Shut up! Shut thefuckup!”
The words assaulted me like a punch in the nose, but I latched on to the abuse like a starving beast and greedily devoured the ugly expression on his face. My own heated to near the point of delirium as blood flooded to my cheeks and filled my head—a warmth, a sensation I hadn’t felt in weeks.
Something.I’m feelingsomething—
“Hit me!” I screamed back at him. My voice box felt like it had caught on fire, positively quivering in the wake of the falsetto, but it was too late for me to stop. “Go ahead anddoit!” I shrieked. “Just get it over with! Because if I have to spendonemoremomentin this house, I am going to fuckingkillyou, you asshole!”
He took a thunderous step towards me. “Aura—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish. I couldn’t take it any longer. I could not be in that house with him, sleeping with one eye open every night, chewing nervous holes through my blankets every time I heard a creak from one of the floorboards down the hall. I couldn’t do it. Iwouldn’t.
Heaving an enormous breath that stretched my lungs to bursting point, I released the most blood-curdling scream I could muster and closed my eyelids against the darkness that splintered across the room in flashes of nightmares and artificial lights. There was the sound of my terror and loathing as Ispent every last scrap of my voice at once in that single scream, followed by a symphony of what sounded like bullets raining down on me—and then there was nothing.
Complete and utter silence.
Part of me prayed that someone had heard me and intervened, but I couldn’t sense the presence of anyone else in the room. It was only me and the monsters…
Or perhaps it was only monsters.
Before I opened my eyes, I tried to gather enough saliva to force down my swollen throat, but my vocal cords were paralysed and my stomach was in knots. I felt the chilling heat of my scream settling in my chest, curled up between my collarbones like a dragon. When I tried to take a breath of air in through my nose, I was hit with the stench of exposed flesh and burning wood. I doubled over and nearly choked as a mouthful of my own blood came hurtling out at an alarming speed, and my eyelids were ripped back on instinct.
All the lights were out.
The whole room would have been in complete darkness had there not been some kind of fire glowing in the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink and a second blaze sparking against the doorframe behind my father’s body.
Limply, he lay on the linoleum with his arms and legs spread out, bent in unshapely forms. Everything around him was in jagged pieces—cutlery, crockery, wooden furniture, and chunks of plaster. I was seeing all of it in black and white. Even the dark blood pooling beneath his head, which was turned away from mine.
My stomach churned around a knot of unease once more, and I dropped to my knees as I retched and spat another mouthful of metallic-tasting fluid onto the ground. Seconds later, my head followed and turned the whole world off with a skull-splitting slam.
I slept for a long time.
I almost thought I’d never wake up.
I almost hoped I wouldn’t.
When the white-haired woman appeared in the doorway, I must have been dreaming.
And when I did eventually wake up, it was daylight, and the world was colourful again. I was in my bedroom, tucked under the covers. The fires were all out. The light globes were working. The parts of our kitchen that had appeared to be shattered and broken were whole. My mother had fresh, clean sheets.
And my father was gone.
