*Content Warnings: Physical Violence or Abuse*

Solstice

by: April Yu

Thanksgiving came and went. There was no turkey that year, no stuffing or cider or those croutons from TV with garlic seeds that snapped white-hot between your teeth. We didn’t sit at home like a nice family.

“Where’s Daddy?” Henry asked me as the leaves fell crisp and crimson into the lawn.

“He’s away,” I said.

“He’s not coming back, is he?” Amelie asked. She had a way of saying things that grated on me, like every word was a fact.

“He’ll come back.” When I was younger and alone, I drew pictures on the mantle for each hour he was gone and covered every inch of plaster in blazing neon marker. He wasn’t happy when he returned, wasn’t happy at all. But I didn’t mind it because he was there.

The next day I refused pumpkin pie at the school cafeteria. No one swept the leaves off the lawn.

—

My father celebrated Thanksgiving once. He had Mommy clean dead rabbits and I brought out a tablecloth and we feasted like princes. Then the next year all he had strength for was bottles and bottles of clear liquid that he told me was water but didn’t really smell like it, and the dead rabbits faded into the edges of Mommy’s eyes, and then she was on the driveway telling me she was leaving.

“Mommy,” I said. For some reason the bottles at home scared me, and when I closed my eyes I didn’t see the lambs Mommy taught me about, just Daddy with his eyes scratched out into oozing translucent gashes. “Mommy, please.”

She was packing all her stuff into the car. Lipstick and teabags and things. “You can’t come with me.”

“I’ll help you.” She knew I was a helper; I helped all the time. With Daddy when he fell asleep, with the envelopes that flooded our mailbox. I was a good helper.

“No, you won’t.” She wouldn’t even look at me. “Stay here. Help your father. He needs it.”

“He hates it when I help him.”

She slammed the trunk closed and slid into the front door seat.

“Please, Mommy.” I was screaming then like some common animal, limbs thrashing, banging on the door. “Let me in!”

She closed her eyes. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“I’ll help you. I’ll help you.”

“He’ll kill me.”

“I need you! Don’t leave me!”

“Bye, baby,” she whispered, stepping on the gas.

“MOMMY!”

I watched her disappear into the woods, leaves falling everywhere, car fading into nothing as I wailed and wailed until I thought I might break in two on the empty driveway. Daddy watched me from the porch with his oozing translucent eyes.

—

Our father could be a kind man. Two years ago, he played with Henry in the backyard like he was a firstborn, making snow angels, hunting squirrels. Amelie gave him her doll and he wrote ANDY in huge block letters on her boot like the movie character. My stepmother massaged his neck whenever he had trouble moving around. I watched it all through my bedroom window. They looked like a nice family.

—

Two years later, I watched the leaves fall through the window. They didn’t make a sound.

“You were just lying to Henry, right?” Amelie asked.

“Don’t come into my room.”

“I know you were lying.”

“You’ll get yourself hurt,” I said, because she was standing in the doorway looking thin and papery, as if one slight wind might blow her away.

“I’m brave. I can handle it.”

“I wasn’t lying.” The hole between her teeth gaped as she spoke. “He always comes back. He wouldn’t just leave.”

“But Mom already…”

“Get out!” I slammed the door.

—

Ten years ago, when my stepmother first brought Amelie back from the hospital, frost glittered on the pavement. Amelie was a crying mass of fat, arms bunched, straining toward the silver sky.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

“Just hold her.”

“That’s okay.” I might drop her.

My stepmother sighed, irritation dripping in her throat. “Don’t you care about us at all?”

“What?”

“This family. We try our hardest for you. You could at least pretend to be happy.”

Words clogged in my throat. I held the fucking baby.

—

Days passed. Our lawn overflowed, crimson and gold and brown. I couldn’t ask the twins to rake without them asking questions and I couldn’t go outside without smelling blood.

Henry made the lunch sandwiches and Amelie signed the parent slips and I bought groceries with money I couldn’t repay.

“Do you think Daddy’s going to find Mommy?” Henry asked, eyes like shallow basins.

“Maybe.”

“Mommy said she wasn’t coming back.” Amelie looked down. “Even if Daddy begged.”

“He would never beg.” Not anyone. Not for anything.

—

When my stepmother left, the frozen air cracked open with her blood. My dad smashed her head into the closet. Or the cupboard. Or the mantle, smeared with my old drawings: neon cats, dogs, stick people in the park.

I don’t really remember because when I cleaned everything up after, I didn’t hear Henry’s cries, the explosion of the engine. I just scrubbed every surface of our three-room house with the orange walls and faded brown carpets until it smelled like vinegar and bleach. I used both of them, always, just in case one didn’t work.

—

Dying things always came in bright colors, crimson and orange and gold. He didn’t come back.

—

When I turned ten I followed my father into the woods hoping he would teach me to hunt. It was the only birthday gift I’d ever asked of him: to shoot a squirrel straight through the eye with its fur, blood, guts intact.

The rifle looked new when it wasn’t against Mommy’s head. He fitted my hand at the trigger. We waited in the cold spring frost. I could sense his stubbly chin, the sharp scent of aftershave, a peripheral of the sheen in his oily eyes. I trembled.

He slapped my hand. “Focus.”

When the gunshot sounded, when the squirrel fell, I thought he might love me.

—

The bread and cheese ran out. There were no more field trips. The bank caught up to us before I knew to run.

“We need Daddy.” Henry was crying again and I almost hated him for it. “Please call him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s too expensive.”

“It’s okay. Just this once. We need it,” Amelie said.

I wanted to tell her to shut up. She had no idea what she was talking about.

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

Henry began to wail, the sobs bursting out of his chest like a sputtering car engine. It cut me deeper than the winter wind.

“Go outside.”

Amelie stared at the floor, then dragged Henry outside. The front door slammed shut.

For the seventieth time, I fell to the floor and called our father, and for the seventieth time, I listened to it go to voicemail. I heard my voice break out of myself: Come back. We need you. Please, Daddy. Come back.

—

Every morning we went out to shoot, his hands over mine, squirrels evolved to rabbits evolved to beavers. When the sun got hot we cleaned the kills into glistening spoils. If I closed my eyes, every time he guided my arms to the target could have been an embrace.

When he finally stopped teaching me, I found him kissing a young woman at our doorstep. I watched him look almost happy as he forgot my mother. I watched how they shared a glass of wine and laughed like it had all been a cruel joke.

I ran. I ran until the sweat and wind drowned me. For a second the gun held itself in my hands. I threw it in the trees, gasped for air, and never went into the woods again.

—

Winter wind howled in through the trees, clawing the skin off my back until I was bloodless, gutless.

“Maybe he’s—”

“Shut up, Henry.” Amelie’s eyes glistened. “I told you. He isn’t coming back. They were both lying. He isn’t coming back!”

I watched my hand slap across her face, crimson blooming like a wildflower. The sound came after. Glasses shattering.

“Don’t you blame this on me.” I was trembling. Focus. “This isn’t my fault!”

Amelie’s eyes were wide, iridescent. “Then tell me the truth.”

“Don’t be so calm. Don’t act so righteous!”

She didn’t say anything, just breathed.

“He’s going to come back whether he likes it or not!”

Her cheek patterned purple.

Henry ran for my leg and began to cry.

—

The frost crept in through the window and up my bones until I couldn’t get up for days. Henry’s tears froze. We wouldn’t survive until Christmas dinner.

—

“What are you doing?”

“Get out of my room.”

“You’re leaving,” Amelie said.

“I’m trying to live.”

“You’re just going to leave us here?” She stood in the doorway, watching clothes bundle into my arms, her body a glass pane painted crimson. One touch and it might shatter. “You’re going to make me take care of Henry alone?”

“Don’t be selfish.”

If I could just get to the kitchen. If I could just get something to eat. I could disappear.

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how.”

I could disappear from this house that was more dead than alive. I could disappear and not smell blood on my hands every time I closed my eyes. I could disappear without a shadow to remember me by.

“You’ll learn.” Downstairs. Bread tucked into my pockets. “You’ll have to.”

“Please.”

I opened the door. Henry still slept in his room of ghosts. “He never wanted me anyway.”

“Please!” Glasses shattering. “I need you! Don’t leave me!”

The winter wind clawed my body away.

—

The ghosts still knew how to rise in my sleep. Little girls screaming. Little boys mauled in their sleep. A gun telling me it loved me. A car breaking my body open. The woods caged me into myself.

—

I need you. Don’t leave me. I had become my father. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how.

Was he brave for leaving us? Was he brave for not coming back? Could he have searched through the three pairs of shallow basin eyes and found what he had chased all his life?

—

I tasted the steel and smoke before I found it, picked it out of the spiraling snow. The gun held my hand like a childhood. By then I was so hungry my stomach could have clawed out of my body.

I could end this. I could tell myself it had been brave.

I need you. Don’t leave me.

—

When I turned back toward the house, I could have called it hunger or delirium or my body collapsing, but all I could think about was how my mother’s car had ribboned into the dark how my father had cut himself away like a puppet on a string, how Henry clung to hope like a home. How Amelie fractured herself with reality and still believed in something more.

—

The gun trembled in my hands. Bang. The gunshot sounded, a beaver fell, and the ghosts fell away like applause. I was going to survive.

I cleaned the kill and devoured it like a king. When dawn rose soft over the tree line, I closed my eyes and made a snow angel. It could have been Christmas Day.

 

 

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