Why She Drowned [1]

the eleventh gulp

• xi. •

HER FATHER'S NICKNAME FOR CLAIR WAS not a commonplace endearment, for he and Clair shared a sardonic sort of humour, had found "sweetheart" too sugary and "honey" too sickly. Ezra Montgomery never believed in recycled pet names, and Clair appreciated the sentiment to the fullest degree.

But around the time Clair was eight, when her mother was forced to give up her custody—just one phone by the neighbours for child neglect and then Clair's world was not confined to the smell of cigars and hard liquor drenching her clothes—her father did not say a word to her.

(This was more unnerving to Clair then being abandoned by her mother).

He was silent the entire way up to his small little loft ("65th Street, Unit 312, don't forget, Clair!") and as he sat the child down on a chair, looked her in the eye, and asked her to roll up the sleeves—one that seemed a little more burnt than done by an iron.

The eight-year-old gulped. She was young, but even she knew her father would not be pleased to see what he wanted to. "B-but—"

"Clair," Ezra said sternly, so firm that little argument could be made.

Clair bit her lip and fisted her hands for a moment, before slowly unwrapping the fabric around her arms. Her father remained still until she had finished rolling her left sleeve, and a few more minutes after she pulled up her right one, because before he was angry, but now he could not find any words to say at all.

Circular burns, bruises ringed and shades of blue and violet and red little kids should see in their cartoons and crayon drawings, not their bodies. Such abuse inflicted on his little girl that her body (his best art, his best creation) had been deformed to fit a hysterical fantasy (how could he have left his little girl there? how?).

Gently grasping Clair's wrists between his fingers, so big against her tiny ones, Clair's father wept for leaving a girl behind on her childhood. "Oh, my poor girl, come here." Clair, wet tears rolling down her cheeks from suppressed pain, hesitated no more to jump into his arms. She's upset she hadn't earlier.

"You're my little phoenix, aren't you?" her father shifted to accommodate her frame comfortably. "You've been burned and bruised and hurt, haven't you? Oh, my little phoenix, thank you so much for getting through this. You'll get through this. We'll start a new life. Shhh, don't cry, don't cry, pretty bird."

Stroking the crying girl's hair, he had whispered into her ear, "You've survived, and you know what you do best? You start a new life. Don't let your flames run out."

She had wept until her eyes were heavy with sleep, and awakes, in an unfamiliar bed, to the sound of her father speaking into the phone. She silently eavesdropped by the door, opening it a crack wider to listen to the words more clearly.

"My little girl is far stronger than anything you could put her through, Lola," Ezra seethed to his ex-wife, spitting out her name as it it was poisonous, "but you have ruined her. You have always been a poor excuse for a woman, but now you are an an insult to mothers. No! I won't listen to anything you say!" He laughed bitterly as the phone crackled. "The court won't even look at your trial. I know your crackhead self doesn't have enough money to pay for the shit you have around your house now, let alone a fancy lawyer that you can't sleep yourself with."

Ezra raged as if Clair had leant her fire (she does not know that his flames do come from her, from his love for her, from the fireplace that had finally warmed his cold daughter). "You are the reason she doesn't spread her wings, do you understand? You have made her fear that they will be clipped before you deem her tame. You're just another chain that's wrapped around her neck, stopping her from her freedom."

"My little phoenix will never see you again," Ezra finished, unused to the negative emotions swirling inside of him, but he was sick of being afraid. "And I can gladly say that I will ensure that she will learn how to fly again. Don't ever talk to us again." His thumb struck the hang-up button.

And how befitting, how appropriate, to be named after a bird of fire and flames, to relive through another tragedy and survive, start a new life with new burns in solace to her memories. One where Clair had blazed too hot for her poor father, too resplendent and too bright, that the universe took offence. Now, she was burnt out to the point where only darkness meets every corner (ashes of everyone she loved in its wake).

A phoenix who lost her fire (to fire), one who had lost her reason to fly, knew that the next time the flames consumed her, she would not be reborn again.

[ •∞• ]