Souls - XIV

I’m staring at the ceiling of a bedroom in my daughter’s home. There’s a lot about this situation I couldn’t see coming, but staring at the ceiling in my daughter’s home has to be the most surreal of the unpredictable. It was a nice home, very homestead-ish. Floral patterned wallpaper, skillets hanging on the wall in the kitchen, even an old fireplace that needed actual wood. It was a home untouched by time, let alone our apocalypse. 

I wondered if my dad had done this. He obviously had something to do with my daughter after she was carried away from me. He left my mother for what I assumed were selfish, mid-life crisis reasons, but maybe it was this. Maybe he didn’t agree with her, maybe he wanted to help me, to support me, but couldn’t actively. So he ran away from her, and the conflict, and helped the part of me she couldn’t reach; my child.

Or maybe he was an old man full of regret and found my child as an adult in some last-ditch effort at redemption, who really knows. I could play detective in the morning, right now I had more pressing matters. 

My boss wanted my child’s soul.

A knock on the bedroom door interrupts my thoughts. 

“Sir?”

My daughter doesn’t know I’m a female, let alone her mother.

“Yes?”

“May I enter?” Her voice seems to dance, tiptoeing through tone and register. It is music. 

“Sure.” 

The door opens and she steps in, her ankle length nightgown flowing with her. She is from another point in time, the way she dresses, walks, talks, all of it from another set of moments I had forgotten.

“Oh,” her face shows a restrained bit of shock as she looks to my chest, “I’m sorry, I thought you were…”

I look down, I had forgotten I had taken my restrictive bra off. My femininity free to show its curves under my shirt. 

“Oh, no. I’m sorry. I just try to hide it out there.”

She stands still for a moment, “Why?”

“Sorry?”

“Why do you hide it out there? Do you want to be a boy?”

Her innocence makes me want to explode. 

“Have you left this place?”

She shakes her head, “Not since all this happened. Grandpa said it was best I stay here. He brought supplies.”

I nod, “He was right. It’s a dangerous place out there, especially for women. That’s why I dress like this.”

She nods in a way that telegraphs that she wants me to believe she understands but I can tell she does not. She simply wants to move on.

“I know it’s late, I am so sorry for bothering you.”

“Not at all.”

“I just, I just wondered, how did you know Grandpa? Were you a friend?”

I try not to let tears escape, “We used to be. We used to be very close.”

“Did you know his family?”

I nod, the tears attempting a full stampede. 

“I only ask because, well because I’m alone now,” her tears begin to escape, my tears beg to join, “Grandpa was my last family. I was hoping you could take me to his family? I know it’s too much to ask, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t even have a car.”

I want to tell her right there, that she is with family, that I had named her Mary as they were stitching up the hole in my body she escaped from. Looking to her eyes, those wet, bloodshot eyes of grief I’m not sure I can. Not yet, she can’t take much more. 

“Sure.” That’s all I can force out of mouth without breaking down.

She nods, swallowing the sob that she is trying to suppress. “Thank you.”

I want to get up and squeeze her, to hug her until time stops but I can’t. If I move I will weep.

“I’ll make breakfast in the morning.”

“Thank you.” 

And with that, she’s gone; the bedroom door closed. My tears escape, gushing down my cheeks as I grab my phone.

I type out my response: “I can’t. I quit.”