Etchings of Her

Josie swung around to face the girl who had shoulder-checked her. One of her bandmates. Daisy, the keyboardist-and-wannabe-lead-vocalist. On a rare day like today where Josie was both well and willing to be in school, they had a class together. Fashion arts. Daisy didn’t bring much to the band other than a desire to “make it big” but she had merit in being the only one that still usually pretended she tolerated her.

“God, it wasn’t even on purpose. Sorry you’re such a testy bitch.”

“It was. Don’t act like. Like I’m stupid. I’m not.”

“Coulda fooled me, cross-eye.”

That was it. Josie pushed the other girl by the shoulders, then again in follow-up. Daisy caught a desk as she stumbled, making it screech an ugly scraping sound against the floor. One for touching her, one for insulting her, and now one more for the dig at her eye-

“Enough.” The teacher’s voice took her out of the moment. Hawkishly observant, even as class was ending and a throng of students crowded her desk or rushed for the door, she spotted them. That or Josie was a well-known enough troublemaker that teachers were always on the lookout.

“Josephine. I won’t tolerate that in my classroom. Go to the office and I'm calling your father.”

She was bored. The office was just another room full of kids she didn’t care about and adults who told her what to do. Arthur wasn’t really a father to her, even if he went through the motions like he was one. He only knew fatherhood secondhand; he didn’t understand it. Getting called out of school wouldn’t upset him, he wasn’t concerned about her future or her success. He just kept her around because he was hung up on a girl who died sixteen years ago. He needed her around so he could take care of her. He couldn’t stand to boss her around because of that. He had to tiptoe around his own hangups by punishing her in less obvious ways. Not that she wasn’t used to getting bossed around or pushed or insulted, but it wasn’t what she grew up with. She was used to quiet campaigns that tested her resolve. She was used to little things adding up. She was just now getting used to facing the music for fights she didn’t start. Daisy had a problem with her and made that clear, but since she was tricky about how she showed it, she didn’t face consequences. She knew it was on purpose. People went out of their way to antagonize her. That’s how it worked. They knew she’d see through whatever dumb guise they cloaked their attack in and give them what they had coming in return. It was only her refusal to play games about it that made her so prone to trouble. Why did everyone want her to be the bad guy?

She sat in the office until Arthur picked her up.

She was back at home after a tense, silent car ride. She sat down on her bed while her dad fussed with some new clunky object by her bedside. There used to be more, a lot more. The heartrate monitors and IV drips and out-of-place specialty equipment didn’t stick around after she made it clear she could put up with being grounded or not eating or whatever stupid shit Arthur thought would break her longer than he could stand doling it out. She wasn’t getting any more injections or taking any more pills or having any more scans done. The vindication she felt when nothing bad happened after she secretly quit one of her meds outweighed the horror that she didn’t need any of it. Smashing all the machines after was cathartic. It was cathartic the second and even the third time he replaced them, both for the statement it made and for the pressure it put on his wallet, but especially the destructive release itself. So was showing that those punishments wouldn’t phase her. Now anything he brought around were objects that didn’t really look medical. Clunky things that threatened to fill the space in the same way. Even after all this time, she wasn’t sure what they did or even what they were called. Things like that didn’t stick in her brain. They were unimportant in the same way it wasn’t necessary to know how electricity worked or why car exhaust smelled like that. They had a negligible impact on her life. What she did know was that they weren’t common. They were messy, ramshackle things that were dark wood and smoky glass rather than gray plastic and beeping monitors. Some of them did have wires and screens, but plenty didn’t. They looked more like art pieces than machines, and they probably were. Still, they'd get wrecked with the rest of the Arthur's bullshit he thought he could fill her room with. What Arthur had brought in was dark wood, intricately carved with rolling, feathering designs along its legs. It appeared almost like an end table, excepting a rectangular depression in the center where a metal plate covered in tiny symbols that almost looked like tally marks sat. A little mundane, all things considered, but she still wasn’t trusting it.

“If you leave that in here, I’m smashing it.”

Arthur winced, then adopted a less bothered demeanor.

“No, no, it’s not like that. I just knew you’ve been having a hard time with school and- “

“And what? You wanted to, like, study me about it? Screw off.” The tone of voice was a bit of a risk, but with this issue she had the upper hand. That was rare. She was going to enjoy it.

“No, it’s a gift. I’m trying to- “

“Trick me with a bad lie? Act like this isn’t another secret birthday spy camera? Sneak in some freaky machine to make me sick again? I’m not fucking stupid.”

“Listen. I understand that you don’t like me.” Arthur talked over Josephine’s scoff at the understatement. “I wanted to do something nice, because you’re my daughter and that’s what fathers do for their daughters. It doesn’t have to stay in your room, but I want you to look at it before you decide everything I touch is evil.”

Everything he touched was evil. Josie knew better than to trust anything Arthur said or did. She only ate school lunches and fast food since she caught him sprinkling something from a brown glass bottle into her food a few months back, relying on the large allowance he gave to try and buy her favor to cover her meals. Nothing he offered was just surface level. There was something else he was doing beyond giving her an odd piece of furniture.

“Really. Arthur. That’s a shitty peace offering. Are you. Like. I’m not going to be a part of your weird antique obsession. I don’t care. And I’m not touching that thing.”

“If you’re going to be ungrateful, be ungrateful. I expected that. If you don’t want the table, that’s fine. It’s not the fun part, anyways. Watch.”

Arthur pressed down on the metal panel. It depressed with a click, then raised up to about an inch above the surface of the wood once he took his hands off it. He gripped either side and lifted it out, revealing it to be a jewelry box with similar runic decorations along every surface. He flipped it open and held it out to Josie. When she didn’t take it, he reached a hand to grab her wrist. She knocked it away, then shoved him backward. The box dropped from his hand, flipping in midair before landing upside down, hitting the hardwood with a clang and a scrape. The contents were scattered, a few small pages of paper fluttering to the ground while some oblong glass object clacked and bounced like a runaway marble.

“Don’t fucking touch me.” Josie picked up the end table, now with a square hole in the top that made it much less useful as a surface and shoved it into Arthur. He caught it in both hands but did stumble back. She snarled at him, almost growling, and pushed him away with the table out through her doorway. She slammed the door in his face, making a loud clacking sound as it collided with the table. She heard stacatto footfalls and wood striking wood, likely his stumbling and dropping the antique. He didn’t protest and didn’t try to continue the conversation, leaving her silent in her bedroom.

She looked down at the metal box, upended on her floor. It left a mark on the wood where it landed, something that added to the tableau of scattered photographs around it. She knelt to look at one. They were pictures of Arthur with her mom. These were pictures she knew, ones Arthur usually kept for himself. She hadn’t ever met the woman, but she knew the photos well. They were from various points in time from when the two knew each other. One is her in a conservative cornflower blue polo at some festival, her voluminous brown hair screaming eighties and her posture screaming insecure about her figure. One was her in a ruffly white dress standing in front of a sports car, looking a bit older and thinner, but her deep brown eyes still being these rich pools of darkness behind her. There were many more that featured Arthur that Josie didn’t care to look at. She knew all these photos already; Arthur had shown her them time and time again and talked about her constantly. The first was from their first date to a fair. The second was from when she had not-so-subtly needled him into buying a car beyond his means. He explained that once upon a time he could have easily afforded it, but bad business decisions that led to him losing most of his wealth after meeting her. He described it like something temporary, like he would bounce back, but it was sixteen years after that picture was taken and he was still posturing as upper-middle class. Arthur and her mom barely knew each other four years before she died and the doctors had to cut Josie out of her, but she looked so different in the later pictures. It was obvious Arthur took a toll on her. Her hair was grayed and she looked weak and she had lost weight, all things that persisted throughout the many photos of her throughout her pregnancy. Something, though, always made Josie feel strange about the pictures. Even as her health visibly declined, she looked happier. Not contented happiness, but mischievous pride. Like things were going well while they fell apart. It made her uncomfortable, though mostly because it felt unnatural to see someone capable of looking happy while being near Arthur. He always talked about her like she was larger than life, but these photographs didn’t depict that. They misrepresented life by divorcing it from context and left Arthur to fill in the gaps with nostalgic drivel. It bulldozed the questions, the weirdness. She’d only ever heard her mother referred to as being wonderful, driven, intelligent, warm, but everything the pictures showed made her seem strange, opaque, unknowable, almost inhuman. Josie wouldn’t ever know what she had the capacity to do; she was pretty sure nobody alive knew.

She slipped the photos back into the box and started looking around for what else had fallen out. She found it where it had bounced and settled into a corner. It was a glass eye, like her own. Instead of the naturalistic yellow brown meant to mimic the one she was born with, though, it was the same deep brown throughout the whole thing. A glass droplet forming a deep pool of darkness in her hand.

April 8th, 2017. Sixteen years and one day after Oren Vaughan died.

Hell 5

Hell 4

Etchings of Her