Intercession

By Ashley Sargent

The carpet was rough under her knees as the almost-sixteen-year-old surreptitiously cleaned up the random piles of toys and veritable pieces of clutter dotting the living room. She could hear the calm, undulating voice of her grandmother reading a story to the younger children, one of which was asleep on her arm while another was nodding off, brown, long-lashed eyes fluttering open and close.

The teenager rose from the floor and slid into the seat next to the sleeping boy, pulling in the youngest child in the room, a towheaded boy of nine to her side, who immediately pulled away to return petulantly to his toys. A moment of repose was all the girl could muster, and then she was up-up and back to the incessant movement yet again. Another pause broke the pacing; the girl thought she heard a voice outside or perhaps a car door but there was nothing that followed.

“Why don’t you sit down?” spoke the grandmother, her kind eyes flickering outside and back in again, belying the absentminded worry resting in the depths. “I don’t want to fall asleep,” admitted the girl, shifting back and forth on coltish legs. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, thank you, dear,” came the quiet response. The girl moved across the room to the desk, where she perched on the edge of the chair and laid her hand beside the corded phone. Almost immediately, her fingers started tapping an irregular rhythm that correlated with the beginning of a pulse that had begun within the teenager’s head; a throbbing that started from the center of her brain, skirted down and around her petite ears, vibrated through the slightest tremble of her lower lip, shot down the length of her arm and coalesced into a steel, spiked mass in her stomach.

There rose a small murmur of sound from the couch and the girl looked up to see her grandmother and siblings all looking out toward the bank of windows that led outside. Then she saw it too, the car lights that slid unbidden through the glass and reflected off the opposite wall, announcing the arrival of a visitor. Already the girl was up and out and halfway to the door without even realizing she had moved. She felt her grandmother reach behind for the doorknob, but she was faster. When the door opened and revealed the grim face of her mother, she knew the worst had happened.

The keening noises were loud, and it took a moment for the girl to realize they were words, even longer to recognize the sounds were coming from her own mouth, shaping, “No, no, no,” over and over. Tears distorted her vision as her knees buckled and suddenly, she was lifted and clasped tightly by a tall man who was attempting words of comfort, words of intercession to the token God of the household.

Time slid and distorted and images, snapshots of loss and turmoil reveal themselves. The girl sees her mother sobbing, face split in fractured pieces and eyes gone, clutching a girl of ten, a boy of eleven, a boy of nine, while a toddler shrieks, legs straddling across a bulging, distended stomach. Nights slither into days and the girl finds herself perched on a hard pew, feeling absolutely nothing but cold as she watches a girl of nine gather her courage and read a lengthy list of words to a crowd of people. Again, time slides sideways, and the teenager finds herself cradling a tiny, wriggling bundle of female hair, skin, and nails, feeling twinges of happiness intermixed with sorrow and deeply rooted wrath.

Moments soon began to be defined by feelings, a strange, heady brew for this no more a girl, not yet a woman. Sweet, tender instances like the smell of her baby sister’s skin after a bath collude with intense anger and passion stemming from the introduction of a first love and inevitable first broken heart. There are dark moments still but now they are punctuated with happiness as well. Flashes of beauty appear as the girl-woman discovers life and ways to fill the deep concentric hole in her heart. Twice a year, the girl-woman stops, remembers, and falls apart.

It is enough.

Time keeps on and the days fly by. A picturesque scene of dark, boiling clouds, flickering candles and intense feelings cleaves into one snapshot of a woman in a white dress, hair in curls and a deep blush imprinted on her cheek. The woman clings to her grandfather’s arm as he tries unsuccessfully to hold back unwelcome yet exultant waterworks, steering her down a long pathway and into the waiting arms of a handsome, rakish man. The woman, transformed by utter bliss, glances around at everyone she has ever loved, save one and is at peace. She flashes back to a moment where she hands over tools to a dark-haired man with glasses and great hair, grease smudging his cheek and her hands.

“I miss you, Daddy,” whispers the little girl inside her.

Author Bio

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