I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
Her mother touches her and it helps scatter the fury that coils within her.
She does not understand her anger but she does not question it either.
She thinks maybe this is simply what it means to be alive.
To be alive is to ache and to hate and to spit and hiss and grimace.
To be alive is to rail against the things you hate only to watch them remain unmoved, unchanged, unfettered by your hate and your rage. She catches her clumsy tongue on her teeth again, drips blood from her chin and he just goes on looking at her.
He seems on the verge of saying something when her mother speaks up and he looks away from her. “Perfect,” he says, “like you.” The child wants to scream and kick and punish him for thinking that he can speak to her mother like that.
But her mother speaks to her and she peers up at her. Her grandfather. She does not know what any of this means and it only lends fuel to the fire of her anger. Bethlehem thinks of his own father and how he never had it in him to be proud of anything at all. He grits his teeth and he looks away. From the both of them. He shifts his focus into the murky darkness that surrounds them and he shakes his head.
Had he promised her that he’d leave or had she merely learned to expect it from him? His self-loathing swells to rival his daughter’s loathing of him and he swallows thickly. Her question sinks into the marrow of his bones and he wants to recoil, skirt out of its reach, but it makes him ache before he can stop it and he drags his gaze back to her face, shackles it to the soft green eyes staring back at him.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, plain. The heart twinges in the cavern of his chest when she turns to softly address their daughter, who fiercely shakes her head and mutters something he cannot hear into the plains of her mother’s shoulder.
What she says is this: “I want him to go.”
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
