Photography Anonymous

asserted. “We’ve gone through this over and over again.” “He’s your father, after all. I can’t just ditch him like that.” “I don’t even see him as my father,” said Abigail, wiggling her head in a quick vibration, “and you guys divorced like, over ten years ago...we’re barely related to him,” words were pouring onto her lips, “But you were there when he was detained for drink-driving, you were there after the juice dealers seized his house, you helped him find a basement, you got him jobs, you let him stay here—” “Abigail, listen,” Evelyn rose and approached her daughter, “whatever happened is between him and me. You are his daughter. You don’t get to decide how I deal with him,” Evelyn said earnestly. “I promise he won’t come back this time. I’ll leave him in the basement, for sure.” Abigail eyeballed Evelyn expressionlessly. “No. You can’t make such promises anymore.” Abigail declared. “As long as you guys are in contact you won’t get rid of him.” Evelyn went speechless for a moment, but the mother must say something. “Why are you so obsessed with this? I thought you wanted us to be together. I remember you blathering about how the other kids have both parents and how good their dads are.” “That’s because they have good dads! Not someone who doesn’t pay child support and never even offers to pick me up from school...and you see these bottles cluttering

Photography By Anonymous

everywhere, and we’re inhaling second-hand smoke literally every single day!” Abigail raised her voice. “I know he’s a jerk now but you can’t forget the old days.” “The old days?” Abigail sniggered lightly, “you mean the times he treated you like dirt or the times he almost killed us in drunken brawls?” “No, of course not,” Evelyn added hastily. “You don’t understand. You don’t know.” “I don’t need to,” Abigail retorted, “I just need to remind you that now it’s time to not consider the good deeds,” imperturbably, with a slight drawl. Evelyn paused, gazing at Abigail. “And you’re going to forget all the good deeds I’ve done for you when I get old?” She piped up, coolly. “What?” Abigail was completely thrown off by the question. Evelyn went on: “I never thought you could do something like this. I did not raise you like this, Abigail Bowen—how could you be so cruel? You are connected to him by blood, for Pete’s sake.” “That doesn’t mean anything! He’s incorrigible, and if you keep helping him you only hurt yourself. You can’t let him screw up your life any further!” “I’m not talking to you about this. I don’t talk to someone so cold-blooded.” Evelyn’s eyes flashed lighting, giving Abigail a hard stare. Swallowing her words with a pout, Abigail stomped out of the room until she reached the doorway and jerked a pair of boots out of the shoe rack. She clenched the shaft of the right boot with both hands and plunged her shin in it. Her foot got stuck in the middle and she thrusted even harder, wincing in aggravation. Behind the bedroom door, Evelyn started to go through her “making a fuss” routine just as after every spat. Each bitter remark she uttered rang in Abigail’s eardrums like buzzing wasps and threatened to sting. “Abby, is that you? Come out, I need to talk to you.” Joe’s voice came from outside the door. Abigail flung the boots onto the doormat and gasped for a minute. Then she turned the handle and thrust past Joe, leaving the door open. Mustering so much strength to trot forward, she had no energy left to make out what Joe was saying behind her. As she slid towards the apartment gate, her phone vibrated in her pocket. It was a message from Ella under “cant make it 2nite sry sweetie” on the right side of her screen, an “All right. What’s up, honey?” in a rounded corner rectangle. Ella was like a

small, transparent baby proofing corner guard on a rectangular table. *

She stopped at the gate, fronting the right side of the street, then it struck her that in the two years she had lived in this community, not once had she turned right at the gate. The left side seemed to hold access to everything: schools, grocery stores, and metro stations that would carry her to more hustle and bustle of the metropolis. Yet Joe was there now. He shut some sort of gate to the left. Above the ledge, yellow and white squares scattered between the bricks on the facade. Abigail lost track of the one that belonged to her. Down there, Joe was still scrolling on his phone. Abigail then heard a voice echoing in her head: right, right, right. As soon as she passed the entrance to the right side in spite of herself, she felt the thief picking up her bones and putting the fragments together into a kintsugi bowl. It’s a beautiful bowl, Abby had to admit, the glazes covered a network of cracks on it. It gleamed. Abby saw it floating further away to the vanishing point ahead. She scrambled forward to chase. The pour of distance rendered the bowl far-fetched, as though every step forward was an arduous leap up a steep hill. But all that was needed was chasing it, all was simple. Forward, she soon found the street deserted. The traffic noises subsided, and the tiny, little barbs in the sky would loosen up for a while: “stars to every wand’ring bark,” exactly the way the literature teacher told her. Solely for her sake, the sporadic lampposts lit up the space. The breeze would descend to breathe life in her, randomly rippling the tops of the trees while twining itself around her footloose body as she sprinted forward feverishly. Her hair, messed up by the sultry air, resembled pouring water. She could see a part of the bowl hovering there, right there, but it stayed at a certain distance even though she accelerated. Sinking into preoccupation, Abby didn’t notice the side stitch she got until she felt it piercing through her ribs so acutely that she had to stop to bend and wheeze for relief. Perhaps it was the passage of time that the sky had turned from a pitch-black canopy to a navy blue one like the bottom of an ocean trench. As the new arrival spread across the firmament, Abby could sense the air narrowing above her. She started to lose her breath when the canopy, pressing down as low as the tree trunks, wrapped water around her entire body the way scientists pickle a baby in the laboratory. Terrified, Abby huddled, holding her body tightly in her arms, only to learn the uselessness of buoyancy. For a minute, she thought maybe this was it, but the stubborn

urge to stay afloat was damn strong that it turned her into a torrent herself cutting through the water, till she bumped into a huge column of light that spiked through the body of water. She clung to it, wriggling to climb up, while the light shone brighter and brighter, so bright that she had to shut her eyes to avoid throbbing pain. With a great stroke, she flung herself forward and stretched out her arms to grab. She was sure she caught something, though she did not open her eyes: this romantic notion of capture was too unmistakably intense. So, she hooked her arms around it the way a little kid held a beloved stuffed toy in their peaceful slumbers. For a very long time, maybe a lifetime, she clasped the bowl in her arms. By and by, some faint, scuffling noise rose. She chose to neglect it and continued to do so even when it multiplied rapidly. Ultimately, it turned into a high, bawling voice, and Abby’s indulgence finally gave way to let consciousness invade her again. She regretted doing so the second after she lifted her lids. She recognized Evelyn’s distant voice too fast. She hastened to grasp her bowl. A hiss ensued, and the bulk of a girl’s figure fell near her eyes, and then that of a boy. She found her and Ella’s hands intertwined and her whole body chained up in drenched clothes and some gooey leaves. Abby strained to stick out her lips for them to acknowledge a “sh”, and shook her head imperceptibly. “Where are we?” She whispered. “We don’t know, but the police said this was the route to the school, from the right side of the road,” Nathan replied softly. Abby gently turned her head left, squinting at Evelyn, who was quarreling with the police about something, something about her. She dropped her lids. When she opened them again, to perceive, the fresh, weightless air after last night’s rain surged through her. “Never tried turning right before,” said she. “We neither,” said Ella. A few feet across the asphalt road were patches of Japanese ivy hanging on a red-brick wall. A pair of thin, decrepit columns sandwiching a transparent, yellowish-brown glass plate on the top stood in front. The plate bore an irregular hole on its bottom-left corner, and tiny, triangular pieces of glass clung to its periphery.It shone perfectly, filtered through the glass, resembling long, narrow scars smeared with iodine. They were the tangling lines on the kintsugi bowl that buckled in her blurry eyes. That’s one hell of a beautiful bowl, Abby couldn’t help praising it. Though it looked darker with the glass blocking its light, it still gleamed.