"The Absence of Animus" by Kitty Hardy

She watches the horizon yield, its treeline bending under the mass of the setting sun. The last rays lick the bellies of clouds, tickling them pink. She snaps her feet together to stand at attention, just like her father taught her. She salutes the sun.

That done, she swivels east to watch the moon rise.

Her father taught her to salute the moon too, but it's never felt right. She waves instead, gently undulating her fingers.

In response, the swollen moon climbs the sky, bulging to ten times its normal size. A shadow falls across her face, red as spilled wine. She turns, rigid. Her mother's hand dangles toward her like a rope. She lets herself be pulled, casts one final glance over her shoulder at the blotted moon. Clouds obscure her next thought, what she really wanted to say.

“The moon is full again, mama.”

“Yes,” her mother's voice edges on exhaustion. She's tired of this vigil. “It happens every month, love.”

Why does the word love sound so melancholy in her mother's mouth?

——

The day she found out her father died dawned no different than any other day. She woke to the same bugles that woke her father in his barracks. He had bought her the clock for her third birthday, saying it connected them the way looking at the same sun and the moon connected people who lived far apart. She didn't have the heart to tell him she found the sound annoying.

She pictured him rising from his narrow cot and tucking his sheets and blanket tight around it. She followed the same motions with her plush comforter and ruffled sheets.

Snapping up her blinds and waving at the sun, she pictured her father's face reflected in its light, complete with whiskers that had crept onto his cheeks overnight.

She washed her face, brushed her teeth and went downstairs for breakfast: oatmeal with cream and brown sugar. She smelled its sweetness already. Her mouth watered, as it did every morning as she descended the stairs.

She found her mom in her usual chair, drinking coffee, opening the mail. Her mom smiled as Sue dropped into her seat, then resumed reading letters, twiddling a pencil over a half-filled crossword puzzle. The comics sat folded beside her bowl. Sue spooned oatmeal into her mouth, read the comics. The same old characters, up to the same old tricks.

——

Her mom stopped moving. A noteworthy occurrence, because of its rarity. She'd always fancied her mother's hands to be barn swallows held captive at the end of her long arms, such a fluttering array of movement they expressed. Dawn to dusk, they'd fuss, with book pages, buttons, envelopes, dishes, hairstyles, bedclothes, laundry, purse zippers, lists and pens. Yet, in this entombed moment, the swallows fell, stone dead, out of the sky.

The girl stopped eating, she looked up from her oatmeal as the pink drained from her mother's cheeks, the same way it drains from the clouds as the sun sets. The pink pooled at the base of her throat. One hand resurrected to clamp down around it, to keep it from draining away completely. The other hand held a letter. It fluttered like a moth against a lighted window.

In her mind, the girl switched off the light, setting the moth free. The letter fell to the table. “We regret to inform you...”

“Mommy, what's wrong?” Something felt very wrong. Every inch of her skin prickled, as though brushed by wind.

The hands stopped trembling, dropped to fold the letter in thirds and slam it closed.

“Nothing honey, just a letter from your father.”

——

She kept a picture of him in her locker at school, the corner wedged into the metal fold inside the door. He looked crisp and intelligent in his uniform, even through the soiled creases and fingerprints. She held the photo up and kissed it at the end of every school day. She told him about her grades and classes as though he had asked: How was school today, Suzy?

She searched his eyes for any advice he might have left behind for her. Was it hidden in the slope of his forehead? Or clenched in the curved angle of his jaw? Was it clasped in the crinkles beside his eyes?

Nothing there. He left her nothing.

His eyes wouldn't meet hers, always staring over her left shoulder, at a figure who wasn't there, or who was simply gone by the time she turned around.

The end of that school year, she took the picture down from her locker and pressed it between the pages of her anatomy textbook. That way, he'd have to stare at the musculature of a human thigh for all of eternity, and he'd leave her alone.

By now, her memory of him had faded. She forgot his face in the sun. She couldn't recall his voice as he told her to track the moon's phases, to understand the passing of time. She no longer woke to the sound of a trumpet. Instead, she heard a buzzing trill from her cell phone. She took the alarm clock down to the box in the basement, with his uniform folded inside, a bottle of his cologne: nearly gone, and the letters.

At sixteen, she convinced herself that her mother fabricated those letters, to protect her from the truth: that she was a bastard, a fatherless child. The picture was fake, and the uniform, a Salvation Army special. She saw them there all the time, belonging to someone's grandpa who'd died, or got carted off to a home, and his family had deposited all his junk at a thrift store.

The cologne made her wonder. Made her doubt her story. A memory of being tossed up into the bright sun, and caught in bracing hands, laughter, wafted when she inhaled from the bottle. She didn't believe it. She must have made it up.

She no longer saluted the sun, or waved to the moon.

——

The man said he liked her art, invited her back to his studio with some other artists, for wine and conversation.

“I'm not old enough to drink wine.”

“Nonsense.” He replied. “And besides, no one will tell your daddy on you.”

Her heart fluttered at the mention of her daddy. But how could this man know that no one could tell her daddy anything, because she didn't have one.

“Come on, Suzy Q.”

“My name is Sue.”

She shrugged the man's eyes off of her skin. They were too blue. They gave her the creeps. But when she looked at him sidelong, she noticed they focused not on her, but on her painting.

“That's good,” he told her. “Very good.”

She tossed him a smile and stepped away from the wall. She told herself: his eyes aren't really that blue.

“Will you tell me what it means, over drinks?” He winked and offered his arm, curved like a noose, for her to slip her hand through. She let herself be pulled, casting one final glance over her shoulder at the blotted moon.

She's not sure why, but whenever she tries to paint a new subject – a face or a chair or a bowl of fruit – it always turns into the moon. The moon with the red stain, an image etched into the back of her eyes, that she must stare at for all eternity.

——

Over the wooden door, under a harsh bulb, hangs a sign. It reads Imaginarium.

The room is octagonal, a round window in each wall, placed to drink in the light at every angle. The man must be a renowned artist, to afford all this. Does he rent or own? What does he paint? She sees no evidence of works in progress. A huge easel reclines in the middle of the room, a blank canvas leans against it. In this light, it reminds her of a praying mantis.

Eight people: one silver-haired woman, and seven men, stand around sipping wine. They laugh in unison. Though they speak in English, their conversation murmurs wordless and alien. There's nothing she can grasp on to. She clutches her wine glass tight against her chest and leans on the ladder, the only solid point in the too-round room. She feels wooden, jerking and awkward like a marionette. Blames it on the wine.

“Are you having fun?”

He materializes from the shadows behind the slanted ladder.

She smiles.

“Come on. I want to show you something.” He climbs the ladder, slips through the hole in the floor, dangles his arm down like a rope. She grabs his wrist, he clamps his hand around hers, drags her up. She is limp and pliable.

Up here, there are no windows. He flicks a light switch. Thousands of foil stars flicker silver light in shards. It's dark above, so she can't see how they have been suspended from the ceiling with fishing line. The illusion is that they float, shining like cat eyes in moonlight.

He stares at her profile, tracing the angles.

She can feel his eyes; they really aren't so blue.

——

The sun leaves the sight line of the last window, elongating the shadows of the assembled crowd. Their glassy eyes reflect the dying light. The praying mantis climbs the wall, its legs reaching for the rungs of the ladder. She pulls her legs up, tucks them underneath her body.

“I'd like to draw you.” She shakes her head, knowing with most men, that means, “naked.”

He's her daddy's age, the age he would have been.

“I thought you didn't have a daddy.”

She pulls her sketchbook from her purse and scratches at the paper with a dull pencil. With the eraser long since chewed off, she needs to be precise. Every time she glances through her curtain of hair at him, he makes a face. He makes her blush. A giggle escapes, which she quickly nips back down and bends to her work. Her mom said never to giggle in front of a man, that it makes them think you're ditzy, weak-minded.

He burps and slurps funny guttural sounds into the darkening attic. Hides his eyes behind broad hands, peers through spread fingers, then snaps them closed like eyelids. He makes lewd gestures when she turns away, hides his hands when she resumes her study of his face.

“Stop it.” She says. “Or you'll turn out all blurry.”

“Oh no, we wouldn't want that.” He says, with mock seriousness.

She ignores him, finishes shading. The image of his face now held behind her eyelids, he is no longer needed.

He doesn't like being ignored.

She darkens the pupils of his eyes, dilated in the low light. Captures the playful glimmer with a circle of pure white. When she meets his eyes again in real life, they're not playful anymore. What colour would capture that glow? Burnt orange, edged in blue, like a gas lamp on low?

She bends to erase his eyes, to change them. To make it right. She didn't look deep enough. She made a mistake and missed his true nature. But it's too late. The missing eraser scratches his eyes out.

He reaches for her as she flips the sketchbook over and holds it up to his face. He can't meet his own eyes. If he could, he'd see what he's become. She watches his face through the holes, where his eyes used to be. It's no use.

He wrenches the book from her hands and flings it to the room below. The pages flutter like doves habitually returning to a ruined dovecote, even though it no longer shelters them when the sky opens up.

He grabs for her thighs, hooks his fingers beneath the flesh, tugs at it to take some for his own. There isn't enough, she's so very small.

He's unsatisfied. He grabs at the ribbon that wraps her dress around her body.

She comes undone, unravelling. A cloud unveiling the moon.

As she plummets toward the horizon, he lunges for her so that when she falls against the earth, he falls on top of her.

A sickening crunch. A spray of blood paints the canvas perched on the easel. The crowd howls a chorus of hyena laughter that echoes in the rafters. How could they laugh at a time like this? She turns to look at them, finds she cannot. There's so much blood. It slips beneath her, clotting her movements, thickening and slipping as she tries to rise to her elbows.

The easel, no longer a praying mantis, has become her father.

“Come on, Suzy Q,” He smiles down at her. “I've missed you.”

“I don't believe in you.”

“Well, here I am. In the flesh.” He pats his chest. The gold buttons glimmer.

His uniform is crisp as the day he had his picture taken. The day he completed his training. His face in the sun, frozen in time.

“Do you believe in me now?”

She doesn't know.

“Let's go.” Her father's hand dangles toward her like a rope. She climbs. Up and away from this quickly forgotten place.

“I didn't mean to.” The man says. “I-I'm sorry. I just got carried away. Can you blame me?”

But she isn't there to hear his apology.

“She made me do it. She enticed me, then ignored me. You saw it?”

He turns to the jury, wine glasses, empty and lined up on the sill. The watching eyes had only been windows. The praying mantis, the girl's father, after all, only an easel holding a canvas.

And the girl?

Red paint speckles every surface of the room. It soaks into the wood grain.

He crumples then, into a ball. A white hot point of light sets him aflame, burning him up until only ash remains.