playdate | fiction | a short story

I smell like my father’s cigarettes. What he holds between his fingers, smells like me. Sometimes, he lets me have a sip, I don’t like the taste, but he says it makes him feel better. I pretend to like it and I pretend to like him, too. There is a drawer where he keeps worn dresses that belong to me, he keeps them the way I left them. And he puts them on me and he loves what he sees. His eyes look very different then. As if I’m not there, as if he’s imagining me. He makes me do my homework.

Sometimes, I hear my little brother cry in the next room. I’m alone, but I know that he’s not. I’m supposed to watch television. It’s too loud as well. I don’t have the remote. I would know, even if the house were silent, if my brother were silent. I know that after tonight, I’m not allowed to change his diapers for a while. My father takes care of that. I know that he’ll only come to say good night to me tonight.

The photographs my father takes of my brother and me are not in a family photo album. I never see them. I don’t know how I look. I don’t remember. He strokes my head. I hide underneath his desk. He says that he’s telling all his friends about me, about us. He moves closer with his chair, I have less space when he adds that one of them has two daughters and that they would come to visit soon. He takes a picture of me and I disappear. I should look the way he makes me feel, but I probably don’t and he reminds me to smile.

They’re twins and I know my father. I don’t want them to come in. Their father has the same eyes as mine. He feels the same. I don’t want to leave my father’s side. I think I’ve stopped existing. The father of the twins reaches out his hand to me and wants me to show him my room. My brother is asleep. The twins look at me. I don’t want to look like them. Feel like them. They disgust me. My father sits down on the couch. He pats his leg several times and one of the sisters sits on his lap like a trained puppy. My father is impressed and compliments their parent on her behaviour. I run towards her and throw her off him.

Both fathers chuckle. I look my father in the eye when he tells me to go to my room and behave. The twins stare at me and wait for me to leave. I rush to my room planning to pack my backpack, grab my brother and run away. But I realise that I’m not alone, there’s a giant hand on my door and it’s not my father’s. He says that he has seen pictures of me, that my father told him all about me. I don’t want him in my room, near me, near my brother. I understand that my father won’t help me. I understand that this man is here for a reason. I don’t want to be me. I wish I could just leave my body here.

I stopped calling for my mother a long time ago because she is dead. He asks me whether my father raised me well. My brother’s breathing is steady. I know what to do, but I don’t do it. He’s not my father. I’m thinking about the twins. They don’t deserve my father. I don’t understand how this man has a key to my room. But he locks the door because of me. He sits on my bed and he won’t leave. He tells me that he has always wanted kids and that he feels so lucky to have two daughters. His body changes. I look at his ring.

He whispers that my father is having so much fun already, that he can hear it, that he raised his daughters very well. He repeats that he was looking forward to meeting me because my father had told him what a special girl I am, that I have super powers. I blush and I’m jealous because I can hear what he is talking about in the living room. Everything sounds familiar. He smiles at me and I want to hurt my father for hurting me. I want the twins to feel the same way, to know that I can hurt them just as much as they’re hurting me.

I walk towards him and his body changes. I need to show him what I can do. I know. My father taught me. He always reassures me that I remind him of my mother, that she would be so proud of me and then, missing her, hurts less. I do everything in a quiet way because I don’t want my brother to wake up. I’m still not allowed to change his diapers, so he needs his sleep. That’s the only thing that belongs to him. Where he is alone. Where nobody watches him. Except for our mother.

It is dark outside when the father of the twins unlocks my room. I can barely move. I can tell that my brother has been pretending to be asleep. I was quiet. I can hear my father’s normal voice again, he sounds happy, he is loud, they both are, not a word out of the sisters’ mouths. I don’t know their names and they don’t know mine. The house smells of cigarettes and what they have taken from us, it sticks, it never goes away. The men exchange pleasantries, I can’t listen, I do not exist. I just stare at my brother’s turned back, hyperventilating, mute. I cannot move.

My brokenness is burst by an immediate cracked sound, like rocket fire across the edges of thick paper, but louder, harder, sand, crust and rocks. I run to my window. And I hear one of the unheard sister’s voices, shrieking, and I can’t find the other one, the one that I pushed away hours before, I look and look until I see what is left of her and she looks like me, she looks the way I feel and I envy her because she doesn’t have a pulse anymore. The car stands still. The world moves past our house. The smoke flees through our front door. Our fathers pretend to be fathers. And I grab my brother’s hand in a hurry because I’ve grown old.