Like a dog guarding the small square of his front lawn, my father stalked and panted around the four corners of our kitchen. Rottweiler? Bulldog? Whatever he was, he’d caught my scent, and I couldn’t shake him. His breath—strong, moldering—was hot on my face.

“This gravy train you and your mom and brother are on isn’t going to last forever, Rachael.”

By gravy train, he meant a roof over my head, food in my stomach, clothes on my back. All things I owed him for; things he could take away.

My pen scratched across paper filling evenly spaced lines in a college application.

His fist slammed on the table. “Did you hear me, girl?”

I stopped writing. His eyes were yellow where they should have been white.

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

With two hands, he lifted the table and released: the wooden legs slammed onto green linoleum floor. My application and gel pen slinked across the tabletop, the shuffling sound of paper falling through air. I shifted in my seat.

My father took up an offensive position, hands on hips, blocking my exit. His words foamed out so fast they all mushed together.

The topics were as paranoid and tangential as his current mood. Stomach-turning threats of abandoning me to poverty dissolved into rabid animal attack defense tips (hit them and run) and how our family would stay safe during the Y2K fallout (lock-in at our Methodist church).

The minute hand ticktocked around the plastic clock face, stained brown from my mother’s cigarette smoke. When he took a pee break, I made my escape.

Later, while I lay reading on the top bunk of my loft bed, he rushed in.

“You’re hiding him!”

“Who?” I asked, putting down my book. I peered over my bedframe to assess how close he was. Was there room to slip down the ladder and into the bathroom? Lock the door and wait him out.

“The devil,” he said. He gestured to my blacklight reflective poster. On it was a sizable, fluorescently colored dragon—I’d bought it from Spencer’s Gifts with the money I’d earned as a cashier at a fast-food restaurant.

I didn’t question his accusation: that Satan had taken root in my bedroom decor.

His arms, like flags cut loose from their cords, spiked out haphazardly—toward the glow-in-the-dark footprints on my ceiling, my purple light, a flower power bumper sticker.

“All this is the devil.” He shook my mushroom keychain in my face. “I can hear him speaking through this.”

The tchotchke was decorated with psychedelic swirls of color. I’d bought it at Claire’s on sale for $1.29. At the time, I didn’t expect my father would come to believe it contained the devil, but maybe I should have.

He slammed his hand and the loft bed convulsed under me. I gripped the side railing to prevent a six-foot drop.

***

Chris, both my manager at the fast-food restaurant and my boyfriend, lived in a townhouse that smelled like grass and spunk. He wore a Marine Corps T-shirt and blue boxers and, after greeting me at the door, walked his tall frame over to his two-burner stovetop. At his kitchen table, I wrote and rewrote college admission essays in a spiral Five Star notebook. Smoke filled up the room like fog rolling in over the Chesapeake Bay. Our dinner, which had come out of a bag, was burning.

After eating, we spooned on his mildewy couch. I waited until I got sleepy and drove home.

My father was at his outside post, shotgun tapping against his hand. Paint peeled from the porch ceiling in loose, hanging strips.

I turned off the car, pushed the stick in park, and took a moment before getting out. My throat was thick, tongue dry.

He rose up like a hound on his hind legs, unsteady. The high-contrast lighting shadowed his nose, giving it the appearance of a snout. Though it was a chill night, I could feel the heat pouring off his body as I squeezed by.

“You have no respect for boundaries. Either come home on time or don’t come home at all.”

“Okay,” I said. My eyes flicked to the neighbor’s house. Was it possible they were awake?

“I mean it.” He loped after me into the house. “If you come home past curfew again, you can’t live here anymore.”

The front door slammed shut behind me. I turned around and faced him.

“If you’re not home by ten p.m., then pack your shit and get the fuck out of my house.”

His words frothed onto my face. I didn’t wipe it off.

“Fine,” I said. My hands flicked to my throat. I remembered his hands clamped there, crushing my windpipe, the room going dark.

I remembered how my mother’s eyes had snapped to the stuffing coming out of our living room couch. How I had tried to catch them and how she wouldn’t lift her head. She’d believed him when he said he wouldn’t do it again. Or maybe she believed that he’d only do it when I deserved it.

***

A week passed, and I again found myself at Chris’s sticky table. Time was up, college applications were due. Squinting in the low light of the television set, I read:

Discuss a realization that sparked a new understanding of yourself or others.

I’d realized that, if I landed one good knee, my father would release his grip on my throat. That the air, when I could breathe again, was bitter in my mouth.

My crabbed penmanship smeared my hand dark where it dragged along the paper. The text ran together. I cradled my head, balled the paper, started again on a blank sheet. I scratched out made-up paragraphs that described someone else’s goals, someone else’s growth, someone else’s family.

I wanted to be someone: a lobbyist, a graphic design artist, a poet. But, mostly, I wanted to get away from my father’s house. As far away as a college degree could take me.

Evening made its stuffy way into the kitchen, turning everything a shade of dun. If I arrived home late, he’d be waiting, but I felt so heavy. Standing, facing him—it was too much. Instead, I kept writing.

Football game noises shifted to saccharine commercial jingles. Chris padded over to me.

He wrapped his arms around my shoulders, hung on. “If you don’t get home soon, I’m worried it’s going to be bad for you.”

“You’re right,” I said. After a final once-over, I stuffed the applications into large, manila envelopes. It would have to be good enough.

The drive home was thick with stillness. Winter constellations winked at me through my windshield. I could almost reach out and touch the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters. Their formation wobbled in my rearview mirror as I drove. I wished I were a sailor so their mother, Pleione, would protect me.

It was past one a.m. when I arrived. Dread was dead weight in my belly. But there was no menacing father tapping a firearm against the porch chair’s plastic arm. Still, I knew what I had to do.

In the dark kitchen, I pulled out a handful of black trash bags and took the steps to my bedroom two at a time. This was happening to someone else; I was somewhere else.

In my bedroom, lights off, I found things by touch. Books I couldn’t live without, shoes, my cold-weather coat, journals. It all went into flexi-stretch bags.

“You’re late.” My father was standing in the hallway, shirtless, bloated. His eyes drilled holes. “You know what that means.”

“I know, I’m leaving.” Something like fear or hope kicked against my sternum.

“Don’t come back crying to me after you’ve been raped out on the street.”

“I won’t,” I said. I picked up the bags, bulky with the items I would bring with me into adulthood.

“You don’t get to keep the car.” His voice was venom. “I’ll report it stolen if you don’t get your little boyfriend to drop it off tomorrow.”

I paused on the stairwell. “How will I get to school?” I drove to a magnate school outside of my local jurisdiction.

“I don’t care.”

I’d figure it out somehow; I’d finish my senior year.

Down the croaky steps, I whooshed around a corner toward the front entryway, bags like ravens flapping after me.

At the turnoff to my parents’ room, I imagined my mom sleeping under a pile of blankets. A primal feeling welled up. For a moment, I considered going to her—pictured myself four years old, curled like a comma in the curve of her body.

He paced behind me. “Get the fuck out.” A snarl.

Chin tucked, I made a beeline for the front door.

Outside, the December air was sharp against my cheeks. Moonlight lit the driveway rust gray.

My old car’s engine flared. With a snap, I locked the doors, put it in drive. The small world of my father’s house fuzzed out.

***

An hour later, on Chris’s couch, lemon vodka shots burned my esophagus. I licked the rim, crunched white sugar granules. My wisdom teeth were coming in and their crowding caused every bite to reverberate through my gums. I tipped the glass and caught sight of her.

Hello, there.

Her bulging red eyes stared up at me. Drosophila melanogaster. Fruit fly. Crumpled, cellophane wings, transparent thorax, and swollen abdomen the size of a pinhead. She was plastered to the bottom of my shot glass.

Chris’s voice traveled from the kitchen. “I think you’ve had enough, lightweight.”

I didn’t respond. He appeared over the ridge of the couch like a caravan on the horizon.

“No more, okay?” he said.

I hugged the empty shot glass against my chest while my winged companion disintegrated. “Okay.”

Hers was an ironic death—suffocation by something that should have nourished. For a moment, I considered changing places with her.

The ceiling fan creaked and wound around and around. My eyes followed the cyclical pattern until, unfocused, it became a whirling carousel and carried me off. I was a balloon that had lost its string, had lost the child holding it.

-Rachael Quisel

Originally from Northern Virginia, Rachael lived in New York City for a number of years before moving to Santa Barbara, California, and launching her real estate business, La Maison. What does managing a successful business have to do with writing? Very little except in the way it affords her resources to do the things she loves most in the world: reading, writing, and running. The former two she does quite rigorously as part of the creative writing and literature master’s degree program she’s enrolled in through Harvard University Extension School. Her short stories, poetry, and articles have been published in the Santa Barbara Literary Journal, Network’d Magazine, and the Santa Barbara Independent, among others. In previous incarnations, Rachael wrote proclamations on behalf of a US Governor, on-demand haikus, and disaster response SOPs for the American Red Cross. When she’s not writing, she’s reading the slush pile for the Harvard Review, taking her cat, Apollo, for walks, and hoofing it up mountains. Instagram: rachaelquisel. Twitter: @rachaelquisel.