Your father died an hour before you were born.
There was a lot of screaming that day. Your mother, air hissing through her clenched teeth and hands grasping at empty air, pushing while surrounded by white walls and the bitter smell of antiseptic. Garbled words of a foreign language grabbed her by the cheeks and shook her. There was no familiarity in this cold hospital. No family waiting outside for her. Only two nurses and a supervising doctor clad in white who watched through deep set eyes as she struggled. She was only twenty, and the stack of her two decades seemed pitiful in the grand scheme of things.
Four miles away, your father’s car sped through a red light. It was promptly t-boned by a semi and flipped twice in a blinding arc of light and screeching metal that momentarily lit up the night. Stained pieces of baby blankets, a stuffed bunny, and his body were among the things scraped off the cold concrete.
Later, your mother told you his death registered as a drop in her stomach. Perhaps it was a vague premonition, or a stray kick from you. Her next breath weighed cold and wrong in her lungs. At that moment, she knew your father wouldn’t make it in time to see you.
Of course, you don’t remember any of this. At that time, you were a screaming sack of skin barely conscious enough to register its own existence.
In the rare moments when she let something slip about your birth, you accepted the information hungrily, forever searching for the pieces to a puzzle you’ve been trying to solve your whole life. Where did it go wrong, you wondered. When was the moment your mother decided loving you had become a chore?
You grew up the way a weed did, rooting into cracks and sprouting when everything around it willed it to die. Home was a derelict building squeezed between the corner store and an abandoned apartment.
You spent your days in the darkness of your room, hunched over to avoid hitting your head against the low, sloped ceiling. The slivers of light that leaked through the shuttered window lit the hardwood floor orange, dimming when a car raced past.
There was a constant heaviness in the air, almost a presence of itself, and it seeped deeper under your skin as the years went by. It was the dead stare of your mother in the early days, when all she seemed to do was lay in her bed and stare at the ceiling fan no matter how much you called out. It was a harsh hand that smacked your cheek with bruising force when you talked for too long. It was running to the corner store at 11 PM, begging please, just one more time, and dashing back with a handful of lotion for your mother’s eczema.
At night, when the quiet itched and pulled at your skin, you closed your eyes and held your breath for as long as you could–until your head felt light and you couldn’t tell whether the mattress was below you or above. Your chest jumped up and down in a facsimile of a breath, reaching desperately for air through your pursed lips.
It was then, as your lungs threatened to burst, that you felt alive.
Years passed by like a slow trickle of molasses. You and your mother moved to a better neighborhood, but living in a white-picket suburban house didn’t seem to improve anything. Late night conversations about your father faded into heated arguments about college and familial duty. You didn’t hold your breath anymore because the sting of disappointment every time you inevitably came gasping for air got tiring.
(Some days, you wondered if it was possible to mourn a dead man that you never met.)
You aren’t sure when it started.
A hot breath in your ear, or a hand brushing through your hair. Seeing a shadow in the doorway when you were certain your mother was asleep. Piece by piece, your subconscious constructed your father from browning photos and your own appearance. Sound didn’t come until much later, because imagining a voice was a bit tricky, but you came to find that it didn’t matter how he spoke. Just that he did.
You’re doing good, he would say, mouth twitching in a non-smile from his spot just past your peripheral vision. Just a little longer.
He doesn’t talk to you that much nowadays. Just stands in the corner, staring into the back of your neck. You don’t turn as you clean shards of soju bottles off the floor, unflinching as glass digs into your calloused palms. Your mother is knocked out cold on the couch, surrounded by the stink of alcohol and something more bitter.
You know what he wants you to do. What she wants.
There’s a larger piece of glass on the floor that slots neatly into your palm, glinting a green-edged smile under the fluorescent lights. It’s funny, you muse, as you hold it up. This cycle of leaving.
In the bent glass, your grotesque reflection almost matches your mother’s.
Outside, the crows sing.
Jenna Hong is a student at the Orange County School of Arts where she spends her time studying creative writing and literature. Her work is forthcoming in Inkblot, an OCSA-led magazine, and she has been recognized by the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards.