Father’s Day

Vida left her wife and kids at home for this, as she did every year. She put on her coat and slipped outside into the quiet, cold air of predawn. By the time she drove her car through the spiked metal gates of the cemetery, the sky was orange to the southeast.

Her feet made a hushing sound as she walked across the neatly trimmed grass toward their graves, still wet with dew. No one else was in the cemetery yet. She preferred to do this alone.

She brought a single flower, as always. A single flower was like a wish, a hope, a child’s memory, and it wilted in days. She didn’t plant anything the way other people did. Nothing permanent made sense to her in the face of such loss.

There were three tombstones in two plots. Two were the same large, blocky rectangles as most of the others in this part of the cemetery. The third was sandwiched between them unofficially, an ordinary rock she’d paid to have carved. Unlike the graves of her parents, her baby brother’s grave didn’t have a body below it.

Vida kissed his stone first, pressing her lips to the cold damp stone the way she had once pressed her lips to his cold forehead when he’d died of internal bleeding in the hospital so many years ago. That’s when all of this had begun, or perhaps, when it had all ended.

Vida placed the flower she had brought on her father’s grave and knelt in the wet grass, not caring for the dampness that quickly touched her copper skin through her jeans like the fingers of the past. She pressed a hand to her heart, feeling rising up beneath it like the slow steady waters of an ocean tide.

There had always been problems in their house, even before she was old enough to remember, but children have an incredible ability to love their parents unconditionally. She had managed to adore her parents until she was seven. Until the day her father had come in and said she was old enough to be punished with a belt. Until the day her mother had watched as cold as a statue while she screamed.

She rolled up her sleeves to see the tattoos winding their ways up her wrists. Flames led up to a phoenix on one shoulder: a reminder of who she was and what she’d been through. The flames were only mostly metaphorical—they covered up some of the scars from the day her father had gotten creative with a fire poker.

Vida began to sing quietly as the sun broke over the horizon, weaving peace into her breath, the wind, the world of the cemetery. It was a lullaby, one that she sang to her own daughters. One that her mother had never sung to her.

A tear slid from her closed eyes and down one cheek, dropping onto the flames of her wrists, and she found herself surprised that she could still have tears left after all this time.

The first time she had come on Father’s Day, it was to have someone to yell at, someone to vent her hate and heartbreak at for why she couldn’t celebrate this day and why she’d never really had a father. But after nearly fifteen years of therapy, of healing day by day through the beauty of Shahira and the children and their teaching her the lessons she should have learned so long ago, this day had come to commemorate what she had lost instead. The father, the mother, the family she should have had. And a beautiful little girl who had been absolutely perfect.

Vida brushed her fingers over her baby brother’s stone, gentle as a breath, and murmured, “I love you.” The stone said only Beloved Brother, with the dates for his short eleven years of life. Perhaps putting his stone between theirs didn’t make sense, but maybe too, it was the only place it could have gone.

Where his real ashes were, Vida didn’t know. After the four years of foster care that had followed her father’s death, she had gone looking for her mother. But her mother had died and her brother’s urn was lost. It had broken her ravaged heart all over again, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Not from the mother who had cremated her beautiful brother to save money, when she had plenty. Not from the mother who had held them and told them it was for their own good while her husband had beaten them within an inch of their lives. Not from a mother who had known nothing of love.

Nothing else would have broken her as her father beating her brother to death had, when Vida was only fourteen. Nothing else would have driven her rage, her hate, to the extreme needed to turn on the person she feared more than anything, and yet had still, somehow, loved. Nothing else would have twisted that tendril of evil out of her battered, lonely heart, and made her truly want to do him harm.

But her father’s evil had felt like hers, too, like something she was part of just by being his daughter and living in his house. And maybe by stopping him, she could redeem something of that evil inside of her. Maybe she could protect someone, as she hadn’t been able to protect her beloved baby brother.

I killed him, she had said to Shahira so many years ago, after sharing with her then-girlfriend her favourite picture of her brother. She hadn’t meant to just blurt it out like that, but even then, only months into their relationship, she had wanted Shahira to know, to understand her, to forgive her, even, if such things were possible.

Your brother? Shahira had asked, confused.

My father, Vida corrected quietly, vulnerably, with a shake of her head, half-sure that Shahira would leave that instant and never come back. When he killed my brother. I shoved him down the stairs. I didn’t…I didn’t think it would kill him. I just wanted to stop him, to hurt him, to save—” her voice had caught “—my brother, but he didn’t get up.

She had been staring down at her hands, held palms up in front of her, as she had the day her father and brother died. Staring at them in horror as the shadows consumed her, and wondering if she had only made a new monster by killing the first.

But Shahira hadn’t run. She had taken Vida’s nut-brown hands in her darker ones, and looked back with more empathy than Vida had ever seen. Maybe, Vida had reflected later, that moment had opened the door to her healing more than anything else had. Maybe that was the moment she first began to forgive herself, and to learn how to truly love.

Vida wiped the tears from her face and stood, humbled by the beauty of the dawn, by second chances, and by a life that kept going so far beyond the nightmares she had once thought were all she would ever know. She hummed Amazing Grace as she walked back through the rows of the dead to her car, sitting waiting for her like some loyal old dog. Waiting for her like her real family waking up back home, the loves of a life she had somehow managed to build out of the wreckage of her childhood, impossible stone by impossible stone.

She slipped back into her car, and took a deep breath. Before her, the sun had fully cleared the horizon, blinding and huge and red and beautiful. She breathed in the memories, and as she exhaled, she let go one more time of the man and the tragedy that had defined her life so completely, and turned her thoughts instead to the people she chose.

Her body filling with a bone-deep gratitude—to have survived, and to have somehow, impossibly, created a life full of love—Vida shifted into drive and headed back out into a better world, leaving her ghosts behind to the whispers of the dawn.

Frances Koziar has published work in 80 different literary magazines and outlets including Best Canadian Essays 2021 and Daily Science Fiction, and has also served as an author panelist, fiction contest judge, and a microfiction editor. She is a young (disabled) retiree and a social justice advocate, and she lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more at https:/franceskoziar.wixsite.com/author.