It’s been a long week. A vacation, sure, but an exhausting one - you made sure of that. Your family’s lake house is beautiful to be sure, but more importantly, it’s miles from civilization. The nearest houses are mere pinpricks down the glistening shore. Ancient trees tower over us, heavy sentinels plush with green to muffle the sobs.You let me swim in the sun all day until I was drunk on the heat, dizzy with dehydration, muscles too soaked and sore to resist, and then under the veil of cricket noise and dense, floral dark, you did all the things you couldn’t do back home (bless our neighbors, though, they’re sweet - if I heard sounds like the ones you clawed out of me, I’d call the police too.)
Seven days and my body is a crime scene. My shins are bruised from Tuesday, when you left me blindfolded all day to face the choice between waiting for you to come back for me or stumbling through the unfamiliar space mewling pathetically - “Daddy? Where did you go?” I’d nearly split my head open on a doorframe trying to follow the gentle creak of your footsteps before you gave yourself away by laughing. And my chest and cheek are still raw with scrapes from Thursday when you held me down and fucked me against the roughened bark of a dead tree. There’s blood under my fingernails from picking at the scabs.
“Daddy,” I sigh plaintively, leaning against your knees from my place on the floor at your feet, “I don’t want to leave.”
“Of course not Baby,” you murmur, “We’ve barely been here a day.”
I look down at my tanned legs, the dirt on my heels, the first of the bruises already flushing yellow and vermillion. You must be playing a trick on me again. Right? I know I just saw a pile of dirty clothes in the bedroom. Empty bottles and cartons in the recycling bin by the kitchen door. You couldn’t have done all this to me in a day.
There are no calendars on the wall. No clocks, even. There’s no internet here and you took my phone away the moment we left home. A break would be good for us, you said. Don’t think about all of that. But I have no way of knowing what day it is. They blur into each other sometimes, days and weeks and months melting into indistinct puddles in my memory. But I know it’s been longer than a day this time. We left on Sunday, then I remember Monday because I woke up drunk with your fingers in my mouth and your cock in my ass, and then there was Tuesday, and then, and then -
“No, it’s been - it’s been a long time, Daddy -”/
“Oh, sweetheart, are you getting confused again?” You close your book and look down at my flushed, anxious face impassively.
“No! No, I know we’ve been here for longer than that! All the bruises, Daddy….”
I trail off, hot, frustrated tears welling. You trace your fingers tenderly over the swollen violet nebulas on my shoulders and breasts.
“Baby, there’s nothing there. Maybe you’d better get to bed.”
I let you lead me upstairs. What can I do? I’ve gotten confused like this before, lost track of things and places and time. It’s why I can’t always do things by myself, you say. Why I have to listen to Daddy.
You lay me down somewhere indistinct between the white cotton bedspread and the white ceiling and the white summer sky outside the window. Our clothes are folded in the suitcase by the dresser. I’m dizzy.
“Daddy, what’s wrong with me?” I stutter through quiet sobs. Where am I? Why does this keep happening to me?
“Hush, little girl,” you close one hand around my throat and slowly start to push my shorts off with the other. “You’re so pretty like this. I wish I could say I love seeing you smile as much as I love seeing you cry…but I promised I’d never lie to you.”