Raptures

Lately I've found spaces to breathe in but something toxic is coming to disrupt the silence. I feel it in the way she whispers over the phone on early weekend mornings, Chloe, the little tornadoes of despair she creates and scatters across the wooden floors.

She used to sleep so quietly like on a death bed, now she wakes me by accident as she gets up before dawn on Saturdays. "It's C" she said when I asked her. Always "C", never "father", never "dad".

Just moments ago now: she and I in the dusk, the last reflections of sunlight on her apple skin as she looks right through me. "Do you ever get tired of running?" she says, then turns to pick up a cigarette from her jacket pocket. I wait for her to light it but she never does. This silence is thicker than blood.