The video tape lay in shadows on the table as I stared. It felt cold to the touch, as frigid as the snow in which it nestled for hours just outside my door, wrapped in a thin yellow envelope without a scratch of writing. The cassette bore no label either, save two stretched ovals standing straight up over a wide circle in a crude drawing of a rabbit head.
Her drawing.
My daughter used to plaster the rabbit all over everything she owned. Binders, boxes, bedframes, everything. They even had to scrub it off the walls after they pulled her out of here and hauled her away.
I couldn't watch the ancient tape; nothing in the house would read it. Still, I could sense its contents when I my fingers traced the rabbit's ears. I knew it was a promise, or maybe a threat. It wasn't the first time she'd tried to make contact, even though I'd left imprints of my fingers in the threshold resisting the call. I'd seen the circles she drew on the living room floor, the candles burning just too far for me to feel them through the wall of sleep. But this was the first message she'd managed to push through to me.
Tremors shook my hand as I lifted my daughter's video tape from the surface of the dining table and held it to the thin rays of sunlight drifting through the boarded windows. When I lifted the door along the edge, I could almost make out frames on the magnetic ribbon, tiny pictures of a better time mingled with another worse.
Fifteen years since my little girl took her father from the world, and still she won't just let me rest.
What else can I do when even the grave cannot protect the dead from the living?
No comments:
Post a Comment