I saw her swell a little towards me, standing her ground, staying stable and plucking some string of her authority. And maybe once it would’ve been enough; maybe before I would have backed the fuck up out of her space, chastised and shamed like every other time when I was a little girl throwing a pissing fit.

But no, not this time. She took a step towards me and I didn’t move; my ears remained plastered to my neck and my body jumped with a spark that shouted ”what nerve!”. Now she wanted to stand up like she had a reign on me; now she was bein’ a Ma, or something, but I was wildin’ out of even my control and there was no stopping the hurricane.

I let her talk, because she’d let me shout. I swallowed the impulse to cut across her words—which was harder than it sounded, because it felt like there was something wrong with every word that fell from her lips. I ground my teeth, biting my tongue, swallowing the lump that was ever growing in my throat, the wad of words that wanted to unleash themselves in a hailstorm.

She was talking about Mesec--another wad of pain that I had sort of swept under the rug, where it had lain, awkward and causing a lump in the carpet, gathering dust bunnies and dirt; a pain I’d never reconciled. I couldn’t look at her while she was talking about where Mesec came from—as she explained that he had come from here, which was a bigger mindfuck than I could deal with at that moment. My eyes were already spinning, and now my head was screwing loose, and it was hard keeping track of where the trails of hurt and anger wanted to twist—because it felt like there was a target everywhere.

*“I have not been here long – just long enough for your father to name me a leader, though I have no idea why.”*

Fucking leader. Made so by my Pa. There was something tragic in this that I couldn’t see: my vision was too blurred out with red.

*“You refuse me as a parent.”*

My eyes snapped back to her suddenly. Furious.

*“The last time we spoke, you denied my embrace. What do you want from me, Roskuld? I try to love you the way I know how and you run away, but now you blame me for not taking you around the world? Do you want me or not?”*

“Don’t you fucking flip the script!” I roared, and I felt my gut twist painfully—because the difference was marked, wasn’t it? I was an entirely different creature than my Ma, this composed, gorgeous creature of ice--while I was nothing but a boar with too much voice. “’Do I want you?’ The fuck kind of question is that? ‘I refuse you as a parent’--no, I refuse to play the nut-bucket role for you anymore!”

It exploded out of me—that lump of words that had been growing in my throat. It was unleashed and I couldn’t stop it and it was messy and awful and—“I don’t care about the goddamn world. What I care about is why I looked my Pa dead in his eye and you let him be a stranger to me!” The memory was hazy—but distinct and filled with dead crows and painful in its own way. "How the fuck can I refuse you as a parent? You’re my Ma, and he’s my Pa, and I ain’t had any choice in any of that.” My eyes flashed. “But that’s something you’d choose to do all over again, isn’t it?” Her words were thrown back at her, a challenge a challenge a challenge—

“What do I want from you? I wanna know why you go cold at the whisper of Pa’s name. I wanna know why there’s a whole place dedicated to him—regardless of who’s running it, or how, or why—and why I had to damn-near freeze my ass in half in the tundra tryin’ to find it when you was here anyway, snuggled and safe and keeping it to yourself. I wanna know why you kept me from my Pa. And don’t talk about no bulllshit like you was trying to protect me—from what? Like ignoring the shit was gonna make it disappear from my life? Like it was gonna make it less meaningful to me, like my destiny was gonna change if I was kept an idiot. I never thought you treated me like a child—“ My voice broke—because, for an instant, my eye was filled with memories, back when my Ma was so tall, and I was so short, and nothing was painful—“—and I guess I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

My breath shuddered—and so did my chest, and pretty soon, all of me was shaking. “You wanna know if I want you or not?” I said, and my voice was scratchy and so much lower—and even more dangerous because of it. “Nah, Ma, that ain’t the question. The question is if you really want me.” I paused—but I couldn’t stop it. “’Cuz if you did, you’d remember.”



@[Ophelia]



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