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Kier

Parque Nacional, Portugal, Autumn 2020

Romy cries out when she sees me, lunges forwards to try to get to me, but Zeph grabs her by her hair.

She screams, an awful, guttural scream and I watch him take her head all tender in his hands like it’s something precious and slam it back against the wall.

Her eyes roll back, a thick line of blood trickling down her temple.

I watch as he does it again and again. Thud after thud, and all I can think is: He’ll get away with this.

He’ll kill us both and he’ll escape without leaving any trace, because this is what men like Zeph do. They’re clever. They manipulate people. They turn their charming face to the world, and even when there’s an aberration, they can make excuses for it.

Zeph has his hands on the tops of her arms now, gripping tight, and then he starts to shake her, making her body rattle as he leans forwards and says something in her ear.

I want to move, do something, but my limbs won’t move, that haze, hovering at the very edge of my vision.

But as I turn my head a little, I see it; on the shelf, something I hadn’t been able to grasp for myself.

The glass bowl, Mum’s glass bowl: the only thing I took from our old house.

It looks fragile, delicate, but it’s heavy when you weigh it in your hands.

I look back at Romy, try to catch her eye, try to talk with my eyes again like I did the day the policeman came to the door, but she doesn’t see me. Zeph’s doing to her what he did to me; his hands now clasped around her throat, pressing, squeezing.

I watch her eyelids flicker, then close.

I need to do something else.

Think. Think.

I raise my right hand, try to point, hope she’ll catch the sudden movement.

But it doesn’t seem to register. Her gaze is cast to the floor.

My stomach drops in despair. She didn’t see. It’s over.

Then I hear it: an odd, dull crack.

Glancing up, I see his hands slip away from her throat in one juddering motion. The glass bowl falls from Romy’s hand to the floor. I’m not sure if it’s the dizziness I’m feeling, distorting it, but his body seems to pause, as if it’s questioning what she’s done.

For one terrifying moment, I think it’s not enough. That he’s going to lunge forwards, come for her again, but all at once he crumples to the floor, his frame sagging as he falls backwards.

A few moments pass, Romy gasping, crying, still locked in the position where he’d left her.

Finally, she looks toward me. I open my mouth to try and speak and it’s then I sense something: a twitch from Zeph’s body.

A definite movement: his arm.

My stomach dips. It wasn’t enough. He’ll come back from this. I know he will .

Desperate, I look around.

It only takes a split-second before I see it: the glass bowl, still lying on the floor, light from the lamp on the counter bouncing across its surface.

I summon up my last remnants of strength and snatch it from the floor. Clasping it tightly in my hands, I bring it upwards and slam it with all the force I have against his temple.

Once, twice, then the bowl slips from my grasp.

Things start to fade in and out.

The light, again, appears around me, but as it dims, I register Romy next to me.

She’s crying.

I want to say something, tell her what these past few months have meant, how watching her dance has set a part of me free, but it hurts inside me, a weird kind of hurt.

More than pain, because it doesn’t have a point it starts from – a thread I can clutch on to – or even waves, it’s everywhere, across my whole body, as if I am the pain and it is me.

A tide that’s sweeping me away.

All at once, there’s no demarcation between the here and now and the light that’s filling my vision.

I close my eyes, and though I can’t see Romy any more, she’s there in my head.

She’s dancing, Penn and Etta beside her. My mother too.

They are in one place and every place that is precious to me, defying the laws of gravity and nature, making shapes in the sky.