By : Coda Lim
I held the fragile child awkwardly in my arms, unable to hold her in a comfortable position. The child still cried without pause. Its squirmy limbs flailed disturbingly across my shaking fingers.
The wetness of milk on my sleeves only intensified my displeasure. My eyes widened, I forgot her name…
My loss for it lasted a few seconds, however, it was more than enough. I despised myself more than I hated this era of iron and blood. I tore my gaze off the child because it looked too much of my beloved. I was unfit for the mantle of a father, whatever she needed wasn’t me. I had forgotten it, not because I did not love her. Only because I had practiced seldom saying it. I suppose I thought the silence would protect her from this world.
My mind flicked to a moment outside of time.
“I’d like to name her Ophelia.”
She was looking out the window as she spoke, with her soft brown eyes glowing with sun. “That’s rather dramatic,” I laughed.
A soft smile played across her lips, “So is lifie.”
In the back room of a bombed out house, I laid down on the makeshift bed of fabrics. The child still wept bountifully. I put her down on her back as she cried. I turned my body in the direction opposite, covering my ears, finally falling asleep under the wretched cries…
The river Lorne was in firont ofi me. But then I saw her… her cascades ofi midnight black hair covered in spray. But her fiace… it was smudged like an otherworldly artist brushed her fiace. I heard her voice, crisp and clean, “Ophelia.”
As my fiace broke with tears, a great navy blue fierry thrust out ofi the river. It created a tsunami that launched towards us. Bells hummed in the air… but the wave kept pushing fiaster. It slammed into her, washing her away, but befiore hitting me…
Awoken, I reached for my beloved, only to find nothing. The sound of my movement caused her
to cry again. She was still here…
I got up and checked the doors of all the houses. We were safe for now. I looked out through a half-shattered window and saw a sea of ash, ember, and silver sand. A soft boom reverberated in the air, a bloom of crimson erupted miles away swallowing a sliver of sky in fiery breath. This was the world we lived in, a war that had not seen slumber in months. I walked with my eyes dimmed back to the child. She still cried horribly. I picked her up in a fluid motion, shifting her head against my chest. She flailed wildly, her tears running relentlessly. Then it suddenly stopped. I didn’t breathe until the girl’s whimpering body relaxed. It seemed that, for a small moment, the battle was quietly receding. In the tranquility, I found the bells lingering in my ears. Her voice once mirrored that similar sharpness.
“Do you really care?”
Her left hand was flat against the table, it steadied her. “I do,” I said. “I do.”
The words fielt smaller than they should’ve, they carried no weight. “Then show me.”
Light hit her eyes unveiling, not anger, nor sadness, not quite. Fear.
“Maybe… perhaps I’m not fit to be a fiather. I can’t. You’re right,” The room became deathly silent. A lone tear rolled down my cheek.
She blinked slowly, her shoulders dropped, and the intensity in her eyes softened. The fight left her. She reached out to cup my cheek. I turned my head befiore I knew why.
She let out a soft breath. She embraced me anyway. I didn’t mean to cry, but I did.
I sobbed slowly into her shoulder. Elise started to sing a soft song, tuneless. Just her warmth, the gentle but steady rise and fiall ofi her chest beneath my ear.
“I love you,” she murmured.
“Ophelia,” I whispered to my daughter. I held my daughter. It was the same way she held me, all those years ago. A warmth ignited in me.
Suddenly, bells sounded in the distance. I let out a faint laugh, she would’ve believed this meant something.
I walked out of the bombed house. A crowd in grimy clothes like mine stood in the street. They all seemed frozen in place…
A young man finally spoke, “The ferry…”
The group began to move–first slowly, then with an urgency, then all of them at once. I would answer the call–for her. I joined the run. As we ran I heard the sound of boots and shouted commands. But these weren’t from the new group of people. At the banks of the mighty river Lorne, a line of men adorned with silver masks and batons waited. Behind them, a small ferry — one that might have been yellow once. However, the group kept running with greater urgency. Some cried, cleansing their faces of filth. The masked men formed a line and marched forward. Boots pounded, and yells snapped through the air. Soon, the men started to sprint as well, their batons unsheathed…
The groups collided, plumes of dirt ruptured in the air. Cries of pain were unleashed as the batons crashed into weak bodies. Suddenly, someone slammed into me within the chaos. I nearly dropped the child. I rolled through the dust, then quickly got up.
A man broke through and reached the banks. A masked guard chased after him. They disappeared in the dip of the Lorne’s edge. Only one masked figure returned. He dragged something behind him.
I slowed within the fray. Another man collided with me, I tried to push him away. I couldn’t. He was dead. A gasp tore through my lungs, loud and unbidden. Soon the killed fell, pushing me down to the ground. My arms suddenly felt lighter, and yet other parts were crushed in weight.
Their bodies descended down upon us. An arm striking my head. A knee burying into my back. More dead collapsed on me. Blood and dust filled my mouth. The gray sky faded away, and the smell of gore filled my nostrils.
I attempted to move, I couldn’t. And my breaths came out short. The child… I could not feel her…the absence of her little weight.
Boots stampeded above me. A scream, only an adolescent. The sound ended abruptly, succumbing to death. The Lorne roared in a place beyond the sea of bodies indifferently. I tried to hear her cries, feel her pain. I waited for it, nothing.
Existing condensed into heat and pressure and the slow failing beats of my heart. I couldn’t hear her.
Perhaps… Perhaps she already was gone. The weight could’ve been too much. She was so small, so little. I had nearly dropped her before. A strange tranquility slipped within me.
If… if she weren’t here, she wouldn’t remember this. The silt, the ash, nor the blood. She would not learn the sound of horror before berceuse.
The concept pursued my mind. It would be nicer, kinder.
My soul clenched, not from the weight upon my body, but the force of the idea. Kinder.
Elise’s voice kindled to life through memory. It wasn’t sharp, nor angry. Balanced and stable. She said, “Show me.”
Once those words accused me, made me cry. But this time they waited. They listened.
I felt another body fall on top. More weight crushed me. My breath thinned and my vision throbbed white at the edges.
I’ve spent months believing I was unsuitable for the duty of fatherhood. Weak. Uncertain. Reluctant. I thought that maybe the duty was designated for brave men, and fatherhood was devoid of people like me.
But… if she died here, beneath the bodies of dead, it wasn’t because I wasn’t fit.
It would be because I chose death as my reward, because I chose stillness… a quiet… empty of her cries.
Because I accepted a mercy, a grace that was not mine to accept. A sound shattered the pressure…brittle, heartbroken.
It wasn’t a memory or imagination, but a whimper. Her.
The serenity collapsed.
Buried beneath a crushing, writhing mountain of dead, I struggled to break free. My bloody fingers clawed the dirt. And my pinned limbs roared in pain as I broke free. When I finally reached the surface of the bodies, I choked on the frigid ash filled air, straining for a breath. I drove my whole body up. Squirming through a hole of corpses. I got out.
I located her in grime and dust, her face streaked with blood. Her mouth opened with sad cries that were small against the rampage and uproar of the chaos.
I found pain as a baton struck my leg bone. The agony struck deep, resounding through my soul. The chaos snapped into dreadful clarity. It all became clear. The bells. The dead. The child in the dust.
And the truth that she was still here, still mine, still crying. Still mine to protect. I ran and gathered her small body to my chest.
She must live. Not for Elise.
Not for forgiveness, nor my death. Not because the bells demanded it.
But because she was her, and she was mine.
She must live. The words were no longer frantic, but rather steady. Certain.
Ahead, the river stretched its fast blue arms tainted by silt. The ferry swayed against the dock as bodies torrented to it. It was close just twenty steps away.
I ran.
Each step reverberated through my leg in agony. However, the pain felt distant, my body surged forward devoid of thought. The dock loomed closer, the rotten wood engulfed in spray. Voices slammed into each other into a formless roar.
A woman fell beside me. She didn’t rise again.
The bells pierced the cacophony again–sharp, final.
My feet slapped the dark wood, and I reached the wooden ramp into the ferry. An old woman, her face streaked with ash and silt, leaned over on the ferry’s deck. Her arms opened towards me. Suddenly, a mass of people seeking escape surged into the narrow wooden ramp. They all rushed in front of me. I heard the wood creak.
“It’s going to break!” A man shouted.
They didn’t listen, the idea of escape, clearly heavy in their minds. The wood started to crack.
My eyes widened.
I pushed through the people.
Ophelia’s hand clenched my collar. A soft cry arose from her small lungs. The world seemed to collapse into that small cry, and the small grip of her fingers.
“Please. She must live.” I couldn’t tell if the words left my mouth.
I reached the end of the ramp, to the old lady’s arms. Pain screamed in my leg, and my lungs burned. I pushed through, holding Ophelia. Trembling, shaking, but steady.
Finally the bridge shattered under the fluctuating weight. But I made it to the end, to the old woman’s open arms. As I fell I let go of Ophelia, placing her into the lady’s hands. As her hands slipped from mine, the warmth lingered. I could almost feel her pulse, her life at my fingertips. My heart shattered but for the first time… I believed… She would live…
The Lorne rushed up to meet me. The cold void of dark waters swallowed me.
It felt hollow, the physical pain. The water closed me, and chills roared at me sharply. I rapidly searched again for warmth, any tether. My lungs clawed at me, however each gasp was met with the river’s apathetic enclasp. Within the depths, I felt all the burdens I carried. Fear. Doubt.
Grief. But a soft burning clarity erupted in me. She was alive.
Perhaps I heard her voice. Maybe Elise’s, or both. It blended even more than memory, more than hope.
It did not call for me. It just stayed there, a gentle, immovable thing that carried forward. Beyond the reach of chaos.
The river closed above me. The last bit of light dissipated. Maybe somewhere, Ophelia cried. Somewhere Elise watched. And somewhere I was free, at peace. And at last, it was quiet. Still.
Bridge breaks gives daughter now or never. Give daughter to women never see again Extend she must live
