By Marina Richards

She doesn’t care that he has one and a half lungs. She knows she’ll hate him when she sees him. What he didn’t do for her. How he wasn’t there.

She knows she hears the rattling hiss of his voice. Just like through the cell phone static when she should have hung up.

She knows that’s him in the airport lounge, swathed in plumes of smoke from his expensive American cigarette. A curdled, faded man. Tall like her, their edges matching like two forensic chalk outlines.

She wishes she could turn and run, vanish with the smoke. Wishes he wouldn’t hug her. Doesn’t want him to be kind to her while burning poison down his throat.

Doesn’t want anything she can feel deeper than the root of a fingernail.

She tries not to listen to the cavern of his broken chest, beneath his scars where the surgeons cut away the diseased tissue.

For his heart beat.

She fights the urge to put him back together. Paste the torn black and white photos into the dusty picture albums hidden under her mother’s bed. 

Weave silk threads around his heart. Knot the wounds. Connect the veins so his blood flows in rhythm with hers. 

They enter a church and he dips his hand into the water. Sweeps her brow, just like when he left her here swaddled in her cotton gown.

Before she was taken across the sea to another land.

His face blooms with pride. 

She doesn’t care. She’s not staying long at his villa on the sand where the ocean plays songs and they catch fish from his stone patio. Grow flowers. Play guitar.

And she’s not impressed when he paints her name on his boat. Takes her sailing, the wind flicking his silver hair. Summer’s over. She’s going home.

When he voyages across the water, sail cloth rippling under stormy seas, and never returns, she doesn’t cry. Doesn’t search for him. Doesn’t call for rescue.

She grows flowers. Teaches guitar. Fishes. Sails her own boat.

Becomes an old woman. Lighting his smokes, inhaling poison into the crevices of her pink lungs.

Because she knows it’s the only way she’ll ever see her father again.

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Marina Richards has been published in Fictive Dream, The Hooghly Review, Verdant Journal, Waccamaw Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Mystery Tribune, The Hawaii Pacific Review, Up The Staircase, and more. She has won writing awards and was shortlisted in several literary contests. She can be found on​ Twitter/X @marinarichards​ Facebook @marina.richards.79 and Instagram @marinawrite