Horse. Sweat. We were running and galloping and everything was going in circles.

            “Tell her to slow down! Pull back on the reins! Mari!” my aunt yelled. Her voice was distant, as if no amount of screaming could get my six-year-old self to control Heidi’s gait.

            I couldn’t figure out how to get her to stop. Heidi kept running, and the saddle felt like it was sliding off. Sixteen hands off the ground, velvety-brown wanted to run wild. Run free. I couldn’t stop. Stop.

            “Whoa! Heidi, stop! Stop!” I said in a small voice. I barely stood above her kneecaps on the ground, so it was no wonder I couldn’t control her. She wasn’t listening, and I couldn’t get my hands to pull the reins and my voice to work at the same time.

            “Hold the horn! The horn!” my aunt yelled. I looked down. How was I supposed to take my hands off the reins and put them on the horn? No way. I had to tell myself to just try; if I didn’t, there was no way I would stay in the saddle. I had to place the worn ends of the reins in my left hand. My fingers were almost too small to grasp them. They were worn from many uses, but that didn’t make them easier to grab. I had to get to the horn. The horn. I looked down again and finally grasped it. It was too slippery, too far out of my reach while I was panicking. I placed the reins back in my hand and tried to wrestle both. Horn or reins, neither were good options.

            “Mari, you need to clasp your legs together! Push your knees into her sides!”

            I couldn’t get my legs to work. My muscles were nothing in comparison to Heidi’s. How was this supposed to work? How was I supposed to stop? I wanted off, but I didn’t want to fly.

            Slipping, sliding, the saddle was unstable under my body. Were the straps giving away? They must have been. I had nowhere to go and nothing to stop me. No one ever tells you what it’s like to fly because it’s abnormal. It’s not supposed to happen. Feet are meant for the ground, so they never prepare you for flight or teach you how to land. Flying, flying. My eyes were squeezed tight, hoping that maybe if I couldn’t see what was happening that I wouldn’t have to feel it either.

            was wrong. I hit with a vigor hard enough to make the world go slow. Dark brown patches of dirt met my dark blue jeans. My head and shoulders flew backward on impact with the solid, ice-cold ground. It stole my heat and my breath.

            Falling came fast but lying on the ground pushed everything into slow motion, first with my lungs gasping for air. In. Out. In.

            Out.

            “Daddy! Please help. Please help me,” I gasped. Mouth open, my back arching, I tried to scream but words only come out as whispers when you can’t breathe enough air. My eyes were still shut, but I forced them open to look up into the thick, unbreathable air.

            My daddy was there. Tall, and strong, he wrapped my back and legs in his arms and picked me off the ground. I was back to being sixteen hands tall, but this time my daddy was holding me, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and squeezed. In. Out. In.

***

            Vegas is full of bright lights and dim lives. Painted smiles wash away after nights of promiscuous labor or throwing away life savings.

            “You never listen. What happened out there today? You did so well yesterday, but you struggled today. You know that, right?”

            “Yes, dad.” I rolled my eyes. I was the one who had bowled. He sat back and groaned when I missed a spare, or he made weird noises when I made a lucky shot. It was embarrassing.

            “You should have moved when I told you to.” That was what he said. He meant it. It seemed like an innocent expression, but what I needed to change was completely opposite of what he said. He thought he knew everything, but when had he ever even bowled?

            “You were wrong.” I could tell that made him angry.

            “Every time I try to help you, you ignore me. You roll your eyes. Why do you do that? Why do you treat me like I’m an idiot?” He had told me to move right because I continued to washout, but I had decided to move back. I looked around at our room in South Point Hotel and Casino. The beige and yellow striped walls seemed bleak. I didn’t know what to tell him. I felt so much anger but there was nothing to be angry about. I mean, he did try to make me feel guilty, and he had never learned what I had learned or done as much as I could, but he only meant well. What was happening to me? Dad was just trying to help. He just wanted me to succeed, so why did that make me want to fight with him?

            This was a fight my rational side didn’t want to start, but my teenage brain wasn’t going to give up.

            “You don’t know everything that I do,” I said.

            My dad stood on the other side of the room from me. His T-shirt hung around his body, rounded tummy offsetting his 5’9’’ height. I knew this was going to spring into another fight; we had been fighting more often lately. I had wrapped myself in my blue and white tie blanket with my right leg curled up under me on the bed. I felt safe there even though I knew my dad, and I wouldn’t end this tonight.

            “You were wrong, okay? Just accept it.”

            “I’m only wrong because you never listen to me!” His eyebrows were knitted together and he had his hand in a fist hanging by his side. His knuckles were white. He would change is hand from fist to running it through his mostly non-existent hair. He was frustrated, and my gut churned as I was looking at him.

            I lowered my head to cover up the tears that were trailing down my face. I bit into my lip. I traced the outline of my left knee as it hung off the bed because it was hurting. My daddy usually helped me ice it, but the dull pain in my knee was nothing compared to how my heart was hurting.

            “You never try anything I suggest, and your attitude is getting worse. Just try it, acknowledge me for once. Please.”

            He wasn’t begging, he was yelling, but it was the type of yelling that if you lowered the volume it would probably lead to tears. The type of yelling that rattled walls and bones, but wasn’t angry. Just desperate. His hands went limp by his sides, and his head was tilted as his mouth tried to stop shaking. I didn’t want to hurt him, but he hadn’t understood what I meant.

***

            I spent my time in my room. I wrapped myself in my cotton comforter and my baby blue walls closed in on me, embraced me. I fell asleep at six PM and slept through dinner. I slept all night just to be alone.

            Lonely.

            Just to see if I could find peace.

***

            “Why is he like this, Mom? Why are we always fighting?” I asked. My head was in my hands and my elbows were resting on the dining room table. I was sitting in a dining chair, pushed out just enough that my back arched in order for my elbows to reach. My face was scrunched and my hands were woven deep into my hair. I was trying not to cry.

            “Because you two are exactly the same,” she answered. She stopped putting the dishes away and came to sit next to me. Her thin hand rested on top of my head.

             “I just don’t get it. Ugh, I don’t understand!” I said as my hands flew off my head. They landed palms-up on the dining room table as I stared at my mom, wide-eyed.

            “Your father is a perfectionist,” she said. Her brunette bob swayed as she looked down at my hands. I had surprised her by moving so fast. “He needs everything in his family to look perfect because he wants to always be presentable. He needs to be.”

            “It’s not fair. That’s not possible,” I said. I ran my hand down the crack in the middle of our table. It could separate, and another leaf could be added for more people. The golden tint of the wood mixed with its rough surface-scratches from years of dinners, game nights, and missionary bible studies. There were still newspaper headlines accidentally glued to the top of it in some places from a craft night gone wrong. It wasn’t perfect, but my parents refused to get rid of it. It was a mess, but a familiar one. A single tear rolled down my cheek, meeting the scratches and stains as it fell to the table. “I’m never gonna be perfect, Mom.”

            “I know. None of us will ever be perfect, even Dad. But he doesn’t want this family to fall apart either, and he’s scared that you’re going to leave next year and not look back,” she said. She rubbed her finger in circles on the top of my other still-open palm. I sniffed, trying to hold the floodgates closed.

            “I just don’t want to disappoint him.”

***

            Dinner at my house starts at six o’clock sharp, according to my mom. It’s nothing special, but Mom wants to make sure that we see each other every night. We have specific seats at the dinner table too. Everything is set in stone.

            I changed that. In the middle of my junior year of high school, family dinner started to run longer than normal. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen. I wasn’t trying to change our whole “family dynamic”; I didn’t come home from school one day and decide to pick any fight I could.

            It usually started the same way. We would all sit in our chairs and start eating. The same old question from my dad, “How was your day?” would be met by the same old answer: “Fine.” The same old question of, “How was work?” would be met by my dad’s same old sarcastic answer: “It was just wonderful.”

            I sighed. He was never straightforward about his feelings, and it was aggravating.

            Scratch that: he was always straightforward when he was fighting with me.

            “You don’t understand anything about bowling. You have no idea what you’re talking about. I do,” I said, my fork clattering against my plate as I set it down. The sound was startling, and I looked down at the blue heart-shaped outline in the middle of the white porcelain. I glanced at the clock and then back down at my father’s face. His forehead was red and his cheeks were scrunched around his eyes. I winced.

            We were five minutes late. This was an argument we had multiple times, and I dug my dull fingernails into my thighs as I asked myself why I had to keep picking this fight.

            Ten minutes late. These were the minutes dad fought back.

            “I have watched you compete for eight years. Give me some credit. Sitting behind you and watching you has taught me a little. A lot actually.”

            He was infuriating. It had been close to two years, and we would have the same fight at least once a week. I wanted him to forget about it. He had never been coached. He had never had any class to teach him anything, and he had never competed. I was the one with the coaching certificate, not him, but he still had an ego large enough to bait mine. He had watched my swing and my progression since I was eight, but he didn’t know everything. I wasn’t going to lose to him, not about this.

            Fifteen minutes late.

            “Hey, why don’t you both just see what you have to offer each other? Fighting about it isn’t going to solve anything,” my mom said. She looked between the both of us. I’m sure the almost-hatred was palpable between us. I moved my eyes away from hers, which were drawn up at the corners, and moved them to my dad’s. I raised my eyebrows, baiting him. He stood up and planted his palm on each curved corner of the table.

            He leaned towards me and I instinctively backed away. My spine chilled. This felt different. This fight wasn’t one of fire anymore; Dad was packing ice and he had carved it to a point.

            “We drive you across the state. We fly you across the country to compete. We let your boyfriend drive you around when you don’t want us there,” he said, “even when you would be nowhere without our help. You are ungrateful.”

            His words drew the breath from my lungs. They stung more than any he had said yet, mainly because he was right. My eyes bounced from him and his stance to the table and my fingernails still dug into my thighs, and then the clock. Oh, that minute hand kept moving and I bit my lip when I saw the time.

            Thirty minutes had passed, more than had ever passed before.

            My eyes caught Dad’s movement as he lowered himself into his chair again. His spine compressed and his shoulders collapsed around him. He had wielded a double edge sword and each swing he took at me cut him right back. That was my fault. I pushed him. I pushed him. I don’t think he could have stood even if he wanted to. Maybe this time it was too much for him. Too many minutes past the end of family dinner. Too many harsh words spoken in raised tones. The life was draining out of him, his head bent forward at the neck. Seeing him like that sapped my fight; I crumbled watching as he fell down too. I noticed how much of his hair he had lost over the years. There had always been a bald spot in the middle of his head, but it was more prominent now. My daddy was tired, defeated. He was trying to hold himself together. He was trying to hold me and him together.

            “Sometimes I don’t even believe that you love me,” Dad said. He raised his head to meet my eyes. I watched as he struggled to breathe; he choked out his words through tears. Watching my daddy cry broke me in two. “I give you everything you ask for, but it’s never good enough for you. I don’t know what to do.”

            Thirty-two minutes.

            I sat there for two minutes. My arms went limp. My mind went numb. What I was supposed to say? My daddy didn’t know if I loved him or not. My daddy was supposed to be my hero, and I was supposed to be his princess. But I broke his heart.

            “I do love you, Dad. I promise,” I whispered. Tears began to trail down my face one by one as I watched a waterfall cascade from his eyes. I didn’t want to win anymore.

***

            January 2018 started fiery hot. Under a navy blue Sherpa and a Winnie the Pooh cotton comforter, my fever spiked to 101.8 degrees Fahrenheit. I was sweaty and weak. My head was spinning in circles, like a drunken stupor I didn’t deserve and couldn’t puke my way out of. I hadn’t been home in close to four months, but today home was filled with the flu.

            Dad had just had a full knee replacement surgery and was laid up in bed, so I joined him. My body was broken and so was his. I slept from midnight till two in the afternoon and then from three in the afternoon until seven that evening.  I wrapped myself on the bed next to him and slept restlessly. I didn’t want to get him sick, but I also didn’t want to be alone.

            I woke up with my bangs drenched in sweat. Moving my head any direction tilted the world, but I wanted to see where my dad was and how he was doing. I could hear The Incredible Dr. Pol still playing on the TV as I turned my head to the left and lifted my heavy eyelids.

            “Hi, Daddy.”

            He looked at me and smiled. “Hi, sweetie. How are you feeling?” Such a simple question filled with so much concern. He was the one in excruciating pain, but he wanted to know how I was doing.

            “I think I’m doing better. Thanks,” I said with a small smile. Just a little out of it, I forgot to ask him how he was doing too. I looked at the TV and back to him, sliding my hand into his warm, calloused one. It engulfed mine. Looking at our hands together, I remembered my dad’s favorite story of the day I was born. I was so tiny that I fit into the palms of his hands, and now here we were, eighteen years later, and his hands could still keep me safe.

            I smiled as I drifted back into my sweaty sleep. My daddy was here, and everything would be okay.

---

Author:

Marianna Pizzini is a sophomore English major who has always found writing to be her passion. She works as a writing consultant and wants to be a professional editor.

Artist:

Ashlee Brus is a freshman at Morningside majoring in Photography. She has a passion for photography and hopes to own her own photo studio after college.