Abigail Catherine Peters

Leave Me With This

The money came during the heatwave, the fortieth suffocating day of it. Rest had become foreign to me, eyes filled with the grittiness of hours spent turning pillows, dreaming of typhoons, and tsunamis, and ice. And my father, of course. He floated into my dreams when he got the chance, hammering at the window and growling under the floorboards. It had been a year since he died, yet, still, I could smell him all around me, the scent he had in the final weeks. In the heat, I started to smell like him too, and in my delirium thought I was dying.