He can’t tell where his blood ends and the wine begins. He had wrapped his hand in a dirty dish towel, the only one he could find, but the dripping blood blends with the spilt red wine seeping into the overpacked duffel bag at his feet.
“That’s not helping your case, Oleg,” Emma says.
“You’re so condescending,” he growls in Russian.
“Too stupid to speak English, too stupid to stay sober—”
“I am sober,” Oleg barks. “You saw it. The bottle wasn’t popped.”
Emma whips around. “Then why’s it in the house? And red wine? Seriously? If you were a real Russian, you’d drink vodka,” she spits.
The words catch in his throat. They wobble up his esophagus as he gargles them in his mouth, feeling like vomit right before it spews out.
He gestures to the shattered bottle on the floor. He could’ve returned it and got his money back.
Emma backs up into the kitchen, high heels clacking against the cracked tile floor. “You thought smashing it against a table would get your daughter back? Have you forgotten—”
“I’ll never forget.” The handle of the bottle forms a fragmented glass crescent reflecting his face back up at him. He looks away.
“You’re no angel either, you snake. Where’d you get the funds to buy those shoes?”
Her eyes nearly bulge out of her head. “Oh, really? Did you already forget last night? You came home so drunk out of your mind that you went so far as to—”
Oleg trips over his bag as he stalks into the kitchen and slams a drawer shut, spilling ketchup packets on the floor. “I did not hit Nadia—”
“So she just threw herself onto the coffee table?”
Oleg’s teeth creak against each other. Blood drips onto his leg as he clenches his fist tighter. He didn’t really hit her, his strength dissolves faster than his liver. It was barely even a shove, the blurry figure of her body bent down to hand him a plastic cup of water, but as his eyes focused on her face, her pale blue eyes resembled the piercing gaze of her mother’s. Shouts of lost money, college funds and Nadia’s future buzzed in his ears like flies.
Go away. He jolted out of his second hand recliner, pushing her away.
Oleg shivers, shaking the thoughts from his head.
Reaching behind her neck, Emma fiddles with the length of her pearl necklace. “You know damn well what you did.” The shadows from the dimly lit kitchen contort the planes of her face, and suddenly she looks nothing like Nadia.
“You hit our little girl and sent her flying over the table. What if the candle started a fire? What if the glass broke and it got in her eye?”
But none of that happened, Oleg wants to say. The glass didn’t break, there wasn’t even a bruise left. He wants to defend himself, but Oleg knows. He was drunk again, and he hurt his twelve-year-old daughter.
“I can’t trust you, Oleg. You can’t even trust yourself. You’re selfish, a pathetic excuse for a father. You’re choosing the bottle over your own family.”
“I’m done with booze. Not after what happened with Nadia,” Oleg says, brushing a hand through his beard.
Emma stares at him for so long his gaze falters. “Then why was the bottle in the fucking house?” She whispers.
Oleg is silent, steady drips of the leaking faucet answering for him.
“Leave,” she says. “If you love our daughter, then leave before you hurt her more. Leave or I’ll get CPS involved and you’ll never see her again.”
Oleg’s skin simmers, and he glares at her diamond earrings. “If you call CPS you won’t see her either. They do a lot of digging, she’ll be put into foster care.”
“And that will be all your fault.” Emma spots her purse on the table and grabs it, snatching a twenty from Oleg’s wallet as he withers. “It’s five past three, Nadia’s gonna be home soon. You need to leave before she sees you.”
The noise of the bus’s diesel spurs him into action. He stumbles over his duffel bag, snatching the strap and flinging it over his shoulder. As Nadia bursts through the front door, Oleg slides out the back.
“Mom! Where’s Dad? He said we’ll go fishing after school!”
Echoes of children laughing on the bus drown out Emma’s halfhearted response about leftovers in the fridge and dinner with her friends as Oleg pushes open the broken wire gate.
Noah Roy is a twenty-year-old student at CCSU, majoring in English with a minor in writing.
Featured image courtesy of Vicinius Amano
Strength dissolves faster than his liver…..Lines like this keep me coming back to Blue Muse!