In the Dark

I sat cross-legged on my crumpled coat in the closet, tears rolling down my cheeks, as I mentally tried to recap.

I came home from school.

I put my coat in the closet.

I made it just barely inside my bedroom door before dad grabbed my arm, jerked me back into the hallway, threw open the closet door, and flung me inside like I was on the tail end of crack the whip. I watched with wide-eyed terror while he looked down on me for just a few seconds, looming there, a shadow of a man eclipsing the light behind him. That light quickly shrunk and disappeared as he slammed the door shut.

That is how it had happened. What I tried to figure out, while I sat sucking in great big buckets of air and excreting them as tears out my eyes and snot out my nose, was why. In the mere ten seconds I’d spent inside the house, what had I done to set him off? Or was it something I did earlier, perhaps days ago, that had been the catalyst for his fire that sat stewing, bubbling, steaming below the surface until just this very moment when it exploded? I thought of volcanoes, because we’d learned about them that day in school. I thought about the ash-coated bodies we’d seen pictures of from Pompeii, curled up as though the lava had taken them by surprise and all they could do was hide in fear. I thought about the light pouring in around the silhouette of my dad, filling in the space around me and stinging my eyes, as though that might have been what made them leak.

I wasn’t in a particularly nice closet. It hadn’t even existed for more than a couple of months. Dad had partitioned off part of the small room in the hallway with two varnished pieces of plywood and runners on the ceiling and floor so they could slide back and forth in a mock-real-closet sort of way. It was flimsy enough that the doors came out of their runners all the time, and sure enough I looked up from my spot in the corner and saw a small stream of light coming in at the very top of the door—it was sitting crooked; dad had slammed it hard enough to jar it out of place.

Other than that, it was dark. Very dark. Darker than I allowed my bedroom to be at night, because with my door open my window curtains cast a shadow on the wall that resembled a giant caterpillar, and I quite liked that. No awesome shadows in this closet, this cave, this temporary prison. How long had I been here? Five minutes? Ten? Four hours? In retrospect I can’t imagine the entire duration of my stay was more than fifteen minutes, but gross exaggeration was an important part of my seven year old personality.

Maybe I hadn’t cleaned my room. What else could it possibly be? I was a paranoid enough child that I rarely did anything I thought might get me in trouble…at least not intentionally. To the right of me, the coat hooks were close enough that I could lean over, just slightly, and cushion myself on my dad’s thick black work coat. To the left, nothing. Seemingly nothing. I looked that direction, into the pitch black and imagined that everything, the snow boots, the walls, the rest of the house, everything else in the world, had all just fallen away and disappeared and I was staring into absolute nothingness. I scooted my foot that direction, very slowly, but pulled it back in quickly; I was afraid of losing it into the limitless void. That was an interesting concept to me, so I closed my eyes and created pitch black all around me and wondered if that meant I had disappeared. Maybe all my molecules and atoms that I’d read about in a science book just broke apart and dissolved, like a Flintstone’s vitamin in a glass of water.

I wondered how long it would be before mom got home from work. I half hoped he would leave me there in the closet until she returned. When she did I would be there, in the closet, waiting while she searched the house frantically for me. “Where is she?” She would ask him. “Where is my daughter?” He would just stare at her like he usually did, stare like he hated her. She’d find me in the closet, my knees tucked gingerly under my chin and my waterlogged eyes peering up at her innocently, silently screaming to be let out. Then she’d whisk me out the front door under her arm and to the car and we’d drive away forever.

But that didn’t happen. It couldn’t have anyway; being merely five feet tall, my mom would not have been able to gracefully carry me under one arm. I stayed in the closet and started counting backwards and tapping my fingers on my knees to the tune of that song that supposedly never ends. My tears had dried up by now, crusting on my face and pulling at my skin whenever I’d wiggle my mouth. I heard the recliner in the living room squeak and seconds later dad flung open the closet door again, knocking it off the runner, and stared at me with a species of facial expression that was sufficiently frightening.

“Hang up your Goddamn coat next time,” he said, and walked away.

I stayed still for just a moment, thinking. My coat, huh. I thought to myself. That was it. I pulled my coat out from under my butt and hung it on a hook as a new batch of tears started rolling down my cheeks. I quietly snuck out of the closet, unsure if the open door was invitation to leave. I sprinted to my bedroom at the back of the house, making it through my little sisters’ bedroom in a mere four steps. Opening my own closet door, I tucked myself inside, balling myself up in the corner and hugging my knees and welcoming the comfort and darkness of my own self-inflicted isolation.