I know from unfortunate future experience that Brigg wouldn’t have stopped if Keti hadn’t shown up to force him to. She was the only person in the world who could ever get him to stop hurting me, and that day she did so with absolute fanfare. If she hadn’t already been my favourite earthling, she’d have solidified it in that moment for sure as she overcame my father in every way but size. She became louder, angrier, and more violent than I could even comprehend. As though she were the god of rage herself, her aura overtook his creeping shadow and she laid her fists upon his cheeks and her claws through his skin in a frenzy of hate. I could understand her words, because they were in a more familiar language, as she asked him questions that he wasn’t given time to answer in between strikes, like “this is what you do to your son? How do you like it when it’s done to you? Do you think I’ll stay here if you’re this way?”

Brigg had many odd features about him, which I would discern throughout my life, but the first one I truly witnessed was his refusal to physically harm my mother. He had no troubles hurting me, but when it came to Keti, he wouldn’t even stop her. He could have! Brigg seemed impossibly large when I was so small, but even as I got older I learnt that it wasn’t so far off. He was abnormally tall and he trained often to keep himself brutally strong. In the years of his life before I’d met him, he had been something of a model, something of a weightlifter, and something of a film star if we count blue films into the realm of stardom. By then, he was focusing on business, which was a broad term for a broad range of crime, but he wasn’t very far at all from the height of his Mr Universe competition days. Keti, on the other hand, was a thin and short teenager. It would have taken only his hand on her forehead to stop her from attacking him, but he rarely even pushed her away. If anything, he cowered so that she could reach him better. I will never understand it, but to me it made my mother surpass hero and go straight to deity.

After she’d drawn enough blood from him to stain his yellow hair pink in parts, he explained something to her, rather calmly, while gesturing to me. I didn’t understand a word of it coming from him, nor from her as she started screaming his words back at him and ripping all of the sheets from the bed.

She was fantastically feral in that moment, removing the muddy sheets from that enormous mattress with claws rather than fingers, and bearing all her teeth as saliva crawled down her fangs and vibrated at the sound of her growls. She wanted more blood, and her taste was for Brigg’s alone. It was a delightful sight to behold, one which aided her might and gave me comfortable space to hide behind.

Though Brigg was still acting rather calm, speaking to Keti in a voice that soothed, he did try and stop her when she pulled up a table lighter from the dresser. He repeated her name in a crescendo of worry as she shook the lighter until beads of wet spotted the pile of sheets like rain, and he grabbed at her claws with talons of his own when she attempted to light it.

“Keti, no, no, no!” He was nearly shouting, and for once, with the scant words I understood.

 Right as he almost had the lighter away from her, she wrenched it back and hit him alongside his head with the heavy thing like it was a brick. Twice, perhaps three times she battered him with it and then threw it, engaged in flame, onto the silver sheets. 

It created an inferno so quickly that even I gasped at its fury. Amongst the grey of the sky, of my clothes, of the floor, the walls, and the silky silver sheets, flames burst into colour. Warm white crawled after orange, and yellow chased blue in a choreography of engulfment. The fire took everything, faster than I could follow it with any of my senses.

Oh, how I got snagged on that fire. The dance of sparks enchanted me with hundreds of beckoning fingers, calling me towards things I felt I was related to like warmth, orange, and movement. As I outstretched my tiny hands towards lapping flames, I was enthralled by how my once ashen brown skin suddenly appeared alive and bronzen. I was untarnished in the light of that passionate flicker, and seeing it made me weep in a way that was so clear in its longing. I wasn’t afraid of the fire, I was happy to see it as though it had been missing from my life, and completely ready to reclaim it.

I was close enough to the omnipotent heart of my mother’s frenzy that I got wet when Brigg unloaded a bottle of champagne and its accompanying bucket of ice onto the sheets. In a cold instant, the colour was gone from the room, extinguished from my flesh, and the chilled scent of alcohol overtook every element of pleasure I had been witness to. Dreariness and the overwhelming echo of Brigg’s and Keti’s voices were the only things left in the universe.

I didn’t care what they were saying, and I didn’t even attempt to understand. There was nothing that could be said which would explain why I’d felt so loved by that fire, and nothing that could console me over its absence. I’d been empty from the moment I gained consciousness, but I hadn’t known it until that dark moment when my hope, my longing, and the hazy memory of my life before The Glass Hollow were extinguished. The pattern of my childhood began in my parents’ bedroom that afternoon, a pattern in which warmth would build to flame in a vibrant swell of brilliance, and just as quickly be snuffed out. My father was, himself, the cold, acidic, and stifling force of expensive champagne, and my mother was always the fire: all-powerful, thrilling, and gone as soon as I reached towards her.

I was the sullied and stained pile of sheets, limp on the marble, both drowned and charred, destined only for the bin.