Closet Space

She could only dimly remember what had set him off this time. She grimaced as her fingers grazed the large knot on the top of her head. She couldn't see it, but she could feel the blood on her fingertips. She wiped it absently on her jeans.

Julie tried to think of what she had done, and it hurt to think. She could remember her father shouting, then standing, then... nothing. It was a blur after that. Whatever it was she had done, her father had locked her in the closet again. Julie dispised the closet. The smell of moth balls and cat urine seemed to hang around her like a shroud. Julie could remember the first time she'd been forced to sit in the "jail cell" she seemed to inhabit so often these days.

She'd been twelve and still recovering from the death of her mother and younger sister not six months before. Julie and her father, David, had just returned home from the store. While David put the groceries away, Julie sat in a chair in the hallway, staring at the photographs hanging on the wall across from her. Friends, family members. All gazing eternaly into space. It saddened Julie to look at those pictures. A photo of her mother, taken only months before her death, rested on the table in the hall. In it, she wore a blue dress, her flaming red hair pulled back into a bun. Julie could see small streaks of gray runnig through it in places.

Mama always said they were our gift to her, Julie thought. Her lip trembled slightly. Next to it was a picture of Maggie, Julie's younger sister by two years. Her sweet smile had always cheered up Julie. Now it haunted her. Julie noticed that one of Maggie's baby teeth were missing and thought morbidly, it'll never grow back, just before bursting into tears.

She was still sobbing when David came into the hallway. She had grabbed both pictures and was clutching them tightly against her chest.

"What are you crying about?" demanded her father. She looked up at him through teared eyes and said: "I miss them, daddy."

"Yeah? Well, I do too, but you don't see me crying about it." He snatched the picture of Julie's mother from her hands. "And what did I tell you about these pictures? You know you start baby-whining whenever you see 'em."

"I kn-know, Daddy, but I like looking at them," Julie said, her voice hitching

"I can take care of that!" he yelled, flinging his dead wife's photo down the hall. It struck the bathoom door, the glass shattering.

"No!" screamed Julie. She tried to run down the hall, but David firmly grasped her arm.

"Now I'm going to take care of you," he mumbled. He drug her down the hall with one hand, and with the other opened a closet door. He flung her inside indifferently.

"Now," David said calmly, "I'm going to leave you in here until you can control that whinin' a little better."

Julie's eyes widened as she realized as her father was actually going to lock her in a closet. She sat back against the wall, pulled her knees to her chest, and rested her head on them. David slammed the door and Julie heard him slide the key in and lock it. The darkness seemed to suffocate her. She listened intensly to her father's footsteps as the faded away from her. She began to cry again. Not only for her dead family, but for her father as well.