The pit of my stomach overflowed with orange popsicles by ten o’clock in the morning. Sticky wrappers splayed across my once-white bedding in a collage of leftover sweetness. My lips glistened, tainted with goo. Down the hall, the droning snores of a sleepless man echoed throughout the house. My cherub feet danced across the linoleum to the raucous sound and into the kitchen. The box of popsicles ran empty; my father didn’t wake until nearly three in the afternoon. 

I slept with every light on, forbidding any shadow from concealing ghoulish creatures of the night. Mom would tell me, “Eight-year-olds aren’t afraid of the dark.” Often I would protest, claiming that I wasn’t afraid of the dark but what hides within it. That night, I laid in bed illuminated like the flicker of a candle against an empty church. Before cascading into dreams of kissing the boy caught eating crayons, I sat awake wishing my father was there to make fun of the clown hiding in my closet. 

Right before my twelfth Christmas, I bled into my favorite underwear. Once cotton-white and decorated with a pink rose, now soiled with the bloodshed of womanhood. Mom gifted me a box of Tampax Pearls, topped with a red bow. My father’s dog ate the tampon from the trashcan, painting the carpet with its grisly remains. He screamed at me as if his anger would revert me back to my youth. Santa died and the holidays became scrubbing period stains. I mourned his death over mint-chocolate-chip ice cream. 

It must have been twenty minutes before I looked up from the menu, only to be greeted with a half-hearted grin and uneasy eyes. My gaze shot back down and I proceeded to scan the menu, mimicking someone who wasn't about to order chicken tenders. Behind the veil of fatty foods, my father sat with his woman of the hour; he said her name was Ashley. Before Ashley there was Melanie, not to be confused with the girl before her: Melody. Then there was Cassie; the first dame to weigh heavy on my father’s heart after Mom. He told me he had fallen in love with Ashley, that he thought she was the one. I blew bubbles into my pop. After dropping me back off with Mom, he forgot to pick me up for three years. 

Our family photo albums now concealed within a box, plagued with unfamiliar women attached to my father’s hip. Beside them is a girl, her tongue splintered with apologies saved for her Dad. I no longer live in fear of the darkness that consumed her, for I have become the clown that hides in his own closet; a reminder of the child who bled orange popsicles.