Page 19 of Teddy Bear

- You have no idea how hard all this is for me, Liz. I am completely devastated and cannot recover from this news. That's why I think it's a good idea to get you out of here and continue therapy in private, while we try to process this excruciating loss.

His words are hollow, plastic. I can't make sense of them. Through my half-open mouth, I manage to mumble:

- How did my parents die?

Danny furrows his brows, making the saddest face in the world.

-It was an accident.

He sighs heavily, clinging closer to my shoulder.

And now you finally have me all to yourself, don't you, doc?

I look into the icy blue of his eyes, realizing the weight and extent of my utter helplessness.

A slight shiver goes through me when I realize how close it really is to me, and that in just one day I will be "free", side by side with Danny, my guardian.

-Okay, I just need to rest a little.

I repeat this, as if in a frenzy, pushing him away from me with my hand.

All this is too much for me, unimaginable.

Danny understands the gesture and the mimicry of my body, and retreats from the room into the whiteness of the hospital corridor.

I go into the bathroom and turn the cold water on the faucet. I place my wrists under the hissing stream, trying not to look at my bloodshot eyes in the mirror.

I'm not crying; I'm completely calm and obedient, and a little bit of warm, slimy Danny's sperm is dripping down my inner thigh, under the white hospital nightgown.

4.

The sound of police sirens was piercing and shrill, almost deafening in the muffled, nocturnal silence of our isolated, luxury villa.

My mother and I became horrible, unwilling witnesses to a terrible, agonizing accident that night, in the icy January wind, on a fresh night with a black sky and only two visible stars, shrugging our shoulders from the cold and watching the smoke billow high, thick and heavy, gray and misty, towards the harsh sky.

Mother handled the cold much better than I did, just crossing her arms and wrapping her sweater tighter around her skinny body.

She retained a regal, sculpted frame, but her posture was burdened by the specific, hollow look of a woman who had long ago stopped living.

Anyone who had an ear for the human spirit could tell from a thousand meters away that she was deeply wounded.

Unlike my mother, petrified and cocooned in a sad accident and life's misfortunes, I, on the other hand, could hardly bear the rush of cold wind and fresh air that suddenly filled my lungs when I was taken out of the burning house on a stretcher.

I clearly remember that terrible fever - the body shaking beyond my will and power to stop it, the muscles that tensely played and spasmed in an attempt to warm up, and the desperate need of the shriveled lungs for fresh air that felt both suffocating and overwhelming at the same time.

I remember the terrible blur, the indistinctness, the sudden shouts of people who stood in the vast space of our property, which then seemed to me at the same time terribly narrow and impenetrable, with blurred edges that collapsed into an invisible vortex and a dark, colored background of black night that swallowed and absorbed everything into itself.

I remember that everything seemed somehow caricatured, impossible, unreal.

I had the impression that I was watching a cheap psycho thriller on an old, broken TV, and not my own life.

The life for which until yesterday I was clutching and fighting so desperately, trying to keep even a speck of perfection alive and shiny - trying to enjoy even the colorful facade of what should have been called a happy family.

It was stupid, pointless; it couldn't be real.

Images of Mr. Bunny lit by my father's first match, and drenched in a thick layer of gasoline, begin to burn before my eyes, then images of his white, furry ears in flames, and then the entire furry, plush collection of rainbow colors being consumed by the righteous fire of my dear father who is trying to purify and punish the sins of his promiscuous daughter.

Horror and brilliance, darkness and light, a colorful merry-go-round of the most morbid human feelings alternated in me - until I became completely, almost blissfully numb.