The water burned. It was all she could focus on, despite everything. It was supposed to be cold. It felt cold on her face, but inside, when she gasped and struggled to breathe, it hurt so much. It felt like something thick and burning hot was searing her chest from within.
Her father’s hands were strong. The skin was rough with calluses and felt like coarse wood grain against the soft flesh of her throat. She marveled at how someone’s hands could feel so unlike living things. They felt cruel and uncaring.
Everything looked distorted beneath the surface of the water. Vivienne saw her father’s face, but the water warped his features. It rippled and moved like his flesh was malleable and alive. His eyes, intense and blue like hers, seemed to bulge and pulsate with the aggressive movement. It looked like they might burst free from his face at any moment.
Her slender hands were wrapped about his wrists. Trying to pry his hands free was like trying to pry trees from the earth. She had never thought of her father as a particularly strong man. Not that she thought him weak, but he never seemed physically foreboding. He never seemed like he would have the strength to choke the life from someone, to drown them in a pond. He never seemed like he would be an impossible force to overcome.
She kicked and thrashed, but it proved useless. Her father pressed down on her with all his might.
She resisted trying to breathe in for as long as she could. She wanted to hold her breath, to outlast him, to break free and escape and live. But it was not meant to be. Even with his powerful hands around her throat, she was able to draw in a breath. Except it was not air that filled her lungs, it was the cold water that still burned its way inside of her.
The anguish seared through her body. She had never experienced pain like it, and she felt pressure building through her. She desperately needed air, but there was none. There was only the excruciating burn and her father’s face. His manic, warped, and rippling expression as he held her under. As he murdered her.
The situation suddenly struck her as absurd. After all this time, her father had finally snapped. He let loose whatever shreds of sanity he had grasped onto. He had become the monster that he’d accused her of being. He was no better. He was perhaps even worse.
She wished she had killed him first. She wished she had gone into his room at night and bashed in his skull with a candlestick or a brick from the garden. She wished she had doused him in lamp oil and set him ablaze. She could have watched him dance, screaming as his flash cracked and fat rendered from his body. None of that would happen now.
Her father would get his wish to be rid of her once and for all. She would have laughed if she could draw in the air to do so.
The burning in her chest continued to spread, and her head throbbed. She tried to focus on his face through the murk, but her vision grew cloudy and dark. Eventually, everything went black. She held onto the sensation of floating for what seemed like a very long time. In time, that vanished, too.
