Phantom Mark

Poem - by Liana Tang

A small child of eight

Yawning,

Cracking her neck,

As she finished a bold string of equations.

She plodded out of the tutoring center 

With a heavy-loaded backpack,

Brimming with files worth of homework,

Under flickering lamplights.

A small blur from a distance grew. 

A grown man in a suit strode alone down the street

Arrived with a mini pink scooter in his clutches.

“Hop on, sweetheart,” her father said.

“You deserve your night of fun.”

A half-sprouted adult of seventeen

Scrolling her phone inside her room

Elbows propped on the stack of books set on the table,

All due next week.

Knock, knock, knock.

As the door veered open, a looming dark figure

Blocked the hallway lights. 

The silence hung in unspoken chains 

Weighing down on the girl’s shoulders,

Caught in a crime.

“Go to sleep,” the man rasped.

He scooped the pile of textbooks

Before slamming the door

As the father studied the texts until broad daylight

So he could teach his little girl once again,

Like he once pushed her forward the first time she rode a wobbling scooter.

Soon,

A lady graduate of twenty-one

“When are you getting a job?”

Turned into a rising career woman of twenty-five

“How much are you getting paid?”

Then a director executive at thirty-three

“When will you settle down and have children?”

To unemployed at forty-six

“I’ve told you so.”

Only to become a successful business owner at fifty.

Gray hair was flying at its seams 

And sunken eyes, 

As she let out a breath she’d held for so long. 

Overworked, 

Proud, 

But alone. 

Now we’re face to face, 

Eye meets eye. 

I reach out my hand

Only for his smiling, flaking frame 

To crumble, 

Dust carried by God’s winter breeze. 

I swing back 

And wade through the tide of people, 

Ignoring the complaints hurled over my shoulders 

But the crowd never thinned. 

There were no remains. 

No photographs to tell the story,

Except a rusty, pink scooter. 

Only a phantom mark 

That I was once his daughter.