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The little red-haired girl heard her father come home from work too early. During the day, when he was at work, and her mother cooked, or cleaned, or read, or took a nap, the little red-haired girl hid in the shared closet that joined her parents’ bedroom to her bedroom, which was nothing more than a large walk-in storage space her parents had fixed into a nursery. The closet was really a small passageway between the two rooms. Her father built shelving for storage and mounted dowels for hanging clothes. The girl sat beneath the dresses and coats that dangled from the wooden rods. For her, the closet was a catacomb cave: the clothes from above dropped like stalactites; the shoes on the floor, stalagmites; the shelves with boxes of this, that, and the other, an ossuary of saints and martyrs; and the wood grain patterns of the plank floor, a typology with streams that flowed into the depths of cold and lightless aquifers. She sat for hours with the closet door set ajar. A fraction of light creeped around the jam. In her reverie, she smelt the musty air and smoothed her hand against the moist rock walls.

When her mother and she were about to prepare the package that the little red-haired girl would bring to her grandma for an overnight visit that evening, her mother needed to lay down for a nap, which is where her husband found her when he came home too early from work. Face up, as if set for a funeral, she did not stir when he placed himself beside her. He lay on his side and set his arm across his wife’s waist. His head rested in the curve of her neck. Their daughter observed them through the narrow slit of the door. Her parents’ breath slowly harmonized. Their chests rose and fell like the seiche of a closed lake. The little red-haired girl also grew tired. She curled upon her cave floor and slept.

She woke to her parents’ moans. Her father raised himself on his elbow and bent his head over his wife’s face. They kissed. The woman on the bed nestled her body into the embrace of her man. He wrapped his resting arm around her back. She folded her body to the shape of a newborn in flexion at all the joints. The little-red headed girl scratched behind her ear and raised her head just slightly enough to see better through the crevice in the smooth cave walls. Strange behavior, indeed, she thought. Her father’s hand cradled her mother’s breasts. The little red-haired girl clutched her own flat chest. Then he ran his fingers across her face, the edge of her jaw, over her chin, down the ridges of her throat, and up the side of the neck to behind the ear. Her father did this two, three, maybe four times with his fingers before he bent over his wife and slid his lips along the same path his fingers took. Then they kissed. The little red-haired girl’s mother began to fumble with her husband’s belt as he undid the clasp of her waistband that cinched the full-length skirt spread across the bed. With her husband’s belt unhooked, the woman reached her hand into his pants. He unlaced her bodice. Her breasts spilled out of the undid blouse. Their daughter sat on her heels and leaned forward on her hands, like a cat examining a curious movement in the shadows of a tree. Her mother’s face flushed with blood, and she sighed, if not whined, when the little red-haired girl’s father lifted his wife’s skirt enough to reach his hand between her legs. The motion of his arm and her pelvis began to rock like the pendulum of the grandfather clock in the family den. At last, the little red-haired girl’s father eased his pants below his hips as his wife pulled her skirt above hers and spread her legs. When her husband penetrated her, the little red-haired girl’s mother whimpered. She wrapped her legs around his rumpled trousers. Then they kissed.

That was enough. The little red-haired girl covered her mouth against an audible gasp. The creak of the bedframe and rustle of the sheets smothered the soft breath of the tiny child tucked away in the closet. She turned away. What had her father done? she thought. What could come of her mother? Waves of impotence shuddered over her body. She was small. She was weak. And he was so large. The little red-haired girl caught herself in mid-heave, her breath pulsing, her chest in spasm. The pulse of her blood muffled the crescendo of her parents. She heard nothing but the boom boom boom of her heartbeat as she ran down the center hallway of their village house and into the back garden and through the gate to the alley behind the rows of similar village houses. Maybe she heard her mother call her name. Her father echo his wife. The little red-haired girl ran and ran and ran until she found herself beyond the split rail fence that formed the village border. There the woods were dark and deep and quiet. She coiled beside the rough bark of a pine tree and swayed herself to a twilight sleep. He was there, too, not far, having returned to the village after a noticed absence of months. He marked the dozing little red-haired girl as he rolled a cigarette then licked his lips before he lifted a leg and struck a match against the hard sole of his boot.