Practice Makes Perfect.

Daddy's face was all wrong. 

The corners of his big mouth stretched, hideously slow, cutting their way upwards through his sunken cheeks. His thin, dry lips parted like curtains, and shiny, uneven teeth greeted her, square and hard as bricks. 

"This is a smile", she reassured herself. 

But daddy's eyes didn't smile. 

They screamed. 

"So, honey..", Daddy beamed, giddy with deliberate, perfected jolliness. His cheery tone was precise and pitch-perfect, with a touch of manic rage sizzling in his tongue, burning her eardrums. She was already ready to fall to her knees. Beg. Apologize. For Mama, for bad grades, for bad memory, for bad faces, for general badness. For everything.

"They're coming. Are you ready?", he whispered and ruffled her thick, golden locks. Making sure she looked the part. "Let's put on your pajamas, ok? You like this one?". He kept asking and making suggestions while pulling and pushing at her limbs, taking off her silver tiara, her icy-white skating shoes, and her baby-blue skiing dress in clumsy, frantic haste. She remained limp like a puppet in his hands the whole time. 

When she looked like she really just got out of bed, he smiled. She smiled back at him. Daddy was her hero and it was almost second nature for her to mimic him without noticing. "Stop smiling, sweetie", he ordered, still smiling.

Her tiny shoulders rattled, a vein twitched right under the beauty mark beneath her right eye, and she tasted her own hot, bitter tears at the tip of her tightly shut mouth.

His hands clasped her, pinning her in place. His grey eyes, wild and bulging with barely repressed panic, were lasered in on her face, studying and rearranging every wrong facial expression with a simple look.

"I said stop smiling, sweetie. Fix your face", he ordered again, his own smile vanishing. "This is not the time for smiling. They will think there is something wrong and you were lying. Do you want the police to think you were lying?". His parted mouth was so close to her forehead that she could feel yesterday's booze heating her hairline.

Her chubby face was tight with anxiety and the smile wouldn't budge. It got stuck. She covered it with her hands. Her huge, green eyes were welled with tears, pleading with her body for mercy.

"Come on. We'll try this again one more time. Come, come here". He held her up and moved her away from the blood.

"Now, please remember what we practiced this time", He begged, blocking her view with his broad shoulders. 

Her eyes failed her and darted back to the cherry-red pool of blood that slopped all over the knife-like sharp edges of the living room table. 

She couldn't bear to glance at her Mama's splayed legs under the table.

"Look at me", he sneered and every muscle in her body obeyed.

"When the policeman comes here and asks you what had happened.. what will you say, hmmm?". 

The "hmmm" sound stretched out inside her head for a very, very long moment. A faint memory of Mama's voice humming her to sleep crashed at the farthest corner of her foggy mind and her very core was jolted by the impact.

It all felt so, so wrong.

"I was.. sleeping.. in my room".

"So, you weren't with daddy at the door?"

"No".

"He didn't try to take you to practice tonight?"

"No, I was sleeping".

"Mama didn't pick a fight with daddy?".

"No, Mama is nice".

"Don't smile. What happened, baby?"

"Mama hit her head".

"No. Do it again".

"Mama fell down and hit her head".

"No! We've practiced. Again".

"Mama slipped and fell down and hit her head".

"Good. Again".

Mama was mad at her baby girl. Her star. She got a bad grade in the skiing competition. After all this time and money. After practicing her dance and her smile again and again and again. Mama got mad, so mad, and went to pick a fight with Daddy. She preferred to fight with Daddy when she was mad at her precious star-girl. They were in the living room. All three of them. The TV was on and it muffled out the screams. It was past midnight. Daddy was trying to take her to practice. Mama yanked her and yelled that this is a waste of time now. A waste of money. A waste. Her only daughter was no star at all, a waste, and he was ruining their lives still chasing a dead dream. Daddy got mad and yelled a bad word and Mama clawed at his face. He got madder and pushed her away with all his might. Mama stopped moving. 

The little girl always needed to replay the truth in her head over and over before she can erase it. The truth needed to be emptied out before she could replace it with a new "truth". She couldn't repeat the new "truth" without smiling, though. But daddy didn't get it. Couldn't. To him, relentless practice was the solution to every problem.

"Mama slipped and fell down and hit her head".

His stiff shoulders relaxed and he let a hand rest on her head, petting it like a well-trained puppy. "You understand what 'accident' means, right? Sweetheart?".

She no longer understood what 'accident' meant. She used to think it meant doing something bad but unintended, something like 'mistake', but when her left foot failed her at the skiing competition and she slipped and fell down; daddy had insisted she'd done it on purpose to be a brat. 

Inside the living room, mere feet away from Mama's cold body, Daddy's hands cupped her face. His thumbs wiped her dried tears and pressed at her skin with soul-crushing tenderness. 

"What happened to Mama was no one's fault. It was an accident. An accident, sweetie. I would never hurt you or Mama ever. Ever. Believe me".

She obeyed. She believed. 

Mama is dead and it's my fault. This is all my fault. This is all my fault. This is all my fault.

The street hummed with police sirens, but she didn't hear or see the policeman coming until he has already invaded their house. When the heavy footsteps approached her; Daddy hugged her, shaking, hiding his face in her hair. "Remember to fix your face", he whispered. 

She remembered. She practiced.

But when the policeman leaned down and smiled at her; her body failed her for the last time and she smiled back.