Sometimes, she likes to stand on the edge of those big cliffs near her house, the ones she is not allowed to go anywhere near, under any circumstances, do you understand?

Her parents drilled those words into her from the time she was old enough to understand them but after a while they stopped telling her and occasionally she’ll wonder if it’s because she’s old enough to know better or because they stopped caring, but whatever the answer she notices they stopped warning around the time Daddy got a new secretary and Mommy started making her coffee Irish.

She wonders who decided to build a house so close to the Bluffs, anyway. Maybe they firmly believed there was happiness in the world or maybe they liked to lay in bed at night and wonder who was standing on the edge, toes curled tightly around it as if that will keep them steady.

She used to come out here whenever Mommy and Daddy started to yell but lately there’s been no yelling, just stony silence that is somehow worse, and now whenever she calls them Mommy and Daddy they yell and tell her she’s a big girl and shouldn’t be using those titles on them. Sometimes she thinks it’s because they’re ashamed of them, because Daddy is losing his hair and Mommy’s waistline isn’t the same as before I was pregnant.

When she stands there, she spreads her arms out wide to balance herself, but the truth is she feels like she’s flying. She doesn’t look down, because it’s dark and the water makes a sloshing sound that assaults her ears. So instead she looks up, at the sky, and she likes to get lost in the deep blue and feel air underneath her, feel that empty space that stretches out in front of her and sometimes she can delude herself into thinking she’s somewhere far, far away.

A few years ago, a girl threw herself off of the Bluffs, a few miles down from where she lived.

They never found her body.

When that story came on the news, her mother turned to her, and she expected, hoped, waited for her to say, you are not allowed to go anywhere near those cliffs, under any circumstances, do you understand?

Instead, she turned her eyes back to the screen, red eyes that weren’t from tears like she had thought at first but from the bottle she keeps hidden in the laundry hamper so Daddy won’t find it.

Today it’s windy and cold and the wind blows at her back, pushing her, and her toes grip the edge and she lifts her arms and brings her eyes to the sky but it’s dark and stormy and she looks out at all that empty space and thinks of the exhilaration she would feel if she just jumped and flew.

Instead she turns around and treads across the grass as the rain pours down and her father yells at her for her dirty feet and her mother stares at her with red eyes as if she can’t remember her.

She belongs on the ground.