01:04 - Willow

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******

Elaine Howard was looking at the rise and fall of her Grandfather’s stocks.

She was a hacker; not by trade, by survival and by having a certain aptitude for corporate espionage and a driven need to see something so big dissolve into nothing once again. She had found a way to hack into that corporate account and into her father’s computers using malware and her own ingenious devices, all from a remote location and using a different identity.

She was no longer Elaine Howard, but Willow Dennings.

The most ironic and disturbing part was that her father had turned her on initially to the idea of hacking at an early age(eleven years old). SQL injections, phishing and Trojan horses were all a part of Elaine’s father/daughter bonding experience and it made her sneaky and a bit more apt to lie even under circumstances that did not require her to do so. But, her father told her that lying and cursing tended to create a smarter human being.

He never met an intelligent or interesting person who talked nicely and never lied.

Still, she hated him.

Hated his guts.

She hated the large corporate giant that her family built their fortune on. Willow hadn’t been the son he had wanted, but Frank certainly treated her like one. Not in that heartwarming, ‘going out fishing,’ kind of way, not in that Andy Griffith Show kind of fashion, no, it was more—-“You will succeed in this family. No shortcuts. No pain, no gain. No sissifying. You are a steel beam. A Boulder. Nothing can move you. Nothing will stop you. That way, nothing will stop us.”

Willow thought of her mother.

The way she’d always wear those dark sunglasses, especially when she woke up, and how her raven black hair always looked perfect and smelling of hair spray, perfume and lovely. How her smooth black skin gleamed in the sun, and how much she wanted to have her mother hold her.

Yet, there her mother stayed, in that perfect bubble of makeup, perfectly manicured fingers and brown eyes too lonely to look at—-only dark shades to cover up their apparent paternal estrangement, and of her many hangovers, keeping Willow longing for something that would never be.

Willow, who preferred that name to her grandmother’s namesake of Elaine, would, as a young girl, secretly go into her mother’s room in the dusky afternoons. On her mother’s dresser, she look intently upon the laid out pieces of jewelry, the perfume(which she could distinctly recall there still being a whiff of the perfume wafting in the air), and the silver hand mirror.

Carefully, she touched each piece.

In a way, doing this everyday made Willow feel closer to her mother.

The silence in the room felt less threatening when her mother wasn’t in it.

And Willow realized that she would need to be the one to carry herself tall. Not her mother, nor her father.

Her father Frank, always dressed up, his brown hair tidy and his pale skin smoothed out with a musky masculine accent, and always had a bit of facial hair, no matter how many times he shaved.

But she never felt his scraggly face against hers; never felt her mother’s tired frame hold her so tight and never let go.

She was feeling older, as an adult should, once she hit adolescence. She didn’t care for toys or games or fun. She left her friends and became solitary. She felt like Jane Eyre the day she left Thornfield, remembering the line from the narrative, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

She was an only child; however—-she never felt like their child. Willow kept herself straight and tall, and didn’t bend to anyone, just as father prescribed.

Her finger followed the simple path of the stocks that fell and rose, and she realized even with her experience and expertise, she’ll need assistance to take down and liquidate this empire of her Grandfather’s house. Cryptocurrency and other financial services were the main strategy of this elusive situation, of this legacy that had spawned their story and elevated their status from borderline middle class to something that was almost above upper class, where estates, mansions, yachts and other such luxuries could be afforded without much of a drop in the overall bucket of their wealth.

Willow feels a distaste come to her tongue thinking of the extravagant lifestyle her father set up for them, and starts to think slowly and carefully about her next steps.

She tells herself she isn’t going to merely dissolve the company and all of its assets. She is dismantling something much more significant than that.

She wants to eradicate the name.

The whole of the family legacy.

Willow looks up her friend Red from her contacts, a friend she’s known simply for the aspect of sometimes getting together simply for afternoon tea.

But, more honestly, Red is there simply for information retrieval.

He can provide something she desperately needs. A huge lead to start this process, and to finally move on—-to finally complete her journey of self-sufficiency.

She shuts down the systems and calls Red up.

As soon as it rings, Red answers.

“Care for a spot of tea, darling?”

She smiled wryly, her hands covering her lightly painted lips.

“Yes, Red. Let’s try not to spill too much. Just enough.”

“Oh, you tease. You know I’m in it for our little back and forth. A little argy-bargy to get the blood boiling, eh, Willow, dear?”

She laughs. “Shut the heck up, you silly fool. I’ll see you at our usual.”

“Right, sweetheart.”

She hung up, and felt her cheeks warm up.

Her heart, however, had a low thud to it.

It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t hot.

It felt gray and liquidated.

Slowly, she got up and gathered her things, closing her eyes for a moment as she pictured her father.

He was old now, and looked like shit. Sick and like shit.

Biting her lip, she opened her eyes.

Running off, she felt a flutter hit her whole body. Toe to head.

She took in deep breath and pretended it was a heart murmur.

******

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