MERCY

Matrimony. We see Mercy carressing the pictures in a rusted old photo album that stains her handles when she touches the three inner rings. There is a hole in the cardboard cover. The pictures are of her parents and her as a baby in the earliest life she can remember. She finds a particular one she loves, one of her parents holding her and laughing but privately, to each other, and not at her, or even about her, her mother's hair wavy and long and dark and her father's perfect teeth, she cannot get over how white and straight and perfect her father's teeth are, even now, why she did not inherit those teeth.
She is fat and happy and bubbling and looks like both of her parents. She loves this picture and tries to pry it from the cardboard of the album and it sticks and tears and then tears more until the faces of those two people are unrecognizable, erased, who are those hands that hold that bubbly baby? Mercy's eyes fill with tears.

Your mother and I were never married
She never wanted to, she just wanted to have you
our relief. Our Mercy. So we had you.
And now look. Now look.

Mercy's father is drunk and his wig is half-off and he is mumbling

Mercy our relief our relief
you were our relief we thought
everything was going to be OK with you
but our Mercy Mercy Mercy

Mercy had always thought that her parents were married. The divorce was not an actual legal divorce. All the men her mother ran through that were not her father, always searching for her father, always needing her father's acceptance and love, Mercy saw when she was a young girl the way those men treated her, talked to her. It scared Mercy. Luckily, none of those men were ever weird towards Mercy, none of them touched her, frankly most of them ignored her, waiting and wishing for the weekend when she would be shipped off to her father's house. When she finally disappeared, she was sure the man of the week did not even notice.

What happened to her, Mercy asks her father. What happened to her from this photo to death.

I don't know, I can't answer that
I think she was looking for something
that she never found, clearly. I'm glad
for one thing, my Mercy, I'm sure glad
we had you. You are the best thing that
ever happened to me and to her, even
if she never showed it.