After that, you bundled me in those ratty handsewn quilts that kept you sane while you were pregnant. Other mothers poked at their fleshy sacks of children. They measured the length of their teeth. You covered me up and told everyone I’d gotten a chill, gave me a woolen hood to shadow my face. Who would question it? Sprawled on the frozen ground well into the evening in only the pilled, wrinkled slip worn every night to sleep. A somnambulant daughter, a new curse for the fables. Wandered out the wrong way—walking where, who knows. Through fields of golden wheat smashed down rotten beneath bare feet. Who would question it? A child lost and miraculously found. Well, the old women. They would question it. Hence the teeth-measuring. It’s in all the fables. Can’t trust a child lost then found. The old women kept away from us. When they saw you at the market, they stomped on your toes. Smashed your grapes like black, swollen eyes.
After that, you spent months teaching me all the sounds letters could make, and the proper way to hold a pencil in my right hand, not the left, and the fables all the other children knew by heart. Tantruming foxes and magpies, lonely fruit bats, sheepish toads. At night, you’d read to me, stopping at points to ask senseless, leading questions. You are at home alone, you said, and there’s an unexpected knock at the door. I gasped. I’d answer it! I watched the light drain from your eyes. You’re lost in the woods, you said. I’d find the most horrible creature you can imagine. I’d go home with it. You asked that question so many times. Once, I said this: I’d find your daughter. I’d find her corpse, picked clean by the pixies and the trolls. You said I was your daughter. I shook my head. I was very close to being that thing, but I was not.
I told you what you never let yourself accept. She was gone—but she could be anywhere. Swear it. I only described her hypothetical corpse to shock you. But you didn’t read to me after that. The old women, though, they liked you better pale and gaunt. Eyes like those smashed grapes, knowing something about what they call truth.
After that, you asked me to change the title of this. There was a child who was taken. You offered up other words, too. There once was a child who was maimed. Eaten. Bargained. Who would want to think of their child as being any of those things? Who wouldn’t want their child to have left of their own accord? That child was too young for you to read fables to. To answer your questions. You tell yourself it would have made a difference. You tell yourself you would have her and not me. But you have me. You have me.
I was the child who stayed. I am the child you have. I’m sorry for planting her rotten body in your mind. I thought it was what you wanted to hear. But read this. Think of it this way. I am the one who offers you hope.
Who but you would call it a curse?
Fiction - ISSUE #28