The Daughter

It’s concerning to think that my daughter has been on the phone this long, twirling the coiled cord around her index finger, discussing plans of her 10th birthday party with her friends. There will be party favor bags with Wooly Willy kits, lip gloss, magnifying glasses. No clowns.  That’s what she tells me just before she dials the next number, tapping her nails against the medicine-pink phone like she’s someone older than she is.

I glance at the clock. I suppose it’s more concerning that I don’t actually have a daughter, that I’ve been staring at the phone off the hook for hours, dial tone humming into the room.

I wipe a bit of drool from the corner of my mouth. It’s not like me to be so concerned.

I get up from my pretzeled position on the woven rug and head to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. It makes my stomach hurt, too much acid, and I gulp a bit more as I look out the window above the sink and watch a cardinal jam its beak into its bright red chest, over and over again.

My daughter would laugh hysterically at the sight of something like that. She’d pull out her notepad and pen and write a story about a neurotic little bird who needed sessions on a couch in some psych’s office. She’d call the bird Luther and imagine a life for him and his brood. I like them best, she’d say, because the males have errands to run and food to find, they play a faithful role.

By the end of her story, she’d write something utterly horrific and you might let out a little scream as you finished it, and she’d laugh, but not in a troubling way. A pure laugh that can only mean she’s done her job and the cardinal’s life has stretched beyond the branch of the tree in front of the kitchen window, just before me, where I stare.

I say my daughter because of the way I’ve always wanted one, or thought I wanted one. Maybe it was some kind of societal push or a secret ingredient in my birth control pills. For a while I thought that it might have been the way my own mother looked at me when I stopped needing her for help, for anything, really. But I knew I wanted it early on - to have a daughter.

I imagine all kinds of scenarios in which my daughter exceeds all the expectations of this life. I imagine her to be so unreal that she seems alien. She doesn’t have any particular color of hair because she doesn’t need it. She doesn’t wear pants or dresses because she’s actually thought of some yet-to-be-named garment that she likes best. She has a smile and she uses it when she pleases. She eats, she shits. She walks the earth as if she conceived of it. She’s my biggest inspiration.

A bit of coffee spills onto the floor. I’m lopsided when I think this hard, I don’t mean to be that way. In the corner of my eye, I feel Luther watching me from his branch, Bradford Pear blossoms raining down atop his soft head, releasing that familiar stink. He’s no longer jamming his beak into his body. I’m the sideshow he likes best.

I reach forward to pull the curtains closed and head upstairs to change mother’s bedpan. It’s a Monday, so she’ll be needing extra help today.

Hannah Wyatt (she/her) is a West Virginia writer with a particular interest in fiction, poetry, and genre-blurring pieces. Her creative writing and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Five on the Fifth, Drizzle Review, and L’Esprit Literary Review.