Daughter

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Step One:

If no one answers I will leave this message:

A daughter runs down a pier, over a rail, into a shark’s jaws.  Suppose I am the shark.  Suppose I say, “Is there no life I would not save you from?”

I am asking the wrong question.

I should ask rather: Have you seen my daughter?

I’m calling from a payphone on Coney Island.  Here are many daughters.  But none are mine.

“Hello,” says a man.

“Once upon a time,” I tell the man, “the number I dialed belonged to my daughter.  The recording said:  Hi.  You’ve reached Dee.  When clearly I had not.  Do you know my daughter, Dee?”  I ask him.

“No,” he says, “I don’t want any,” and hangs up.

On Coney Island they keep daughters on leashes.  Fathers flick their wrists and daughters come reeling back to them.

Step Two: 

If I had a word for flight, I might feel better.  Let’s try:  Father.  David Mike or Brian.

I told him, the daughter is feral.  Don’t try it.  We were kneeling by the bed.

“Come out,” he said and crushed a can against his forehead.

My daughter, crouching under the bed, tucked her beak into her feathered chest.  I watched, for hours, the whites of her eyes and teeth glint beside the beams of our flashlights.

“Are you my daughter?”  I said.

“No,” she whispered, “I don’t know you.”

Step Three:

Daughter, don’t let me feel shame.  It is not an island, but an archipelago, and the way home is by knowing what I called darling never was.

I’m looking for another quarter.  I want to call my daughter.

Step Four: 

Let’s suppose I was a shark on Coney Island.

I’d have eaten him.  I know what punishment is.  I am a mother.  What should I punish?

Step Five: 

I want my knees to be his broken ribs.

My daughter: all teeth and beak and wings beat.

David Mike or Brian slapped her mouth.  “Be still, now,” he said and stroked the feathers from her neck.

Step Six:

So, you can imagine my surprise when I discovered no daughter existed.

No one to swallow.  Nothing lost.

I will call again.

You think I’m behaving like a hysteric.   Well, let me ask you this: Do you think I’m behaving like a hysteric?

I will call again.

Step Seven:

It is not that David Mike or Brian pulled her fangs out with a wrench and sold them to the tourists, but this:  I am eating a candy apple.  The pulp is jagged and tastes of rust.  I discover, as I hurl the core over the boardwalk, I’ve cracked, gummed, and swallowed every tooth in my mouth.

Step Eight:

Daughter, you are only some lewd school girl with your arm slung over the back of your chair, and you won’t tell us where you’ve been, or why they call you what they do.

Do you imagine your behavior is original?

Meanwhile, under the shade of oak trees, on crowded trains, in passing cars, in the door-jambs of corner stores they go on calling.

Step Nine:

I am digging in my purse for a quarter.

It was not the daughter drug out from the bed by a fistful of feathers, but her push snapping my hands off at the wrist.

One minute my palm closed around a quarter, and the next my severed hand, like a fish, flopped from my purse to the boardwalk.

My wrist like stems of cut flowers.

Step Ten:

Once I was sure she was the shade, the breeze, the sun, a hand that held me everywhere.

Now my daughter, I know, is nothing I have ever felt.

Step Eleven:

I find my land and black berries and forget my daughter.

Until one day she is flicked, like a used matchstick, from a passing car.  My field will fill with a fire, which, it will occur to me, I’d never stopped waiting for.

I’ll remember my daughter then, who spent my life growing old without me.

Step Twelve:

Each night I prepare for my daughter’s arrival.

I’ve got a clamp in my mouth, and I crank it wider.  My lips, my gums, my jowls grow wolf-wide like half moons tipped to their sides.  Blood and saliva drip off my chin—it feels like eating my own face, or white light blighting her back to me.

“What are you doing?”  David Mike or Brian says.  The bathroom door creaks beneath his shoulder.  “Let me in.”

Somewhere my daughter is behaving like a lady, drinking tea, eating cookies, telling other ladies she tried it once, being a daughter.  But it did not, as ladies say, take.

David Mike or Brian will break this door down if I do not open it.

I cannot answer now, I tell him.  My lip is a leach feeding on my face.  I try and fix it to my mouth.  It simply unravels.

Out in the hall the wood is cracking.  Inside the bathroom a stench of blood and vomit spattered walls.

I am sure of two things:  what is coiled in the commode is a long lip or small intestine.  And I, crouched over the bowl, am in the path of what is coming.