The Lost Daughter Collective

by Lindsey Drager

  He praised her tale and bid her good evening, though he could not bring himself to kiss her forehead as he always did. And when he took himself to bed, lying next to the woman his daughter called mother, he struggled to find sleep. Through the night, he was left in the twilight space on the border of waking, the tale a vortex in which he found himself consumed. His fear was two-fold: both that the story’s conclusion might be more horrific than the tale so far, and that the story’s origin lived somewhere inside the body he’d co-produced.

  The next day at the mill, weary-eyed, groggy, and expended by the tale, The Miller struggled to work. He found himself making minor mistakes. As he left the mill for fresh air, he forgot to firmly fasten the door. Meanwhile, his daughter had spent the morning wandering the streets in order to find the story’s ending, and just as The Miller left, she entered the site of his work, so excited to share with him the conclusion that she could not keep her body still. Her exhilaration made her form unfamiliar to her—she tried to control it but she continued to fail, tripping on the stone path from the town’s center, losing her footing again as she half ran to the mill. And so, when she reached it, she accidentally fell into the complex machination that—until that moment—had practiced annihilation only in an effort to produce.

  In the years to come, The Miller would tell no one the story of his lost girl. For what haunts The Miller is why he’s haunted: not because his daughter’s gone, but because he has been left for eternity ever-hovering in the horror of the story she left undone.

  BY THE TIME THE girl has acclimated to the age of five but before she is on her way toward six, she will be woken one morning to a discovery concerning her mouth that will confuse her even further. She will wake in her small room with the light still on, because she had fallen asleep while working with her shadow girls. As the light of the morning filters into the room from the tiny window that lives high up on the wall, it melts with the artificial light of her lamp, in effect putting her shadow friends to sleep. She wakes and notes this, then runs the tip of her tongue along the bottom gums, where two coves sit empty. But as she lets her tongue linger in the fissure left behind, she notes a bit of rigid something emerging from where her tooth no longer lives.

  The walk to the women’s restroom feels much longer than usual. As she takes each cautious step, she tries not to visualize what could be growing in the caverns of her mouth. She imagines a claw emerging that curves toward her eyes and envelopes her face. She imagines a mechanism planted in her gums by someone she trusts while she is sleeping, one that slowly grows over and around the contours of her head to lock it closed like a fitted cage. But when she places herself in front of her low mirror and, after sighing deeply, opens her mouth, what she sees is a slice of bone-white. She runs her tongue along it and then places her tiny index finger in the hole to confirm.

  It is more ragged at the top than the last, but it feels like— could it be?—another tooth. She is so relieved that she slides to the ground. She almost wants to smile until a foggy sadness overwhelms her, as she comes to realize that her comfort might be short-lived, that just because a new one’s coming in does not mean it will stay. Perhaps her crime is so fundamentally awful she has been sentenced to a lifetime of rotating teeth, where her mouth is a machine that churns out bone like the head makes hair.

  She walks back to her room alone, and when she passes her father in the hall, she does not return his nod.

  AFTER THE ICE SCULPTOR’S passing, a series of ice sculpture publications will contact the Wrist Scholar in an effort to interview him about his daughter’s death. He will have the staff of the Wrist Institute hold off these calls and visits, but one will sneak through. The Writer will craft a fiction that she is a cousin of the Wrist Scholar and wants to pay her respects. When the staff grants her entrance, she will be directed to the Ice Sculptor’s girlhood bedroom first. She will slowly turn the doorknob and she will enter the room.

  THE WOODSMAN AND HIS DOROTHY

  CONTROL, THAT DARK DESIRE, rules the heart of the father and the daughter, for it is the evolved apparatus for combating fear. Of all the species gracing the ground, the quality of character fathers and daughters share most closely is the paralyzing anxiety installed by threatened governance.

  For years he practiced the art of control, spent hours in his room entertaining his daughter who did not speak. The source of her silence was a dark mystery that cloaked the home like an opaque blanket covers a sick child. The Woodsman tried in vain to draw a smile from his daughter’s lips and one day did when he whittled a face into a log. By the time he had manufactured a full marionette, the girl smiled daily, watching him work the image of the child out of the wood, watching the wood child released from the confines of the logs. When finally the child was done, body-clothed, face-painted, and string-secure, the girl’s desire to be heard overwhelmed her. Her father handed her the puppet and she began to use its body as a language, to speak through the wooden frame and to her father. In this way, he learned her fears and needs. She loved best watching her father manipulate the strings such that the wooden child looked as though it moved alone. She would watch her father’s show, let herself be seduced by the movement of the wooden child, but soon she let her gaze slide up to the scaffolding: her father’s hands moving the beast’s acts below. His hands worked not unlike a maker of music—fingers dipping, wrists angled and sweeping through the air, her father looking south with eyebrows raised and head tilted. And because fathers get lonely, too, the Woodsman spent time with the wooden child even when his real child wasn’t watching. The Woodsman spent his days learning to move the body with increasing accuracy and agility until watching the wooden child meant also forgetting that there was a meat-and-skin man orchestrating the act. Eventually, he was ashamed to admit there was nothing that could have replaced the wooden being he moved, that the power exercised by the dance of his hands was an art and a science at once, a magic and a math.

  He had always been careful to put the puppet away, for he knew the risk of rope; he had lost his father to it. And although that had required intention, he knew that a similar end could be met by mistake. But four years to the day after his wife had succumbed to her sickness, he drank too much of the liquor he’d been keeping in the cellar in the barrel branded with her name.

  He shudders to think of the mess he left on the floor; the pile of chord and limb, two faces—one wood and one flesh—cheek to cheek. He shudders because for a fraction of a second he admires the way they are entwined, the way he cannot tell where his offspring ends and his art begins.

  He is still concerned with puppetry, but is unable to touch his wooden forms and their adjacent string. Now it is more a matter of silent shape, less with voice and walk. He only performs shows for himself, and does decorative woodwork for the townsfolk: simple and elegant adornments like floral designs to frame their cutting boards, decorative pulls for dresser drawers.

  He imagines his failure as a father is his best trait as an artist, for as hard as he looked, he could not find the invisible strings directing his little girl. He wonders what artist manages her strings now.

  WHEN SHE IS EIGHT, in line to get dinner in the cafeteria, the girl will ask her father why he does not believe in the wrist. Several of the Wrist Scholar’s students will be in line behind her and overhear this question. They will stop and look up at the scholar in preparation for his answer. He will ladle soup into his bowl and look at his daughter, then at his students. He will tell her he does not have time to explore the intricacies of the field; that if she is truly interested, she can read the introduction to his first book.

  Later that evening, the girl will slip out of her tiny room to wash her face before bed in the Institute’s women’s restroom. When she returns, a book will lie on her pillow, with a red ribbon marking a place. She will open Against the Wrist and read the following:

  Wrist Studies, while trying to chronicle the controversial history of the place where the hand and arm meet, attempts
to understand why our culture has grown dependent on the myth of the wrist. Contemporary scholars believe the notion of the wrist matriculated out of early theories of the wing. There is suspicion that the myth of the wrist is rooted in the human desire to fly and the psychological implications of learning we cannot, a devastating discovery that permeates our existence and encourages resentment toward the concept of gravity. In effect, Wrist Studies considers one of its primary goals discovering where in our psyches is rooted this innate need. Wrist Studies also has a particular investment in the preservation and scholarly investigation of underground wrist gardens and their keepers.

  But above all, the field of Wrist Studies concerns itself with this central question: where does the hand end and the arm begin?

  THE SMITH AND HIS ALICE

  A MAN CARES FOR his wife for a very long time. Then she becomes withchild and he cares for her even more, knowing the empty channel inside of her is full of the rest of his story, the next link in the family chain. In this way, his wife becomes a room in which is locked his minute future.

  He lost his wife in childbirth. She, the room in which the child developed, then left empty and gone. She, a room buried, such that another house might be built atop.

  This is how the girl that came from her was his and his alone. And because the girl was then his everything, he managed her with great care, learned when to lock her doors and when to keep them open, learned how to break the hinge to get inside.

  Now a man with white hair and sagging skin, he has trouble remembering exactly how that day unfolded, though it still ambles through his mind at odd times. He had locked her in, slid the key under the door. No one, he had told her, and she had said back, No one, and these were the last words he heard leave her lips. Some way down the path he had looked back, saw the dark outline of his girl peering out the window.

  It is when he cannot find the key that he knows. The door sustained no damage, which meant only one thing: when she said No one, she had lied.

  Sometimes he thinks of his girl—her portrait lingers in the fissures of his memory—but through the years she has grown in his mind. She is a woman with children of her own, big-hipped like her mother, strong chin and small hands and gruff voice.

  And sometimes he thinks of where that key lives now, because he knows the properties of metal. Is it buried like his wife, earth working on the body like weather? Has it been melted in a furnace, rebuilt as a tiny metal doll? Or does it live on a string that dips between the breasts of his daughter, rusted around the edges from her sweat? He thinks these things when he mends a hinge and swings it to ensure it is quiet, when he rattles a knob to confirm security—he thinks these things when he sees the empty frame of a way without a door.

  IN HER PENULTIMATE BOOK, On Departing and Apartment, the woman the girl never called mother writes:

  Bound to the idea that our arms are in fact perversions of real winghood, it stands that we are, for the most part, failed birds, flightless and grounded.

  IF SHE COULD OPEN her mouth, she would like to ask:

  Where do the Dorothies go?

  What color is The Barber’s daughter’s hair? Why did her father not reveal this in the telling of his story?

  When the fathers of lost daughters tell each other stories, is the way they sit more a circle or a horseshoe?

  Do the Alices ever think of coming home?

  Since the fathers of lost daughters gather on top floors, are they ever scared of heights?

  What does her father like better: studying wrists or fathering her?

  Is she a Dorothy or is she an Alice, and when will she find out?

  If her father lost his daughter, would he go to meetings of the fathers of lost daughters, and if so, what would his story be?

  WHEN THE GIRL is eleven, she will attend one of her father’s lectures without his knowledge. She will slink into the back of the lecture hall and keep her bangs low across her face so he can’t make her out. She will bury her nose in a notebook like the others, but she will only pretend to write. Instead, the girl will watch her father, notice how he carries himself differently during oration, keeps his hands behind his back, tilts his chin up a bit. She will think he looks much smaller from this height, though his voice booms throughout the lecture hall. Smaller not just in size but in scope; he is somehow reduced from this angle. Volume, she will think, must be applicable not just to sound and mass but to form.

  He will say:

  Believers in the wrist suggest that proof exists in theories of the neck—the union of the head to the chest and shoulder space. They purport the same logic provides a framework for validating the existence of the wrist, though bone scholars have disagreed, as the primary difference between the two is that the neck contains vital organs. Furthermore, there is a wide body of literature on the history of hangings and the valuable role the neck plays in this discourse. Relationships have been drawn between the wrist and ankle, but these, too, are false, given the heel’s value in literature of the joint. Correlations between the wrist and knee or elbow are seldom drawn, given that these act as space breaks in the leg and arm; both do not adhere two separately identified parts, but rather act as an interruption in the rhetoric of limb.

  We say that tables have legs and chairs have arms. We say that books have spines and bottles have necks. We say that clocks have hands; we say that shoes have tongues. The notion of the wrist, however, has not been admitted into the domain of dead metaphor—in short, nothing else contains a wrist.

  In short, we will lose nothing if we choose to lose the wrist.

  THE ANGLER AND THE WAINWRIGHT

  AND THEIR ALICE

  BECAUSE LOVE IS A complex system of overlapping greetings and departures, the places where love ends and begins is often obscured. While popular belief maintains that the body is the conduit for love, it is in the mind where love buds and breaks open and apart. And because the mind is a mysterious arena that is enveloped in comings and goings that intersect and knot like a dense web, it induces a variety of dread. This is why there are no Scholars of Love.

  The Angler had met a woman for whom he cared. When she said she wanted a child, he felt giving her one would be a very kind gift. He would leave for weeks out to sea to lead his girls toward a proper life. Soon after the child arrived, he left for too many moons, and on his return he was not welcomed at the door because the woman had become mind-sick and then became gone. This is how the woman thanked him for his gift: she gave it back.

  The Angler could not pursue his fishing ventures with the tiny girl at home, so he went to the village to see about more grounded work. On the way through the center of the village, his daughter holding his hand, The Angler spotted The Wainwright working on a wagon in distress. As they came closer, his daughter squeezed her father’s hand, because tucked into the place where his shirt met his neck was a flower of a very rare shade. It was a shade living on the precipice between the colors that she knew. It was a shade that collapsed those more familiar colors, that was even somehow missing from the magic in the sky that bloomed in the aftermath of storm.

  And when the daughter and The Angler approached The Wainwright, he knew without looking up what they were there for and untethered the flower from his neck, handed it to the girl. Then he looked at The Angler with a smile that was also an invitation.

  The Wainwright came to The Angler’s home that evening and The Angler told him all: about the woman and the gift and the disgrace he experienced at the peace of her release. And how wrong she always felt. And his shame at feeling most at home in the middle of the sea. And with the thin bone carcasses of emptied fish still left on the table, The Wainwright kissed The Angler’s forehead and then moved slowly toward The Angler’s lips. Then he took The Angler’s hand and led him to the bed.

  Their Alice would watch The Wainwright mend wagons, and for every day The Angler was on a ship and the duo at home would be overcome with sadness at his being gone, they would make a notch in the door, so that w
hen The Angler returned he could see how much they missed him. And The Wainwright would take the girl on long trips in the carts he fixed and she would see what lingered far beyond the village. And when The Wainwright would tuck her in at night, the girl would tell him that when she became old she would spend all her days searching for the mystical color that marked The Wainwright that very first day.

  It was a year after the girl had begun to call The Wainwright Other Father and it was during a storm. The Angler returned to shore because he could read the sky and knew far worse was coming. When his home was in view, he saw The Wainwright approaching through heavy sheets of rain. From far away, their embrace looked gentle, but up close the truth was revealed: The Wainwright was keeping The Angler from falling to his knees.

  It stormed for three days and they spent the whole time searching the wood, asking around the village, retracing every parcel of land they had ever let the girl traverse. They did not eat or sleep. They spent the storm apart.

  They were cradling each other in bed when The Angler looked out the window to see the mystical shade that had marked The Wainwright that first day was smeared across the sky. He shuddered then and rose to close the curtain.

  WHEN SHE IS TWELVE, she will ask her father how he entered the field of Wrist Studies. He will take off his glasses and place his thumb and middle finger on his nose. He will breathe in deeply and look her in the eye, then put his glasses back on. He will pull from his shelf a first edition of Wrist Discourse: Toward a Unity of Arm and Hand, flip to the opening pages, and hand her the book. When she starts to read it, he will ask if she could take it to her room, as he is very busy. She will go there and read these words: