The Daughter Collector

Author: idontwriteibleed

Thick water. Thin blood. Easy to swallow. Pretty to spill. Amber, his wife, didn’t take much convincing. A suicidal virgin made up to be a muse, forcing us to watch her bleed at the dinner table. And maybe he made her. Maybe he handed a razor to a girl made of paper, but it doesn’t matter because even if he conducted evil to crawl into her open wounds, she welcomed it and still does. An accomplice in the abduction of fragile acolytes, exhaling sirenic incantations that beckon us to their narcissus adorned cage.

A seed of suffering is sewn into our stories before we get a chance to contemplate sanity: It was 2am and my first time travelling internationally alone. Myopia. My glasses were in my suitcase but he was in a rush so I submit to the feeling of unfamiliarity. The air smelled pure. I wasn’t cold. The river beside us slurred a consoling ballad and in harmony I hummed. 7 minutes passed; everything was going to be okay, but possessed by a sudden urgency to unveil me, he dug his canines into my hypnosis. The revelation of my father’s death induced in him an elation akin to a poor man’s discovery of a goldmine. Salty ichor slashed my cheeks in a steady stream of dejection. 8, 9, 10. Time to turn me against ashes and undo acceptance in the name of art. He declared me lost, traumatized. Announced with zeal that my parents failed to protect me – I must return, he’ll cut me a key, the new daughter, with you we’ll make the loveliest photographs!

Behind the lens, like an obedient little lunatic, I surrendered. I wailed. Discarded sight for touch. Became Odette at the end of act II in swan lake, before indulging violent confrontations with phantoms that resemble everybody I’ve loved and left. Rationality muffled by pathos. How liberating! Drugged on the illusion of freedom like a caged nightingale relocated from a dark closet to a windowsill. But after two days, dizzy. Vertigo and lethargy stole my smile so his could widen. Slumber was prohibited and I swallowed the vomit because ripe fruit is fevered for a bruise.

The ocean makes me feel better. I like to let it fuck me. On day three we drove to greet it and I made him play blind man’s buff with smoke. They claimed to want me true but chastised any spilled eroticism – attached to my melancholy like flies to a corpse; afraid my neoteny would sully prestige. Despite my exhaustion that day, I was moved. Raw like if my entrails drank my skin. That sea knew not only my name but my spirit, and being under its enchantment instead of his was a bloody fingerprint on the bed of emancipation.