Voodoo

by Christopher DeWan

You walk into your daughter's room. You wouldn't do this normally. You try very hard to respect her privacy, even when this sometimes causes you to wonder if you're being a bad or neglectful parent. The fact that you wonder means that you probably are not a bad or neglectful parent. But everyone has better days and worse days.

Her alarm clock is going off and she's nowhere to be found, so you walk into her room, and that's when you see them: two little dolls. Voodoo dolls of you and your wife.

"Maybe it's an art project," Janine says, when you tell her about it that night. "She's always been a kind of strange girl."

The next day, while your daughter's at school, you sneak back into her room to have another look. But her desk is empty. You open the drawers and rummage through, careful not to make a sound, even though no one's home. But you don't see them. You check her dresser, filled with underwear that looks too lacy to belong to your little girl. You feel guilty going through her things. "Dad," she'd say, "what are you doing?" And you're not sure what you'd answer.

As you reach for the comforter, to look under the bed, your phone terrifies you nearly to death by ringing.

"Hey. What's up?"

Janine has a migraine, came on suddenly. She's on her way home.

"I'll have a cold compress ready for you. That helps a little, right?"

Janine's firm depends on her and she likes that, which means she works long days and then brings work home with her, too. Your own consulting business has been slow lately, and you find it's more satisfying to weed the garden and to cook elaborate meals than to power on your computer and try to drum up new clients.

You're chopping vegetables when Janine comes through the front door, and before you can ask how she is, she throws up on the foyer rug.

"Go to bed, I'll clean it up."

Your daughter comes home an hour later. "Eww, what are you cooking?"

"It's chicken stew. You like chicken stew."

"I'm vegetarian."

You had no idea your daughter was vegetarian. "Tell you what: I'll take the chicken out."

"Gross!"

You don't know how to ask if she's playing with voodoo dolls. You're not even sure "playing" is the operative verb. The dolls were made of sticks bound together with wire, and dressed in old Barbie clothes. What makes a voodoo doll a voodoo doll? What authenticity? You touch your head, feeling for pinpricks. You don't feel especially well, but you don't know if that's black magic or just the normal kind.

"Honey, can I talk to you about — ?"

But she's already gone upstairs and closed her door.

It's unfair, isn't it, to pour so much hope into one's child? To ask them to be the flimsy vessel of so much expectation? We want all the things for our children that we never had – which means we're asking them to succeed where we ourselves have failed. Why can't we just simply love?

You knock on her door. "Can I come in?"

She's on her bed, doing what looks like homework. "You know your mom's sick, right? Some kind of headache."

Your daughter pauses at this information, but gives no indication whether she herself has driven a hatpin into her mother's avatar brain.

"What are you working on?" you ask, when you notice the paper you assumed to be algebra is actually filled with unreadable symbols.

"It's cool," she answers. "It's like a secret code."

"Can you tell me what it says?"

"Well, then it wouldn't be secret."

You look at her, this little creature. You recognized her, you think, when she was three, when she was seven. She seemed like someone who could be a daughter of yours.

But lately you're not sure.

"You hungry? You want grilled cheese?"

She shakes her head and goes back to coding.

While you're washing dishes, you get a nosebleed. You watch the blood fall into the dishwater: the drops are slow to disperse. They hang between the suds and the enamel, floating wispy globes. Slowly they spread into thin red clouds, little sanguine genies offering you a chance to make a wish—but do it quick, before they disappear forever. You watch your blood floating in the sink, fading. There are so many things you could wish for. So many things.

(This story originally appeared in A cappella Zoo.)