Unpublished work © 2013 Rachel Whittlesey Wynn

       

 My daughter is called a murderer: Sadie the Slicer, Sadie the Sadist, Psycho Sadie. The S-sound alliterative hiss follows me everywhere I go, like a nest of snakes biting at my heels. In thirty days they will become bored, coil up, and find something else to gulp down.

          

A man becomes not just a father, but a protector when a baby girl is born. My role is to take care of her, even though she only has twenty-nine days left to live. I alone think she has a future, a chance at something, while our community is counting down the days until her death.

 

Marlena’s face is a permanently contorted grimace that only changes when I say Sadie’s name. Then she glares, the whites of her eyes bared, and I can hear her mentally cursing me; mentally shouting that I’m an idiot, that we no longer have a daughter. Silence is louder than shrieks.

 

Marlena put away all the pictures of our girl growing up. And by put away I mean she slid them out of frames and beloved scrapbooks and extinguished her cigarettes into Sadie’s grinning face. The day after Sadie did it, Marlena said to me, “Sadie’s dead to us and don’t you fucking say otherwise”. Then she took the box of photos out back to the cement patio and settled into the metal chair with blue and white strips. Each photo plucked by numb raw fingers from the box resting on the grey slushy ground and to the demise of the grill which curled away any memory of Sadie. Marlena would stare at each picture, as if trying to recall the memory and then delete it from her brain.

 

She stubbornly sat there in her poufy black parka for an hour that morning, lighting and relighting her cigarettes each time to burn a perfect circle into Sadie at soccer practice, Sadie at high school graduation, Sadie at her wedding. The icy wind blew her hair up into the air where the strands whipped around like the devil’s angry tail. I sat inside at the dining room table and stared at the scrape on the worn maple wood surface. When Sadie was seventeen she absentmindedly ran her skates over the table and one left a deep scar. Marlena tried to cover it up but it remained, visible and ugly.

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