Girl Disappeared

From IWWG (International Women's Writing Guild):

 "On March 30, 1858, Hyman L. Lipman patented the pencil with an attached eraser. I can't help but think of Russell Edson's prose poem, "Erasing Amyloo". Use Edson's first sentence to launch your own piece about a daughter's experience of being invisible to her father:

A father with a huge eraser erases his daughter"

Girl Disappeared

They all thought it was so cool that my father was a magician. “A real magician!” they squealed at my sixth birthday party. It didn’t get any better over the years. In high school, they wanted him to perform at their birthday parties, wanted him to do more elaborate illusions every time. Who did they think he was, David fucking Blain? Maybe if he had been….

It all happened fast, when you think about it. I fell and skinned my knees one too many times, so he made them disappear. At least they couldn’t hurt anymore when I fell.

When I got a little older, I tried to engage my mother in some form of sane interaction when I mentioned his drinking problem to her. A couple of hours later, I overheard her talking to my dad in his study. Like the simpering mouse-child that she was, she went to him with “I don’t know why she would say such things…what should we do about her?” An argument ensued, which mostly entailed him raging at her. I can only imagine her behind the closed door with him, cowering by the bookshelf and wringing her hands. I went upstairs to my room and opened Spotify on my laptop. I felt badly that I had tried to talk to my mom about something so serious and important, so I started my Christmas playlist, because I knew it would calm her down. We shared a love of Christmas music, and I could (and did) listen to it all year around.

I had just started singing “sim-ply ha-aving a won-der-ful Christmas-time” with Straight No Chaser and Paul McCartney when my dad kicked the door in and removed my mouth with a wave of his hand. More than anything, that pissed me off because I wanted to tell him that the door wasn’t locked anyway, he could have just opened it.

Part of the trick, until that time, was to give everyone who encountered me that illusion that I was still all there. No one saw that my knees were missing, except my mother of course. This was how he trapped her in a bubble of fear, by showing her through his magic how powerful he was. I’m sure she thought it was charming (no pun intended) when they first met, but now it just kept her on the verge of nervous breakdown at all times.

Dear old dad should have thought before he waved a hand at my mouth, because there had to be a whole elaborate plan of keeping me home for a week, inventing a trauma, and producing fake medical documents explaining my muteness. But he made sure everyone saw a mouth when they still looked at me.

Just before he hurled his penultimate spell at me, I made a final effort to reach him, or push him to the furthest limit of his anger, whichever way you want to look at it.

I’d sent an essay on the psychological effects of magic to an underground online journal called Myst Mind, and they’d accepted it for publication almost immediately. I printed it out, stalked into his study uninvited, and slammed it down on the desk in front of him. Oh, I didn’t use his real name, and I’d even chosen a pen name for myself. But he knew I’d written it, and that I’d made him the star of the essay. He turned to me slowly and began to change himself into some kind of demon-monster-god he thought would scare me. His clothes became the red skin of Satan, he grew a dragon’s head with huge horns and yellow eyes, and the fingernails of his red hands became pointed and black. I’d seen it all before. I actually love dragons. I would have told him that, if, well, you know.

I think he could see how bored I was with the whole thing, so he melted back into himself again. His calculating, hateful self. He simply gave me a pitying look and lifted his arm in the air as if he was conducting his finest orchestra. My hands disappeared.

I almost laughed, inside, anyway. I still had my nose and my feet. Hadn’t he seen any of those miracle stories on 60 minutes about those artists who painted, or played piano, or any number of other things with far less than he’d left me with now?

My amusement quickly turned to anger, and that was my biggest mistake. On the other hand, I was probably just facilitating a faster arrival at the inevitable. I began to kick at the front of his massive desk. I didn’t care how badly I was hurting my feet. Then I wiped out the phone and the lamp with another roundhouse kick. I was on my way to the windows when my dad stood up and shot both arms into the air like a line coach calling a touchdown. I was momentarily frozen until he made a slicing gesture with one of his hands, and then my feet were gone.

His movements continued like poetry: a prince waving from his carriage on his way to be crowned king; a flower girl casting white rose petals on the path of the bride; a matador sweeping the bright cape that he knows the bull cannot resist.

I think he compensated for the fact that these gestures didn’t cause me physical pain by leaving my eyes until last, so that I would see the whole dreadful process. The last thing I did see of him was his face, reddened with anger, and covered in sweat. His eyes held mine until they were gone.

No matter.  I’m here now, invisible, but not gone. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t need to. Instead I’ll… not exactly haunt him, or anything like that. He’ll see. I can’t wait to show him the magic in me.