If You Have No Daughters

Hot cross buns!
Hot cross buns!
If you have no daughters,
Give them to your sons.
One a penny,
Two a penny,
hot cross buns!

Imagine that you are the father of an exceptional child. The child is dead. She fell down the stairs some years ago. The night before her death, you told her something awful: you told her that girls could not be as strong as boys. The next day she slipped on the cellar steps and broke her neck.

Suppose that you are not a superstitious man. But there are questions you would ask yourself, correct? Isn't that normal? To wonder if your words triggered the event? To believe, in the small fearful corners of your heart, that you killed her, the vibrations in your larynx twisting like snakes into something evil and strangling, lying in wait for her on those stairs. Isn't it only right to hope that, in her last moments, she thought of him and not of you?

Isn't it better, in this case, to transfer your love - the bottomless love of a father for his little girl - to him? Isn't it better to use that love, keep it fresh with constant stirring, than to let it stagnate and rot? He who bears your daughter's sword, he who wailed her loss to the heavens and sees her ghost everywhere: isn't it normal to love him? Not as the son you never had but for the daughter you lost.

That's what you tell yourself. You are so proud of him - so proud. He has exceeded every expectation. The promise budding in your little daughter has blossomed in him. Your snake words were wrong - you see that now, don't you? He is what she would have become. Sometimes, in the roll of his shoulders and the graveness of his eyes, you can just make out the slender outline of your girl. That's what you imagine when the weather is sweet and the cicadas creak so peacefully.

But you can't know for certain, can you? You do not know that, had she lived, you would have caught the snake and killed it instead. You do not know for certain that repentance is possible without sacrifice. Would you have felt affection for him only as your daughter's shadow? Or would you have invested all your hope in him as the son you never had, muddying the well of fatherlove? You cannot know. The answers belong to some other, happier world, one in which your daughter is not dead. It's what you tell yourself. But you cannot know.

Is it right to encourage him? Is it strange to believe that his dream has magical properties, like fairytale wishes? Could you see yourself hoping that in the moment of fulfillment, as he stands there in grim triumph, she will burst back into being, formed from air and water and earth and the love your poured into her through him - still young, still long-limbed, her child's body perfumed with sweat and grass? Is it strange to think you will see her again, your little bird whose wings you clipped, whose neck you wrung?

Tell me what you would do, my dear, if you were me. Tell me as I stand by your grave, watching the muscles roll like hills across his broad back as he walks away. It feels like he is taking you with him. Tell me before he disappears down the hill and out to sea and I can no longer be comforted by your presence in him. Tell me. Are these the wonderings of a lonely father, or merely of the guilty?

Oh Kuina, Kuina: you would have been nineteen.

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notes: Kind of short. I feel like it borders on exposition at times, but I tried to play around with the 2nd person voice to avoid that. As always, any feedback is appreciated!