The Nightgirl

Trigger Warnings: Emotional trauma, dissociation, implied abuse.

I do not know my name,

I only know how to haunt my father's grave.

I did not used to be the Nightgirl. I did not used to have a home.

There were the four walls— wood— and when I inhaled, it touched my tongue,

tasting of everything sweet and bitter.

The inviting woods. But then, also a house. A confinement.

Home would be happiness, I imagined.

Maybe I saw it in a dream.

I stepped into the next room, those walls engulfed me anew. Yet, still the same.

I felt it, the slow thrum under my feet, the moss I could picture so vividly between my toes.

A scent like wonder, dewdrops on my cheeks, and flower petals dissolving in my lungs.

At first, they were bitter, as I envisaged swallowing them.

They made a home in me.

I’d never breathe that putrid air again.

He lay there on the couch. A wooden man with a heavy hand.

Above him, the antlers of a stag, mounted on the wall.

He’d made sure they’d never fall, never plunder his weak heart with the tapered ends.

They twisted in ways that appeared silently enraged.

My feet carried me to him, and I knelt by the couch, laying my head upon his bones and weathered skin.

Silence belied tenderness.

I am a daughter of a father.

His flesh and blood, a father’s proudest creation. His hand raised, and my eyes closed. Albeit darkness was not a shelter.

His fingers threaded through my hair, locking in a curl, then untangling with an effortless touch.

A father must love every speck of dust on his daughter’s nose, every rigid strand of hair.

He must have.

But why did his fingers begin as a soothing caress, only to clamp tight— the strands pliant in the clutches of his hold?

They knit together within the palm of his hand, long surrendered.

I allowed it, I moved towards it. A caress meant to be loved. A firmer grip promised devotion.

A pull, a strike, tilted my world.

I belonged back on the firm ground.

Underneath me, the gutted tree was worthwhile— it sheltered you. You forced these trophies to listen to your horrible voice, to be your silent applause.

You only craved warmth and a full belly.

Many things had an excuse.

Yet, I wondered why my head felt hollow and your hand so leaden.

Sometimes you don’t need a reason at all.

I’m a wisp of smoke, begging for an escape through the cracks of your walls.

I have no voice and face, I have no ears to hear your voice. No more.

I had no need for mirrors, for he had crafted my image to perfection.

I bring my night with me wherever I go, they said.

They don’t like my face in the window when they pass the house.

Nor my figure in the woods.

They say the wheat won’t grow — that the grain refuses to sink into the spoiled earth.

But he was the one to turn me towards the moon, introducing us.

I had no voice to tell them.

He and I had enough. Tea leaves stored in jars, chunks of meat in the fridge.

Sometimes it whirred, and I’d sit at the table, listening, as it grew darker outside.

Time moved when I didn’t.

I had stopped counting raindrops rolling from the rooftop, forgetting how they proved everything was in motion.

Except for me.

When he wasn’t home, I didn’t feel relief.

The house always felt stale.

The floor remembered the shape of me when I’d been cradled by the moon.

Through the small window of my bedroom, there it was—opposite the door he never shut.

It was a welcome sight, the shape blurred but devastatingly familiar.

By the end of the night, I’d have no shape at all.

It had grown inwards, knit my skin to bone.

I woke when the walls shuddered and the door slammed shut.

I cleared the webs, pulled out the fir needles from my back.

Unable to face him as I was, I wore the fabric that no longer fit.

He never spoke to me, outright, so I was surprised when he did.

“You will come with me to a hunt,” he said.

I watched his heavy pace as he retrieved the rifle.

Silent, where I stood, my feet had taken root while he inspected the weapon.

All the antlers in the house turned towards him, sightless, once he told me to get ready.

Back in the room, I cloaked my figure.

The forgotten deer peered over me when I introduced my touch to the dead hide over my shoulders.

And I was glad I had stripped the wall of a mirror, else I’d shed.

In its place, looking back at me was jagged bone, carved into shapes of cruel ends and misery.

My own fractured.

I reached for them, my nails dug into the rough edges of the antlers, their shape just right in the palms of my hands. The old wood was lenient, and they came loose with a sickening creak.

The rope around the heap of firewood had never been forgiving.

It chipped at my papery skin — when I still had it.

It was thick and awkward, tying it around each of the white bone, the brown of the dead had fallen away when I finally managed to position them to each side of my head.

It was not heavy, and the dull pain vanished when I tightened the rope into a knot behind my head.

The shadow on the wooden surface was a mirror enough.

Close enough, I could taste the escape.

The flicker of what used to be my flesh knit itself around the bone.

I would not let go.

I stood by the river, something slightly different.

I held the moon within my hands; it cast both shadow and light through its own mirror.

The stream slowed, promising prey.

There was a man beside me, little and grey, who lived in the house next to ours.

And he stole lives.

So did my father on the opposite side of the river, chasing four-legged, kind-hearted beasts towards the shore.

He could not get to us unless he learned how to swim in waters that loved to drag you under.

Trap you with vines and mud, fill your lungs until you grow into something else, something theirs.

With the lamp in my hands, I felt larger than either you or I.

The powerful light, my tender witness.

Movement.

The grey, sad man beside me readied, and I turned my moon towards the other shore.

No wide, fearful eyes reflected the light. No frozen, statuesque grace.

Only a repulsive, hunched figure in the underbrush.

Unhurried with the belief of being untouchable.

Deer would not be so trusting because they know their flesh is brittle.

The birch trees had eyes in their skin, black pupils watching my choice.

But they, too, remained silent and still.

I turned my moon away from him.

It reflected in the water while he scrambled over the branches.

The man beside me, with the weapon, the capable one, bellowed at me. Begging for light, begging for my night to disappear.

I had heard it before.

One, two steps, and he would see: this creature bore no antlers and no pelt to warm his hunch, no soft meat to warm upon a stove.

Patience was not the strong suit of men like him.

He fired the shot blindly. His fingers trembled, yet he landed it with deadly precision, and the figure didn’t even stagger.

Thump.

Silence.

You should’ve known we could not be trusted to walk into the woods where the judgment was sparse.

Where the walls no longer decided my next step.

They said it was the girl who orchestrated it.

But all I did was leave him without the light he thought he’d forever hold above my head.

I heard their bitter voices in the way the fly screamed, the window groaned when I pushed it open with my shapeless hands.

I heard them in the floorboards that had once comforted me, saw their stares when the plate stood empty before me. I tried to carve them out, stuff my ears, take the windows off their hinges.

They persisted.

At the tip of my tongue, then, under the ribcage, somewhere so deep I could not reach.

I’d bury myself, but I feared they’d come with, and burial means respect.

I wish you’d left him in the grass until his bones faced the moon.

So I shed the small bits I had until I could not recognize the hurt that had been.

Until I was a form, unrecognizable, unspoken.

Never judged.

So, albeit bare, allow the Nightgirl to vanish into the watchful woods.

Where rough branches will unwillingly scrape what is left of me when they embrace me.

Because I’d rather have my flank under their roots than face you again.

Because…

I wish that before you were buried,

when I hid beneath the lamp post, unhurried,

for no one saw me, as ever,

I had been allowed to wear you as a coat.

Perhaps, then, I’d fit right in. Forever.