Cataclysm Baby

Justina, Justine, Justise

For the first crime my daughters took only my thumb. They refused to apologize for their aggression, even after I confronted them, after I tossed their bedroom and confiscated the hatchet hidden in their toy box, beneath their miniature gavel. When lined up and accused beside her sisters, all the oldest would say was that my trial had been fair, their court complete even without my presence: One daughter for a judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense.

My middle daughter, she spit onto what was left of our thread-worn carpet, said my defense had been particularly difficult, considering my obvious guilt.

She said, Perhaps you should tell our mother you cut your thumb at work, so that she will not have to know why we took it.

She said, Your records are sealed until you unseal them, and then she made the locking motion over her lips that I taught her when she was just my baby, when she first needed to know what secrets were.

What milky-stern eyes the youngest had too, set in her pale face, floating above the high collar of her blackest dress: Blinded as both her sisters, still her blank eyes accused, threatened, made me sorry for what I was.

This youngest daughter, she walked me back to my room, her hand folded small in my uninjured one as she explained that she and the others hoped I had learned my lesson, because they did not want to hear my sorry case again.

Then the key turning in the lock, jailing me for my wife to rescue, to admonish for leaving the girls alone, because who knew what trouble they might make when no one was watching.

How I tried to be sneakier: To send messages only at work. To go out after they were already in bed. To change my clothes away from home, so that they might not smell the other upon me.

And then waking with my hand gone, divorced from my wrist, a tourniquet tightened around my stump and my mouth cottoned with morphine. And then wondering where my beautiful daughters could have gotten their tools, their skillful medicines.

And then not knowing what to tell my wife or my mistress, each curious about my wounds, and also still being unable to choose, to pick one woman over the other.

How now the gavel sounds in my sleep, how I hear my oldest pounding its loud weight against the surface of her child-sized desk, bringing into line the pointless arguing of the middle daughter, of the youngest—Because in my defense, what could the middle daughter say? What judicious lies could she tell that the others might believe? When all she wanted was for me to see the wrong of my ways, to repent and rehabilitate so that her mother and I might remain married forever?

In the last days of my affair, I lift my middle daughter into my arms, feel how much weight she’s lost, how her hair has wisped beneath its ribbons.

She meets my apologies with a slap, squirms free. She says, Don’t think I’m still daddy’s little girl.

She says, I only defended you because no one else would.

She says, In justice, we are divided, but in punishment, we are one.

The lullaby she sings as she walks away, I am the one who taught it to her. I am the one who sat beside her crib and held her hand when she could not sleep. I am the one who rocked her and fed her when her mother could not, exhausted as she was by her difficult pregnancies and the changing of the air.

I want this good behavior to matter, but I know it does not.

Some weeks later, I awake restrained to my now half-empty bed, nothing visible in the darkness except the silhouettes of my blind daughters in their black dresses, their white blindfolds wrapped tight round empty eyes.

And then it comes, and then they come with it: the children I deserve, if never the children I wanted; my three little furies, my three furious daughters.