Cataclysm Baby

Quella, Querida, Quintessa

How beautiful our daughter is in her white Tethering dress, dancing her younger cousins across the decorated length of our yard: First the waltz, then the cha-cha, then the tango. Old people dances, she called them when she was eleven, but now, twelve years old, feet shod for the final time in bobby socks and dress-flats, she can’t wait to teach the others every step, every turn and twirl, every last aching contact of foot upon grass.

The band plays on while my wife cuts the cake, while she passes out thick frosting-dripped slices of vanilla to everyone present, whether they want cake or not. Only afterward is our flush-faced daughter allowed to open her presents, her gifts from her many aunts and uncles, this family extending to include our entire community, all us lonely adults closer now than when we were kids, when there were no Tethering parties to bring us together.

My daughter is all teeth and dimples as she says thank you to each gift-giver, to each sad-eyed parent in the crowd—and as she lifts her ankle to show off the present her mother and I gave her, opened during the Tethering itself: a steel cuff, clasped around her ankle, concealed by the fanciest lace and pearls we could afford.

After the party ends, I help her pack, placing each gift—each sealed bottle of water, each nonperishable food item, each oversized cable-knit sweater—into her tether-bags, attached to the braided-steel cord already fed through the carabiners and guide-loops, already secured to the clasp on her tether, that anklet which will for a time keep her life close to ours.

And then me hugging her goodbye. And then her mother doing the same, refusing to let go.

And then my pulling mother from daughter so that our child might climb the ladder to the platform where she will await her rising.

How great our sorrow is during the first few months, when she is still close enough that we can climb the ladder ourselves to hold her floating hands, to bring her food and drink so that she might not consume the supplies meant for the trip ahead. Already she longs to be farther away, to be up in the air with the other sons and daughters drifting in the wind, her cousins ballooned with this adolescent gas that fills their bodies and never filled ours.

Together, my wife and I wait until our daughter is ten or twelve feet above the platform, her belly bloating until she floats out of reach, then out of yelling distance, then too far away to see with the naked eye.

Only then do we host this second party, the one where everyone brings binoculars and spyglasses instead of presents and a dish to pass.

The Untethering, it is more a party for us than for our daughter, but it doesn’t feel like a celebration, not with everyone dressed all in black.

Midway through the dancing, I remind my wife that she’s the one who must release our daughter.

I say, If our daughter was a son, then I would do it, because it is what has to be done, what has always been done since the time of the first rising.

I say, We don’t know where she will float to, but if you do not let her go, then she will starve to death upon her tether. Together, we will have to watch her deflate, then float back to the earth, our own lifeless feather.

Our hushed guests wait while my wife looks through her spyglass at our daughter, that fat far-off speck caught in an updraft, spinning uncomfortable at the end of her line. They watch through their binoculars, struggling to read my daughter’s lips, the last message of our only child, only half-mouthed when my wife, already turning away, finally pulls the release lever.

How quick the rest of the cord shoots up and out through the guide-loops, speeding into the air behind my daughter, and how fast our baby girl disappears, off for whatever world awaits her up there in the atmosphere, among all the other children this town has released.

And who can imagine what far-off countries they might settle, what new families they might next inhabit?

All we know is how sad our landlocked bodies are now, comforted only by each other’s flightless, balloonless limbs. Her mother and I, we weep, black-clad, while around us our neighbors sing the Untethering song and cut our Untethering cake: Chocolate, my wife’s favorite, the one she hasn’t had since the day our allergic daughter was born, when we traded its pleasure for some other flavor, some taste thought even sweeter.