The Lost Girl

The Lost Girl

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I remember being in town with Mina Ma. I must have been about ten. She wanted to buy a lottery ticket, and I stood outside the corner store and looked in the window of the toy shop next door. There was a man in the shop, sitting on a stool with a knife and a large piece of wood in his hands. He worked at the wood with the knife, chipping and whittling away, shaping the wood into arms, little legs, a face. I watched him smooth the rough edges with sandpaper, then pick up a wig of soft, almost black hair and fasten it with glue to the doll’s head. Finally he sewed a tiny white dress and buttoned it around the doll. The whole thing looked like dancing. His hands moved so delicately, so lovingly.
When I imagine how I was made, that’s how I imagine it. I don’t know the reality, of course; no one will ever fully explain it. Mina Ma once told me there was fire. Erik said they stitch us together. So I imagine my Weaver sitting at a great oak desk in a workshop. The sunlight glints off the wood. I imagine he’s got a bit of my other’s skin, a bit of her self, and he uses it to make me look just like her. To put a bit of her soul into me. As for the rest, he stitches me together from pieces of someone else, someone long dead, perhaps. He smokes out the old bones to clean them. He burns the old flesh to whittle it down. He uses fire to make me fit the mold he wants to cast. He stitches my infant self to life, weaving in little organs, a few fine baby hairs, a tiny white dress. He glues my edges together. It looks like dancing. But his hands—no matter how many times I imagine my creation, his hands never move like they love me. Because they don’t.
I suppose it’s one of those things I have always known. The Weavers create us, but they don’t love us. They stitch us together. They make sure we grow up knowing, always, that we belong to them.

It’s early. I can smell the wet grass outside, the sharp, clean morning air that turns warm and breezy over the lake later on. It’s too early to be awake, but I get dressed and tiptoe out of my room, past Mina Ma’s, to the French windows at the foot of the cottage. The windows gleam in the sunlight. Only a few weeks ago, they were dirty and splattered with eggs. The town kids thought it’d be funny. I remember looking at the pattern of egg yolks and having the strangest idea that it spelled MONSTER. That was what they called me, when they cornered me down by the lake a few days before the egg-splattering. I think they came because they wanted to know if the rumor about the girl in the cottage was true. It turned nasty fast, and I hit one of them in the face. He was twice my size. I got away with a black eye, a bloody lip, and a sense of savage satisfaction because I did what I wanted for once.
My other would have walked away. I don’t think she fights against something if she doesn’t like it; she has this soft, sensible way of accepting it. Erik and Mina Ma tell me that kind of grace is a more admirable quality than ferocity. They tell me that is how I should be. Her. Mina Ma thinks I like being contrary. “Sometimes,” she says, “I think that if she were a rowdy, angry little thing, you’d be soft and quiet just to be difficult.” But it’s not true. It’s simpler than that: I don’t think I’m much like her. I threw her favorite food on the floor when I was five. While she sat on her father’s knee and polished dusty artifacts, I secretly made sculptures of birds out of wet paper and candle wax. When I was seven, I begged Mina Ma to take me to a movie in town even though I knew my other hadn’t seen it. These are small things. Risky, but not dangerous. I’ve learned the difference.
I touch the glass of the French windows. I was very lucky to escape that fight without lasting consequences. My guardians were appalled. Ophelia should have told the Weavers about it. Only she didn’t.
Erik didn’t say much, but the disappointed look on his face spoke volumes. “We can only lie for you so many times,” he told me. “We can’t protect you if you defy their laws.” Sorry tripped to my tongue, but it seemed inadequate. It didn’t matter. Erik hadn’t finished. “It’s not just the Weavers, either. What about those little brats? Don’t you think they might tell their parents they’ve found an echo? People talk.”

The Lost Girl
Copyright © 2012 by Sangu Mandanna