BY JACQUELINE DOYLE
After Dorothea Tannings’s “Portrait de famille” (Family Portrait)
I dress in white, because Father likes that in a virginal daughter, my breasts perky in a bra with cone-shaped cups, my legs crossed just so, because he likes that too. I wear stockings and heels to dinner, like a lady. I brush my long blonde hair. I brush the dog’s coat. We’re well groomed. Mother has dinner ready when Father comes home from work. We eat punctually at 6pm. Mother sits at the other end of the table, unseen and unheard, shrinking daily. The cook shrinks too, despite her ample girth, her head barely above the tabletop. I taught the dog how to sit back on her hind legs and beg, which makes Father smile, and the cook treats the dog to a bone. Soon the dog will be bigger than she is. And Father. Soon he will be gigantic, too large to be contained in the house. He looms over the table behind me, filling the dining room, the light reflecting off his glasses. His dark shadow on the wall grows and grows. His hunger knows no bounds. His round spectacles hide his eyes, but I know he’s always watching. Sit up straight, he tells me. Lower your eyes, he tells me. Lower your voice. Take small bites and chew your food. He will never be satisfied. I dream I’m the bride in a white wedding, but Father is too large to fit into the church, he can’t or won’t give me away, the wedding is called off. I dream I’m asleep in an open glass coffin, doomed to wait forever for a prince who never arrives. Tiny dwarfs surround me in the dark, touching my body and chortling, and I can’t stop them. Every night it becomes harder to breathe, but every day I dress in white, because Father likes that in a virginal daughter, my breasts perky in a bra with cone-shaped cups, my legs crossed just so, lady-like, because he likes that too. He calls me his tasty little princess, he says Fee Fi Fo Fum like the giant in the fairy tale and then laughs, showing his molars and the dark cave of his mouth. One day, he says, he’s going to eat me right up.
Jacqueline Doyle (she/her) is the author of the flash chapbook The Missing Girl (Black Lawrence Press). She has flash in matchbook, CRAFT, Little Fiction/Big Truths, Juked, and Pithead Chapel, and short fiction forthcoming in Midway Journal. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter @doylejacq.
Artist: Dorothea Tanning. https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/78/