The Daughter She Wanted

identity horror | stream of consciousness | toxic family | nightmares 

A scream tears through my throat. Sweat drenches my sheets. The same nightmare as always.

I sit in a car; she’s in the driver’s seat. She takes her eyes off the road for a second. One second. We are hit, we spin, we flip, we crash into an embankment. Snow falls through the broken window. Blood soaks my clothes—her blood, not mine. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. When I turn to look at her, two gaping sockets stare back at me, and I can’t breathe to scream.

She appears in my doorway, clutching her tattered robe around her curvy frame and pursing her lips. She asks me what’s wrong; I wipe my brow and give her a smile. Nothing. I’m fine. She gives me that look that says I’m a disappointment, no matter how many times she says she wants a daughter like me, and suggests sleeping pills. She knows I can’t stand medication, not after… I can’t—won’t—take sleeping pills. I tell her not to worry, to just go back to bed.

She leaves without another word and I lie in bed, staring at the whorls in the ceiling, trying not to see the crimson stain on her chest from where the steering wheel crushed her.

~

The Daughter She Wanted is a deep dive into the frail and unraveling thought stream of a high school girl living with her manipulative foster mother, navigating the world through the dissociative lenses of her chronic depression, undiagnosed autism, and cptsd. This story is a 4.1k word speculative horror short and contains scenes and topics that may cause distress for certain readers. Please check here for a non-exhaustive list of content warnings.

Praise for The Daughter She Wanted:

"In less than 5,000 words this speculative horror gutted me. I was unprepared for a few sentences about cutting chicken to make me openly sob, and I gasped in horror, in pain, every time the main character weaponized her mother's horrible words against her. This never let me breathe properly, keeping me on my toes with every single sentence. Graves crafted a horror I will not get over anytime soon. Who would?" - Charlie Knight, Author of Tempest, Take Me Home

"This was a chilling and haunting read from start to finish. The Daughter She Wanted absolutely gutted me. I was screaming at the characters the whole way through and was left speechless by the end." - Lilly Lockwood, Reviewer (full review here)