My daughter has a lot of demands when I want her to go to bed. She’s supposed to be in bed at eight, but I usually don’t fall asleep until after midnight. I give her enough attention during the day; you’d think she’d be tired enough to fall asleep when she should. But no.

I put her down at eight, but she asks me for a glass of water at eight-twenty. It has to be a clean glass, and it has to have the right amount of water. If I don’t do it right, she gets cranky.

At eight fifty-two, she’ll ask me to read her a story from the leather-bound tome on the stand in the corner. It has lots of stories, but she only wants to hear the same one. I barely know what’s going on in the story. What’s wrong with something like “Hansel and Gretel” or “Three Little Pigs”?

Then I always tell her to sleep, but she never does. She’ll call me in to check outside the windows at about nine-forty. To make sure nobody is trying to look into her room. So, I pull the curtains back and take a look outside. There’s never anybody trying to see in–of course not, her bedroom is in the attic.

At that point, I know I’m in for a long night, so I just start going through the motions. A little after ten, she wants me to go around and make all the pictures crooked on the walls. I’m really not sure why she needs this. Maybe she just doesn’t like things to be organized. She also makes me lay the picture of my late wife face-down in the center of the living room floor. When I ask why, she just giggles. I guess it is pretty funny.

At ten forty-seven, I get to stretch my artistic muscles. It’s fun. I get some paper and markers, and my daughter tells me what to draw. Nothing too complicated. A bunch of curves and whorls and things like that. Sometimes I use two or three colors on a sheet; otherwise, I just use red. Then I need to arrange them around her bed. I get it right after a few tries.

She wants me to light candles in her bedroom at eleven-nineteen but never things like lavender or vanilla, so I have to melt scentless wax and mix it with crushed-up centipedes or ashes from a crematorium or something.

By the time I can get the candles lit, it’s eleven-fifty at the earliest, and I’m getting pretty tired. My daughter flips to the back of the leather book and tells me to read it out loud. It’s hard to read the words when I’m so tired, and it hurts when I get them wrong. I usually run out of band-aids about halfway through, and I can’t clean up the blood until morning. My daughter kneels on her bed in her pajamas and watches me with her big smile. I swear I’d do anything to see that smile.

Midnight. I guess I just sit back and watch.

After that, I realize I don’t have a daughter–she appeared in the attic one night.

She told me my name once. My ears bled. Once she showed me her real self, and my eyes bled. She always wants the thermostat way, way up, hot enough to boil skin. And I never remember these facts the next night.

I recall now, but my daughter says there are no nights left. The sky is burning, and she’s laughing.

– Daniel Deisinger