A few years ago I would daydream consistently of having a daughter. I don’t know where I’d have had her from, because she was biologically mine but there was never anyone else.

And I mean that in quite possibly every way: there were no friends of mine either, or family. And I must have deprived her of the same, because we travelled often and I schooled her myself, the lessons punctuated with astronomy in the evening. She read books often near the window, in the higher floors of the apartment, above a stream of sparkling traffic. She was quiet, passionate, reflective–but I never characterized her with any sort of compassion. There was no one to receive it. Having been borne of a daydream she embodied one herself, phantomwise, her eyes were large and mirrored the dark sky and her hair was brown and wavy and always neat. Impossibly, she always listened. She was never happy, only content. She never called me her mother. She hardly spoke at all. She only ever read, like something torn open, a crying wound capable only of consuming the thoughts of others. Anything else would be too imperfect, too impolite.

I remembered her suddenly today and wondered when I had killed her. I think I must have done it while she was asleep, smothered her with a pillow in the night. In the midst of suffocation she never woke to a shattered astonished state just before death, only died in a manner of fading away from my memory, without ever breaking into shocked wakefulness. Unnaturally. She couldn’t have lived you see, because I had to consume her, become her as she grew and there was no room for the both of us. There is no room for angels. She couldn’t have lived. There was a demon I had to fight and so I had to kill her see, because she was too merciful and kind and she would have destroyed us, she would have destroyed us both.