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In the months before our departure, most of what sic ened us came from our sweet daughter’s mouth. Some of it she said, and some of it she whispered, and some of it she shouted. She scribbled and wrote it and then read it aloud. She found it in boo s and in the mail and she made it up in her head. It was soa ed into the cursi e script she perfected at school, letters ballooning with heart-dotted i’s.  owels defaced into animal drawings. Each piece of the alphabet that she wrote loo ed li e a fat molecule engorged on air, ready to burst. How so  ery dear.
    The sic ness washed o er us when we saw it, when we heard it, when we thought of it later. We feasted on the putrid material because our daughter made it. We gorged on it and inside us it steamed, rotted, turned ran .
    Esther sang as she wal ed through the house. Her  oice was toneless, from the throat, in a fre uency high in warding power. A  oice with a significant half-life, a no ious mineral content, that is, if it could be fro en and crystalli ed, something then beyond our means or imagination. If her  oice could ha e been made into a smo e, we would ha e  nown. If you heard it you were thoroughly repelled. She muttered in her sleep and awa e. She spo e to us and to others, into the phone, out the window, into a bag. It didn’t matter. Nice things, mean things, dumb things,  ust a teenager’s chatter, li e a tour guide to nothing, stal ing us from room to room. Blame and self-congratulation and a constant narration of this, that, and the other thing, in low-functioning if common