WINTER 2026, SHORT STORY, 950 WORDS
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Today we are taking my daughter apart.
She knows. Some of her friends at school have already changed, returning from the weekend with lopsided pigtails and too-big hands. She hasn’t spoken to me about it, but I know she will have ideas of how she wants to be remade. We will do our best to honor her wishes.
At 7:00 a.m., I patch myself together in the mirror. Lips stitched to face, bones cleaned and screwed in place. Hair brushed and hooked, hands washed and put together again. Over everything I fold mottled skin, inherited from women whose names have long since vanished into obscurity.
My mother’s hooks are silver, delicate, and polished to perfection. Nine in all, they clutter my jewelry box, mingling with rings and bracelets she never wears anymore.
The first time I put them on, lined up along my scalp—pale in the bathroom mirror under unforgiving fluorescent light—they clashed with my gold hoops. Silver has always been her color.
My sister’s hooks are steel: cold and fierce. The five I traded connect fingers to my right hand. In the winter, they grow so cold they burn.
When my grandmother died, her hooks scattered through the family like pollen in spring. I got three, greened copper that stains the skin stretched over my breasts. Looking at myself in the mirror, I wonder who donated the hooks that held her together. The women in my family have no last names, and first names are common as graves. Reaching back, I can only brush the last three generations before lined faces fade into hearsay. Emma, Mary, Justine. Beatrice and Sarah, Annette and Lee. Nicknames deepen the mystery, wipe our fullness out until everyone I know is partial, shortened for others’ ease.
To be female is to be a footnote. I am an assemblage—my hair fastened in place, a gift from an aunt who decided one morning not to rise. My eyes are mismatched. When my mother helped me press them into my sockets, she whispered their stories to me. Left: brown, a daughter who died. Right: cataracted green, recovered from a great-grandmother unmade a week before my time. I owe her also the fingers of my left hand, brittle and scarred. Their hooks were reforged from her wedding ring.
I add my jewelry: gold rings to match some hooks and clash with others. As a finishing touch, I put on makeup, smoothing out the borders between bodies. Today is special, after all.
Complete as I can be, I leave the bathroom on uneven feet. I pause by my daughter’s bedroom. She’s sleeping still. Leaving her to rest as much as possible, I prepare the house for company. I clear the kitchen table and start coffee in the pot. I make fresh ice in the tray and swipe the cobwebs from the ceiling corners. As I sterilize knives in the sink, women arrive.
Mothers, sisters, daughters. Aunts, cousins, grandmothers. I am related to all in the way that all insects share the fear of being crushed. Pieces of them occupy pieces of me—and every scrap remembers its whole.
Low voices mingle in the kitchen as hooked-together hands fold clothes and roll up sleeves. We have no fathers, no brothers. They are as alien to us as we are to them, and we can’t blame them for shying away from this gathering. Because when is the last time you heard about a man prized apart, dissected to preserve the choicest cuts? What man would recycle wrinkled skin to hide vulnerable youth, donning a mask to pretend at expiration?
My mother takes my hand in hers while the coffee burbles behind us. Some of our fingers match. “How is she?”
I check the clock on the wall, listing towards nine. “She’ll be awake soon.”
“Is she scared?” my grandmother asks. “Does she know what to expect?”
“I do.”
We turn to see my daughter standing in the doorway, her hair a mess around her face. Her eyes are the same, her skin clear. We don’t look much alike at all.
The assembled women bow to her, hooks rattling in concert. Taking her hands, we lead her to the kitchen chair. She climbs up onto the waiting table without hesitation. The air is thick with the smell of coffee and disinfectant. I step forward, cupping my daughter’s face in my fractured hand.
“You can choose your first piece,” I say. “What would you like?”
She looks from me to her grandmother, her aunt, her cousin. Biting her lip, she points.
“Your hands,” she says to my great-aunt. “They look strong.”
My great-aunt nods and unhooks her hands with the help of her own daughter. I pick up the knife.
My little girl doesn’t scream as I cut her hands away to trade. She doesn’t cry when we drive hooks into her wrists. She says nothing as we barter her body, dividing her skin and hair between us, integrating our likenesses until she is just as mottled as me.
When we have finished, the table stained red and my hands stiff from cutting, the coffee is burned in the pot. No matter; it all tastes the same to hand-me-down tongues.
We retire to the living room with cups and saucers. My daughter shuns assistance, walking alone on mismatched feet. I look at her, and I see my scars.
I want to say I’m sorry. I want to scream, put her back the way she was—but she’s stronger now. Now her chances might be better.
We sit in a circle, sipping in silence, save for the myriad clinking of metal hooks.
Marisca Pichette is a queer author based in Massachusetts. She has published more than three hundred pieces of short fiction and poetry, appearing in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Vastarien, The Deadlands, Fantasy Magazine, Asimov’s, Nightmare Magazine, and many others. Her poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker and Elgin Awards. Their eco-horror novella, Every Dark Cloud, is out now from Ghost Orchid Press.