The Daughter She Wanted by Felix Graves

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.

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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.

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*there is no use of generative AI in any process of publication for this book