THE MILLER AND HIS DOROTHY

 

THE MILLER’S DAUGHTER WAS a girl of promise. She often wandered through the streets all day to conjure playful tales. At night, she would relay them to her father and he would listen, in awe of her gift for telling, always wondering from where, in the forms of her mother and himself, the source of the gift derived. The Miller’s daughter told him these tales from her bed as he sat on a chair in the corner in the dark, a position he took because she insisted. When he had been closer, where she could see his face, it somehow influenced her telling, changing the trajectory of the tales as they escaped her. And so the father sat alone in the corner, his face kept hidden from his daughter, whose narratives filled the room.

One night, she told him the beginning of a tale so haunting that it shook him to the core. And just as he was finding himself unable to stop his body from shaking, right there in the middle, his daughter told him that she would be concluding the narrative for the night, leaving her audience hovering above the end. The father asked—in a voice that lingered on the edge of pleading—if she would finish the tale, please finish the tale tonight, for he could not survive the suspense for even one day. The daughter giggled, then said she was sorry, that she could not tell him the end because of a very simple fact: she did not yet know it. When The Miller asked in a whisper if she could invent it, please, my darling, just this once and for tonight, the daughter smiled. Dear father, she told him, do you not know the first rule of story? Endings are not invented; they are discovered.

He praised her tale and bid her good evening, though he could not bring himself to kiss her forehead as he always did. And when he took himself to bed, lying next to the woman his daughter called mother, he struggled to find sleep. Through the night, he was left in the twilight space on the border of waking, the tale a vortex in which he found himself consumed. His fear was two-fold: both that the story’s conclusion might be more horrific than the tale so far, and that the story’s origin lived somewhere inside the body he’d co-produced.

The next day at the mill, weary-eyed, groggy, and expended by the tale, The Miller struggled to work. He found himself making minor mistakes. As he left the mill for fresh air, he forgot to firmly fasten the door. Meanwhile, his daughter had spent the morning wandering the streets in order to find the story’s ending, and just as The Miller left, she entered the site of his work, so excited to share with him the conclusion that she could not keep her body still. Her exhilaration made her form unfamiliar to her—she tried to control it but she continued to fail, tripping on the stone path from the town’s center, losing her footing again as she half ran to the mill. And so, when she reached it, she accidentally fell into the complex machination that—until that moment—had practiced annihilation only in an effort to produce.

In the years to come, The Miller would tell no one the story of his lost girl. For what haunts The Miller is why he’s haunted: not because his daughter’s gone, but because he has been left for eternity ever-hovering in the horror of the story she left undone.