In the months before our departure, most of what sickened 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 books and in the mail and she made it up in her head. It was soaked into the cursive script she perfected at school, letters ballooning with heart-dotted i’s. vowels defaced into animal drawings. Each piece of the alphabet that she wrote looked like a fat molecule engorged with air, ready to burst. How so very dear.

The sickness washed over us when we saw it, when we heard it, when we thought of it later. We feasted on the putrid material because our daughter had made it. We gorged on it and inside us it steamed, rotted, turned rank.

Esther sang as she walked through the house.

Her voice was toneless, from the throat, in a frequency high with warding power. A voice with a significant half-life, a noxious mineral content; that is, if it could be frozen and crystallized, something then beyond our means or imagination. If her voice could have been made into a smoke, we would have known. She muttered in her sleep and when awake. She spoke to us and to others, into the phone, out the window, into a bag. It didn’t matter. Nice things, mean things, dumb things, just a teenager’s chatter, like a tour guide to nothing, stalking 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 rhetorical modes, in occasions of speech designed not particularly to communicate but to alter the domestic acoustics, because she seemed to go dull if she wasn’t speaking or reading or serving somehow as a great filter of words.

She did it without thinking, and she did it to herself, and it was we alone who were sickened.

But of course we’d find out it was others, too. Others and others and others. What she said was bitter, and we sipped at i...