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  • Three Wishes for the Missing Man's Daughter
  • Carol Claassen (bio)

1. First Wish: Disappear

No monkey's paw, rabbit's foot, or chicken bone; no dusty lamp, shooting star, or enchanted well. Just an earnest wish beaming through you like moonlight on a whitecapped ocean, your father's arm fastened around your back at your high school graduation, his fingers cuffed around your arm in the last photo you take together before he goes missing.

You remember how, in W. W. Jacobs's infamous tale, Mr. White uses a charmed monkey's paw to wish for 200 pounds sterling after his son Herbert suggests such a sum would enable his parents to pay off the house. Your father's body pressed against yours, you make a similar yet inverse request, asking the universe to make 155 pounds disappear so you can live a life unencumbered by his presence.

Shortly after Mr. White makes the wish, his son is killed in a machinery accident at work, and a messenger from the company offers the family 200 pounds in compensation. You wait longer than the Whites, but a little more than a year after you make your wish, your father vanishes on a backpacking trip in a rugged corner of Yosemite National Park.

Mr. White wants to believe his son's death and the consequent financial compensation are mere coincidence, which is understandable. If his wish caused his son's death, he is a murderer of sorts—and a reckless, arrogant fool. Maybe you are too.

You no longer feel guilty avoiding your father's phone calls because he no [End Page 39] longer calls. You don't read his letters or feign interest in his life because the letters stop coming and his life is in question. You should be grateful.

You recall they had been warned, the Whites. The soldier friend who presented the paw and told the family of its powers to grant three men three wishes each also explained that the holy man who enchanted it had wanted to show that "fate ruled people's lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow." The soldier explained that he didn't know the nature of the previous owner's first two wishes but that the man's third wish was for death. When asked whether he would accept if he were to be given another three wishes, the soldier says he doesn't know and abruptly throws the paw into the fire. "Better let it burn," he says.

The Whites do not ask the soldier what he wished for or why he is so solemn. Instead, they pluck the paw from the embers and ask how it works. When the soldier says, "I warn you of the consequences," nobody asks what he endured to provoke the warning.

It's clear they underestimate the talisman's powers. Mrs. White jokes her husband should wish for more hands for her, and Herbert proposes that his father wish to be emperor so he can't be "henpecked." When Mr. White declares he is content with his life as it is, his son suggests he would be happier if he had "cleared the house," which prompts the first wish.

You wished your father would vanish off the face of the earth. You were tired of trying to be good, of pursing your lips whenever you wanted to tell him how you truly felt about the way he ran his fingers over your calves while you sat in the backseat of his car or ate a meal at the table. You imagined, with him gone, you might stop randomly recalling that fateful morning at his apartment when you, sobbing on the phone, told your mother what he'd done while you slept beside him. You were worn out from replaying his response when, a year later, at the age of nine, you demanded he apologize, and he essentially said it was water under the bridge and you should move on. You were sick of the warmth rising in your throat whenever he said your name, his breath huffy, eyes trained on your body. You were...

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