I Will Name My Daughter Rage by Joe Pearson
*****My name is Hope, but I have none.
*****My parents named me after a virtue, seeking to manifest a life from four letters. Their prophecy did not include confinement from a virus, nor the world ending due to steak and package holidays. My name now feels like an intergenerational joke: they ate the apple then insisted I recreate Eden. I should have been called Doomed-to-Fail.
*****Hope cracks like a whip and knocks me to dusty ground. I lie on my back as my belly swells. New life amid ruins.
*****My daughter will be Rage. She will burn like the world around her. My gift to her will be anger and the right to create it within me. Children must retaliate against their parents; our failings can and should be used against us to bludgeon outdated philosophy. If Rage rebels and is calm and happy, my trick will have worked; but if she lives up to her name, at least she will have weaponry to level at her mother’s prophecy.
*****It’s moot, anyway: Rage won’t ever be born. She lives inside me, repeating her name, reducing imagined futures to ash. She raises her arms to a storm-ridden sky and dances through an inferno. I see her now, shimmering: reflecting the long-slumbering face of our savage, beautiful planet.
*****When Rage burns up she emerges reborn, shedding her name like snakeskin. She marvels at a world that continues to turn, approaches the tree we said not to touch and plucks a new name like fruit.
Joe Pearson is a British fiction writer living in Paris, France. He writes mostly speculative fiction about climate change, cultural displacement, masculinity and fatherhood. His work has appeared in Indelible, Paperbound and the New2theScene Anthology.
Illustration by Benjamin Æ Filby
A version of ‘I Will Name My Daughter Rage’ by Joe Pearson made the FFF Competition Twenty-Five Longlist
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