Short Story Highlight: "The New Daughter" by Dean Francis Alfar (Philippines)

Apex Book of World SF contributor Dean Francis Alfar has a new story up at Philippine Genre Stories – The New Daughter:

When the boy inevitably grew up, married and moved away with his own growing family, the toymaker decided to make a girl.  He did it this time in secret, afraid of what his neighbors would think, fearing the potential unjust accusation of prurience when all he wanted was someone he could talk to, whose conversation would eradicate the heaviness of his solitude.

He worked at night, carving wood with his spotted hands by the feeble light of low and fat candles he favored from his youth, recalling how he watched his grandfather shape magic from wood and humming a song whose words he had long forgotten.  He worked from midnight until just before dawn for five weeks, struggling with the impatience that old men with erratic memory suffer, losing himself in the methodology of his craft, shaving wood to reveal the delicate limbs and the small torso of his waiting daughter.  Then at last he reached the part he liked best: shaping the girl’s face, determining the contour of her cheeks, the ridge of her brow, the curve of her chin, the hollow of her eyes.  For her hair he chose the color of burnished bronze, planting and pulling the strands in and out of her hard scalp.  For her eyes he selected the color of the bluest sky, fitting the glass spheres with a precision that only a master toymaker possessed.  Just before he finished, he covered her polished nakedness in muslin and lace, cutting and sewing the sleeves and the hems and the ruffs, just as the sun came up.

The toymaker straightened up and grimaced at the creak of his aching back and looked at his new daughter, reaching forward to gently put an errant lock back in place.

“Now we must be patient, you and I,” he told her.  “If my son could come to life, then certainly so can you.”

With all the gentleness his trembling hands could muster, he lifted her from his worktable and set her down on the low shelf where the boy came to life one memorable night many years ago.  He blinked once against the memory, then left to make four dainty pillows from the scraps of the materials of her dress, to arrange around her and arrest her fall should she awaken early. – continue reading.

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