The Promise by Dorian Elizabeth Knapp

Greg and Mia had been dating for almost three months when he found the finger in the third drawer of the dresser in the bedroom of her bungalow in Duluth. He hadn’t been snooping exactly. He liked to think of the way he gathered details for his writing as “collecting evidence,” a technique that helped make his characters seem like real people drawn from real life. For the first draft of his latest novel, he’d been collecting evidence on Mia, who had inspired the character of Sarah, though she was not Mia exactly, but not not Mia either. Mia was blonde and pale and blue-eyed; Sarah, on the other hand, was dark-haired and olive-complected. He thought of Mia as resembling Lady Rowena, while Sarah looked like Lady Ligeia from the titular story by Edgar Allan Poe, whose name was plastered on an award that had continually eluded him through his career, despite his own bestselling status as a mystery writer. 

As a writer, he’d managed to make enough money on his books and film options—the latter he called “sitting-on-his-ass money”—that he didn’t have to teach, and as a forty-seven-year-old recent divorcé with no family to support, he’d been in no hurry to get a real job. So when the call came in late November from the friend of his friend Bob in academia about the visiting teaching gig for the spring semester at the University of Minnesota Duluth, he’d declined in his head even before hanging up the phone. But later, thinking about it over a bottle of Glenlivet, as he stared at the walls he’d once shared with his ex-wife in West Hollywood, the unfinished draft of his novel on a shelf in his office, he’d started to think he might be ready for a change of scenery. A long winter. Snow. Outside of the one graduate fiction workshop he would be required to teach, time to dig in and finish the book. Maybe he could find his way back into it. Maybe it would even be good.

The week after he’d arrived in Duluth, at a welcome party in his honor at Bob’s friend’s house, Greg had met Mia. She’d caught his eye immediately with her ethereal looks and scholarly air, seeming more like a professor than a grad student, maybe because she was in her mid-thirties and a PhD candidate, the only one admitted into that particular cohort. Something about her made her seem accomplished, something in the way she carried herself as she glided across the room to talk to him, a plastic cup of box wine in hand, and that impression was confirmed when he learned that she owned her own home in town, worked as a freelance writer and editor while teaching and finishing her degree, and was, like him, a transplant from L.A. She was also a poet, a fact that added to her mystique, because he thought of poets as mythical creatures, and of course Poe had also been a poet, though it was his fiction that had spawned the modern version of Greg’s genre. 

They’d shared a sloppy, drunken kiss that subfreezing January night outside Bob’s friend’s house, and while he’d felt embarrassed about the incident afterward, she hadn’t seemed bothered by it at all and had even invited him out again with a group of grad students from the program the next weekend. Part of her charm, he thought, was that she seemed immune to embarrassment, unfazed by something like getting drunk and kissing someone badly, unlike him, who would obsess over it and then get drunk again and hide under the covers for weeks. 

They’d had sex for the first time that next weekend, an experience that had sent a jolt of electricity through his entire being, not necessarily because the sex had been great, though it had been, but because he’d been dead from the waist down ever since his painful divorce and the ensuing paralysis over his current book, which until then had been going nowhere faster than his own life. Perhaps he’d behaved foolishly by sending her a dozen red roses the next day, delivered to her doorstep with a flourish, a grand romantic gesture that probably would have spooked anyone else, but Mia hadn’t seemed to mind and had even opened her door to him, over and over again, until a few weeks later he had his own toothbrush in her bathroom and even a hook in her tiny bedroom closet. 

It was under the pretext of finding more space for himself that he’d been snooping—collecting evidence—in the dresser in her bedroom while she’d been out teaching her comp class that morning. In reality, he’d been looking for sex toys, which he knew she didn’t keep in the drawer of her bedside table, as that contained only condoms and lube, a fact he’d learned during their first night together. Thumbing through her blue jeans—how many pairs could one poet possibly own?—he’d found the jar shoved into the back corner of the drawer. Inside it floated a single human finger, still wearing its ring and suspended in a bath of colorless liquid. 

His first thought was that it was some kind of practical joke or gag gift, like fake poop or vomit, placed there intentionally to ward off potential snoopers—guilty as charged—but on closer inspection, it appeared too real, too lifelike, its tiny hairs waving like cilia in whatever sea it was submerged in, the severed flesh and bone visible when he tilted the jar. It looked real enough to him, but the only way to know for sure was to open it. 

In the bathroom, he was surprised to find his hands trembling. Under the vanity light, the finger looked so real it must have been fake. Too real to be real, he thought. Probably the remnants of some weird costume she’d thrown together for Halloween—he’d heard stories of legendary Halloween parties at the apartment of a couple of fiction students in the program—maybe the trophy of a flesh-eating zombie or a Blair Witch-style banshee. He could see Mia pulling off a costume like that, with her smooth, translucent skin and huge, watery eyes like turquoise swimming pools. 

Before opening the jar, he studied its contents more closely, noting that it was a ring finger. The length and width of it suggested it was female, its fine hairs a shade of strawberry blond. Below the knuckle, a plain yellow-gold band sat just above the place where the finger had been severed. A clean cut, it seemed, as if it had been taken off by a meat cleaver. The placement of the ring on the finger made it look like an invisible hand was tugging on it, trying to pull it off over the knuckle. The nail was trimmed, its pale half-moon rising from the nail bed. Other than the fact that it wasn’t attached to a hand, it appeared to be a normal human finger. 

Placing the jar in the sink to steady it, Greg twisted the lid open. The instant the smell hit his nose, he recognized it, an odor lodged in his memory from seventh-grade science class, back in the Stone Ages when they still dissected fetal pigs and anesthetized frogs in school: formaldehyde. He twisted the lid closed and carried it back to the place he’d found it, holding it away from his chest like a bag of stinking trash or a loaded gun. 

Back at his apartment later that evening—he’d declined Mia’s invitation to the neighborhood pub with friends by inventing a headache—he stared at his computer screen but found it impossible to concentrate. It was late April, the end of the semester, and an avalanche of grad student fiction, a motley assortment of fantasy novels-in-progress, postapocalyptic cli-fi stories, and trauma porn posing as memoir—Gen Z’s genre of choice, apparently—faced him, daunting as the problem looming even larger in his mind: what the fuck to do about the finger? Should he confront Mia about it? Call the police? Was she psychotic? Dangerous? A trophy-collecting serial killer? The fact that Greg wrote crime fiction for a living—and quite a comfortable one, at that—wasn’t helping, though he felt it should have been. He just couldn’t make sense of it. There had to have been a reasonable explanation. His mind landed briefly on the Halloween costume possibility again, but then he remembered that a few nights before, during postcoital chatter, Mia had told him she hated horror films after he’d likened her to Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, a comparison he’d meant as a compliment—Mia and Mia did look alike—but one he’d immediately regretted as soon as he realized he’d just compared her to the mother of Satan. 

Closing out the student work on his desktop, he opened the folder for Zephyr Cove, his latest mystery novel set in Lake Tahoe and featuring none other than the death of a beautiful woman, the most poetical topic in the world, according to Poe, whose image gazed down at him morosely from the print on his wall, a token from his Prague days in the nineties, when everyone was an expat writing the next great American novel. He’d bought the print on a whim at an antikvariát in Malá Strana on a side street leading down from the castle and had walked straight from there to Jo’s Bar, where he and the other expats had proceeded to do shots of absinthe, or whatever they were calling absinthe in those days, until they’d all stumbled out onto Charles Bridge under the stars, which had pulsed and throbbed like his headache the next morning.

Greg didn’t even really like Poe, if he was being honest. In high school, crazy Mrs. Wiley loved him, as did his classmates, as did everyone, it seemed, except for him. He actually kind of hated Poe for having achieved such a mythic level of fame for what Greg considered such florid prose. He supposed it was Poe’s biography that fascinated people, much like Sylvia Plath’s, another author he detested but whom Mia clearly loved, based on the titles on her bookshelf, most of which also made an appearance in her dissertation, including The Collected Poems, Ariel: The Restored Edition, The Bell Jar, and every biography of Plath ever published in English. He knew this because early in their relationship, he’d secretly catalogued the shelf for one of Sarah’s chapters.

He’d taken Poe’s and Plath’s central subject, the death of the beautiful woman, and made it his own in Zephyr Cove, which had somehow almost magically written itself in the last three months, no doubt a positive side effect of his reawakened sexual appetite, thanks, of course, to Mia. He couldn’t help thinking of her as a kind of muse to him during this period of rebirth and productivity, that somehow she’d been helping him write the book all along by sprinkling her pixie dust over him as he slept in her bed, night after night, seasoning his dreams. 

Early on, when Mia had shown up in his book as Sarah, he’d immediately recognized her, though of course she sounded and looked different in his head than she had in the story. All his characters talked to him; one of the defining characteristics of fiction writers, he believed, was that they heard voices, whereas poets, according to Mia, heard musical notes or tones. But Sarah seemed to talk more than his other characters. At times, the pitch of her voice rose to a level he’d go so far as to call shrill, crowding out everyone and everything else until he finally relented and opened his laptop to release her. She’d become one of the novel’s central characters, his protagonist Rick’s love interest, and he’d even been considering having her be the one to make the discovery of the body at the end, if in fact that was the ending. He hadn’t decided yet. 

Ever since he’d met Mia, the book had been flowing swiftly, carrying him along its current with little to no effort on his part. He could jump back in at any time and quickly find his rhythm. Although it was another murder mystery, it was different from his other books. More literary, he thought, no doubt Mia’s influence again. He’d been quizzing her on authors, titles, and time periods for her comprehensive exams in American literature and had been reminded how much he hated the godawful Romantics, of which Poe was the mascot. He loved the Realists the most—Twain, Crane, London, even Wharton to a degree—and would linger longest over questions involving them, trying to engage Mia in an intellectual debate about how American literature had evolved out of its adolescence by the end of the nineteenth century and into its period of maturity by the beginning of the twentieth. But Mia, being a devotee of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson—Whit/Dick, as she affectionately nicknamed them—would have none of it, and anyway, their intellectual debates always ended with them in the bedroom, stripping off each other’s clothes. 

He was nearing the end of his contract at the university, as well as the end of the book. He could see it clearly, clear as the cold waters of Lake Tahoe where the beautiful dead woman at the center of his story lay. All he had to do now was swim down to her to get a good look—to note her hair, which was auburn, and her skin, which was white, and her eyes, which were hazel and staring at something only the dead can see. 

Mia, too, was nearing the end of something and starting to look beyond him to the next thing. He could feel the shift occurring whenever she started talking about defending her dissertation, the last stage in her academic journey, the final hurdle before becoming a doctor of philosophy. Her eyes looked past him into a future he couldn’t see, just like the beautiful woman’s at the bottom of the lake. 

Up until the gruesome discovery of the finger earlier that morning, this had been the only nagging question at the back of Greg’s mind: what would happen after his contract ended and the book was finished and Mia had graduated? After only three months, it felt too soon to talk about moving in together, though by then Greg was practically living at Mia’s house, sleeping there and showering there and cooking dinner for her there when she got home from her evening workshop. They hadn’t spoken of it directly, but it seemed to Greg that she was allowing it to happen, allowing their lives to merge in a way that would ultimately lead to the one thing that scared him the most, the one thing that had nearly ruined him once before: marriage.

When he first consciously acknowledged the possibility of it, he’d been terrified, but as the weeks went by, and his relationship with Mia grew and deepened—and the pages of his book accumulated—he’d felt himself falling for her, until eventually he thought she just might be the one. Again. Despite his love for the Realists and his penchant for the dispassionate mechanisms of crime fiction, he was, after all, a Romantic. So he wasn’t all that surprised when, a month earlier, right after their first trip away together at an Airbnb in Grand Marais, he’d found himself standing outside a jewelry store in downtown Duluth, eyeing its overpriced merchandise. Half an hour later, he’d emerged from the store with a ring box in his pocket, and inside it, a blue sapphire, Mia’s birthstone, on a delicate white gold band encrusted with pavé diamonds. He’d meant it to be an early birthday gift, not an engagement ring, but he was also okay with her thinking of it as a promise ring, if people still did that, a promise-to-one-day-be-engaged ring, and he’d considered even telling her that’s what it was. 

Now, looking up from the ring box in his lap to the document on his desktop, he felt paralyzed. He had no idea what to do. The woman he’d been dating and was seriously considering spending the rest of his life with was storing human body parts in her bedroom. Greg scrolled down to the title page and began to read his draft of Zephyr Cove from the beginning. He had only the final act left to write. Sarah would be in it, of course, as the one to accidentally fall from the search boat into the lake and then find the corpse, but Rick, the detective, was his protagonist, and in this final chapter, Rick would be the one telling the story, even if that story was increasingly about Sarah. 

At the bottom of the lake, she looks like a mermaid, or maybe Medusa, the tendrils of her hair coiling around her head like a garland of red seaweed. Her eyes and mouth are open and frozen in an expression of blankness that makes him want to weep. On her right hand, a blue jewel catches the sun’s rays filtered through the water. On her left hand, her ring finger is missing. He wants to swim to her, to save her, but every time he tries, she falls deeper into the abyss, as if an invisible hand is dragging her down, as if Hades himself were dragging her down into the underworld below the earth’s crust. When he opens his mouth to scream, water floods in and chokes him. He is choking on the water in which she has drowned. 

The sound of his phone ringing in the other room woke Greg first. Then the screaming headache. He had fallen asleep at his desk again—one of his bad habits—the dregs of his scotch (another bad habit) at his right elbow, the cursor on his screen, which hadn’t gone to sleep with him, blinking loudly. By the time he got to his phone, Mia was already leaving a message, no doubt about their date at the Saturday farmers’ market that morning. Greg looked at his phone. It was 9:39. He was supposed to pick her up at ten. 

Putting the ring box in his pocket, he grabbed his keys, backpack, two Tylenol, and a thermos of coffee, then climbed into his car. He had no idea where he was going, only that he needed to get out of his apartment and find some space to think, and Minnesota offered plenty of that. He headed west, away from the lake, passing the university with its monolithic concrete structures and the street he would have turned on to enter Mia’s neighborhood, passing the tribal casino and then the outlet mall farther out of town, until finally he reached the prairie grasslands in the heart of the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. 

Two and a half hours later, hungry and in need of fuel and a bathroom, he took the exit at Longville, but instead of stopping, he kept going, following the signs for Woman Lake three miles ahead. The names of the lakes in this state fucking killed him. He much preferred the ones that preserved the original Native American names, like Bde Maka Ska or Minnehaha, instead of the ones that had been translated into English. He badly needed to pee but pressed on, afraid to stop. It felt to him like someone or something else was driving the car, as if it were on autopilot, and he was simply a passenger, taking in the scenery, along for the ride. His phone, which he’d turned off, sat in the cup holder, silent and recriminating.

At the end of the road, Greg parked the car and set off for a trail that wound around the lake like a string of twine, branching off into various smaller trails that led into a dense surrounding forest. He first caught sight of the bird as the lake was coming into view, sunlight glinting off its feathers like flashes from a black diamond. A crow. Or was it a raven? Whatever it was, it was enormous, perched in a spruce tree at the entrance to the lake, seeming to shed light instead of feathers. As he approached, the bird cocked its head and looked directly at him, as if asking what the fuck he was doing. Setting down his backpack, he pulled the ring box from his pocket and opened it. The ring flashed in the midday sun, its tiny diamonds sparkling just like the saleswoman at the jewelry store had promised, the sapphire violet-blue when tilted one way, greenish-blue the other. He put the ring away and reached into his backpack for the jar, glancing up at the bird as he did. It was still looking at him inquisitively, its blue-black radiance surreal and otherworldly, like a CGI warbird in an actual landscape. Only after he had thrown the jar as far as he could from where he stood on the bank did the bird fly off, growing smaller and smaller until it was just a black speck in the cloudless sky. 

Dorian Elizabeth Knapp is the author of three poetry collections: Causa Sui (2025), Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak (2019), and The Spite House (2011). She is the founding director of the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Hood College and lives in Frederick, Maryland with her family.

23 October 2026