Chapter 12
The fluorescent light of the kitchen buzzes above us in its white cage, an insect caught behind plastic.
It flickers, stutters, and throws everything, my mother’s trembling hands, my father’s squared shoulders, the knife he holds as if the metal can ward off the thing that shares his daughter’s name, into a jittering strobe that makes edges crawl.
I feel edges better than I see them.
I feel the doorframe’s splinters through my whiskers.
I feel the cold tile press gravity into my bare, no, not bare, into my padded paws. Fur stands, fur thickens. I hear the clock on the wall counting its seconds like a heartbeat it’s stealing.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
My mouth is wet, my mouth is wrong. My tongue presses to new points, to altered ridges. There’s a seam at the corner of my lips where skin gave way to something else, and now it pulps saliva into syrup, and every breath gusts in a low whistle over incisors that are so deliciously sharp.
“Briar,” my mother whispers, trying to use the soft voice, the voice for skinned knees and bedtime. “Baby, please.”
My ears twitch to the cupboard’s click. There is a draft under the back door and it tastes like the backyard, like soil and the spicy green of the rosemary bush.
I tilt my head because the air is a language now, and it tells me everything; the lemon oil she scrubbed into the cutting board, the faint sweetness of cereal dust in the grooves of the floorboards near the baseboard heater, the sourness of their sweat as fear churns it out of them.
Fear smells like everything they used to forbid; damp basements, locked liquor cabinets, forgotten laundry.
I swallow and it tastes like a long hallway back to a bedroom where the doll sits with a perfectly direct gaze, unblinking, patient.
“Princess,” my father says, and the word shakes itself apart in his throat. “Princess...we can talk. We’re going to get help.”
I smile. It works wrong, stretches too far, shows too much. The muscles around my mouth are strong, but no longer mine. They flex in patterns that aren’t mine. They flinch from it, and it’s delicious.
Perfect princess. The phrase loops, loops, an old ribbon snagging on a nail. Perfect. Princess. Perfect.
“They’re right about me,” I say, and my voice scrapes like something dragged over a grate. “I am perfect.”
The flicker of light catches my father’s hand. The knife shakes. He’s holding it as if he’s cutting a cake, awkward and celebratory, but the celebration is the fear he tries to tell himself is courage.
My mother’s hand is on his arm. Her nails are painted the color of strawberries. The Tiffany ring he gave her glints, a tiny bright eye that winks at me.
I have eyes everywhere now. All the little bright things are my eyes.
“Briar, we can…” She chokes on ‘we’. On the idea that we can contain this, fix this, paste gold over the cracks and say it’s stronger than it used to be. “We can go to the hospital. You’re sick. It’s okay to be sick. We will love you even if you’re sick.”
Her voice trembles on love. The word is a ladder they want me to climb back up, but ladders are for creatures with hands that end in fingers instead of claws. The thought of holding anything delicate makes the muscles of my forearms coil with impatience.
I flex, and my twisted claws catch the light; small crescent moons, pretty if you don’t know what they’re for.
They back toward the sink. The fridge hums and ticks.
The back door is to their right, the hallway to the left.
Their eyes keep flicking that way. There is a lock on the back door, a bolt bright as the ring.
My whiskers mark the width of the space between the island and the wall, the perfect size for slipping through.
I used to squeeze. I used to squeeze into the mold of a girl, into the dress that pinched at the waist where a seamstress took it in even more because my mother said there must be no slack, nothing loose.
No slack now. No give.
Everything sharpened.
The air slices around me.
The doll’s scent is here, sweet and old. She’s everywhere. She whispers in my ear with someone’s voice that is not a voice. She tells me what I already know.
That they are prey and they once hurt someone else, hurt them bad.
‘Three blind mice, three blind mice,
Debt must be paid, debt must be paid….’
I hum the tune, start singing the words like a taunt.
‘The sins of the fathers come back around,
The daughter will strike, no mercy found,
Justice will feast without a sound…
Three blind mice.’
My teeth press through my lips, and I taste a blossom of something earthy and metallic. My body finishes what it started barely a week ago. The last edges soften into fur. The last little human hesitations burn off like alcohol under a flame.
“You did this,” I tell them. The words stretch at the end, threadbare. Soon they will tangle, and I won’t know how to say anything but I do now. “You caused this. Eighteen years ago. When you attacked Savannah, when you left her for dead…”
“No,” My mother screams, pulling her hands up to cover her face.
“Please,” my father says, wrapping his arm around my mother, angling his body so that if I jump I get him first. “Sweetheart, we don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re scaring your mother.”
I laugh. It bubbles out high and wrong, a squeak through a reed, a song pushed through a thin tube. It makes their heads jerk, hard swallows, set jaws.
I can see it all now, I can see it like a movie playing out; their younger selves out on the tracks, drinking, laughing, celebrating that win before that car pulled up and everything turned nasty.
“Oh please, daddy,” I say, and the sound skims the floor and scuttles under the refrigerator. “You remember, you remember when you fucked her, don’t you? And mom, you remember how you laughed and watched it play out? You were there. You were there.”
I scream the last bit so loud it feels like the very walls around us shake.
He shifts. His foot slides on the tile. The knife point dips and catches. He’s breathing like a runner in the last half mile.
Behind me, the clock ticks.
My mother looks at the back door again. My father follows the look, and then he looks at me.
“Let us out,” he says, voice low. He pitches it perfectly; it’s the voice he uses with dogs, with nervous children. “Briar. Move aside, right this instant.”
The name sits heavy on my tongue, but it’s gristle now; tough, unchewable. I step to mirror them. They step too. New geometry. Mouse math. Angles. Trapped.
They taught me this, too; how to move in a dance you pretend is spontaneous. How to choreograph the apology before the offense. Keep your face pleasant, dear; no one likes a girl who shows her teeth.
But I have such lovely teeth now. Such sharp, sharp teeth.
“Briar,” my mother says, and she dares, she dares to take a step forward with her hand out. It smells like lotion, like fruit, like something that wants to mask what’s underneath. “I love you.”
My mother’s knuckles are white. Her ring flashes again. My father moves, and the knife catches my eye because metal calls to the bone in me that wants to meet it.
“I love you,” she says again, voice stronger. It’s almost convincing. She is always almost convincing. “We’ll call the doctor. We’ll go now. Okay? Now.”
“Now,” I echo, and the word is everything.
Now is the only time I can feel.
There is no before, there is no after.
There is only the air pushing past my teeth, the thrum in the pads of my feet, and the way the hum of the fridge slides lower, friendlier, as if it purrs just for me.
My father suddenly lunges, the knife clumsy and hopeful. He aims not to hurt but to herd, to push me into a corner, to create ten seconds for my mother to get the bolt turned, the door open. The plan is good. It would work on the girl they raised.
But I am not the girl they raised.
I move. Fast, yes, but this isn’t about speed.
This is about angles, leverage, and the knowledge of a kitchen ingrained from years of fetch that glass, wipe that spill, stand there and smile while the adults talk.
The island hides the way my hips shift, the way my weight settles into the balls of my feet.
I don’t remember deciding, I only remember their faces in the flicker warning me that the light will go, and then it does.
I go under his arm and his heat is a wave breaking over me.
The metal sings a note in the air, a thin line, and then the song is ruined with a clatter as it hits the tile.
My shoulder drives into his gut. He oofs, and the sound is the sound of years and years of Dad making himself a cushion between me and anything sharp.
Stupid fuck, he is still trying not to hurt me. He still mistakenly believes I can be saved.
The back door slams against its chain. The bolt scrapes. My mother’s breath comes with a whistle. She scrabbles and the chain rattles, but clearly she doesn’t want to leave my father behind to his fate. How novel that she’s finally found some bravery after all these years.
There is the dark shape that is my father, and then there is the shape of me, and then there is the floor as we both collide onto it. There are sounds that are not words. There are words that are only sounds. We are fighting, me and him, caught in a battle for survival.
The knife is in both our hands. I can see the flashes of it as it comes so devastatingly close to my whiskers. I can taste the sharpness of the blade. I can sense the desperate song it’s singing as it calls for blood. Blood. Blood.
My mother tries to wrench me off him and I shake her away as if she is made of paper, because now she is, now everything they built is paper and paper tears.
“Stop,” she sobs. “Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop…”
I do, only because she has never asked so nicely. I shift back, staring at them both. My father is on his arse, his fat chest heaving. My mother is on her knees, her pretty face streaming with tears.