Mom opens her mouth to speak, probably to say something comforting and parental and completely missing the point. But before she can get the words out, something shifts in the air around us.
The house itself seems to be holding its breath, waiting.
A slow smile spreads across my elongated features, revealing every one of my needle-sharp teeth.
“Actually,” I say, my black eyes moving between their terrified faces, “I think I already have my answer. You’re looking at me like I’m a monster. Like I’m something that doesn’t belong in your perfect house with your perfect life.”
The scratching sound returns, louder than ever, seeming to come from the very walls around us. But now I understand what it is. It’s not the sound of creatures trying to escape.
It’s the sound of predators preparing to hunt.
And the hunt is about to begin.
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.
