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.
