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.
She reaches up and she touches my face, as if I’m not the most hideous thing she’s ever seen.
Her palm is cool, smooth and shaking. My whiskers tremble against her skin, reading the tremor like script.
“Sweetheart,” she whispers. “Come back. Please.”
I lay my cheek against her palm because I am polite, because a thousand corrections taught me how to pretend that this is what I want. Her breath hitches, and I feel her hope pulse in the pads of my fingers where I hold her wrist. It shakes through me. It makes me so giddy.
I turn my head, snapping those sharp, sharp teeth through the fleshiest part of her hand.
She cries out, a high, shocked sound, and that makes me laugh again. I can taste her blood now, and I savour it as it fills my mouth.
My father grabs at me, trying to subdue me, trying to overwhelm me.
The scent in the room changes. There is a bright, metallic tang under everything, like pennies in your mouth after you’ve held them too long and they warmed like little suns in yourpalm. The lemon oil loses. The dryer sheet loses. The citrus candles they light after dinner lose.
This new smell is stronger. My stomach clenches and releases in a wave that is not hunger, but something parallel to it.
I taste it in the air. I taste everything.
The knife slashes. I feel the sting as it cuts through my beautiful fur, but it’s so thick that it’s like an armour coating. I lash out, using my claws to disarm my dad, and as he falls back on his fat arse I spring up, I spring on top of him.
He’s screaming, cowering, using his fists to try to beat me back. I snap, snap, snap with my new razor sharp teeth. Biting through cotton, through fabric, climbing my way up his body like it’s a mountain pass.
His eyes bulge, they gleam as I get closer and closer. They’re like a beacon calling me home.
“Three blind mice, three blind mice…”
I whisper that chant under my breath and as I sink my teeth in, as I gouge one, then the other out, I squeal with a sense of karmic justice.
He howls, he bucks, but he can’t throw me off.
