His blood streams down his cheeks and I can taste it on my tongue, on my teeth, in my very soul.
My teeth set, loosen, and then find themselves again. The skin around my mouth crawls, then tightens. I blink rapidly and my eyes focus on that vein in his fat neck, how it pulses, how it begs.
“Briar,” My mother screams as she sees my intent, but she’s too late. Far too fucking late.
I tear at his flesh, tear at his sweaty neck rolls. I snap and I snap, until there is nothing but mangled meat and the sound of my own gnawing left.
Behind me, the door rattles again. I turn with laser precision, and see her hand settled on the knob. She wants to flee. Toescape. Is she not proud of what I am? Is she not happy at what her perfect princess has turned into?
I pull the skin back around my teeth and hiss at her as she freezes.
“Briar…” She stammers. “Briar, please…”
“That’s what she said too.” I reply, as I take one steady step after another, closing that distance. “She pleaded, and she begged, and you did nothing.”
“What could I do?” She gasps. “I couldn’t have stopped it, not when…”
“When what?”
She shakes her head, but we both know the lie in her words. She did nothing. She said nothing. She watched and she laughed, and she was happy it wasn’t her being ruined that night. “It was so long ago now, how do you even know of these things?”
I don’t hear the confusion in her voice. No, what I hear is anger that I’ve dared to bring it up, dared to question her.
The whole room shifts around. My breath goes low and quiet. Her breath is a fluttering at the top of her chest. Her heart is pounding so much it sounds like a war drum, spurning me on.
I feel the soft opening in my own throat and the sharp catch in hers.
And then heat rushes over my skin, a curl of fire that doesn’t burn, it clarifies.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
My legs spring, my body pounces. I land on her like she is the prey I’ve been hunting this last week.
She screams out in that same pathetic way my dad did. She screams and she cries and she tries to stop me, but she hasn’t realised that there is no stopping this. This is fate. This is karma. This is what one moment of evil and eighteen years of silence thereafter creates.
I claw at her face, I destroy her features. I pluck out each eye and delight in the way they pop so decidedly on my tongue.
My sharp nails slice through her pretty designer dress, through her lace bra, through the nicely moisturised and tanned flesh of her left breast. And I rip. I rip and I tear, and I pull my quarry out.
My father died, choking on his own blood as it gurgled in his mangled throat. My mother will die, bleeding out, while her heart slowly falls to silence.
A nice puddle of red circles around us. I lay down, seeking to bathe in its smell.
I am quiet now.
There is a new quiet that lives between my ears. The engine that used to grind in my chest—worry about who saw, who said, who would dare—is gone.
There are only vibrations.
The floorboards transmit everything like instruments; the slop of the dishwasher gurgling its last cycle, the faint, panicked tick-tock from the mantel clock, the crackle of the candle that burned itself out on the dining table, puckered wax frozen mid-drip like hardened tears.
Dad’s cologne is like pine licked by gasoline. Mother’s perfume is the most aggressive, still trying to win.
Their mouths are slack. Their eyes staring off, forever glassy, forever watching me.
“Perfect princess,” I giggle, except it’s not a giggle anymore, not a sound I recognize. The word is a wet scrape, salivary, a syllable broken across my new teeth. My tongue is a strange thing now, long and efficient. It tucks against the curve of an incisor and cleans.
I need a nap, I need a sleep. I need a moment to be still.
