Stories So Small, They Must Be True

My child killed her sibling. I’m okay with that.

I remember the day she snapped. How the last leaves lost their months-long fight and fell to the damp, muddy ground. Gray painted the sky and the wind ceaselessly battered frolicking child and shivering adult alike. A thick layer of frost smothered the dead grass, the sound of it underfoot like cracked ribs.

The wind did not promise beautiful snow days in the future, though. They promised sheets of ice which shattered bones and sliced open skin. Slick roads, glassy lakes, and all the beautiful abundance of flora and fauna bullied into the ground, or be caught in the belly of Winter. They promised heartbreak, hard times, and death. 

Fall was coming to an end. With the snuffed flame of my favorite candle, so too did my daughter’s patience for her siblings. 

 

I did not want the first two of my babies. Newly adult, I was a naïve teenager, and had believed my now husband when he promised we did not need a condom. I listened and well… Before I knew it, before I was ready, I was a mother. All of my plans now had to be put on hold at my husband’s insistence. All of my focus had to be put on our child, so gone were my plans to become a bartender for my first job. Gone were my plans to enjoy my twenties. All of it gone, replaced with a rushed white gown. 

While I had secluded myself to a shoddy apartment, separated from my parents, a screaming little girl in the crook of my arm, he went away. The man once attached to my side suddenly had business trip after business trip, with all the promised, needed money never sent. He got sucked into the pretty promises of timeshare, and never once looked back at his young wife, mother of his child, desperate for help. So, so desperate for help. 

On the few days he came back to ‘reestablish’ our relationship, child number two, my son, popped up. Of all the fucking days for my birth control to fail. I could strangle the younger me, who listened to my husband’s tearful promises to be around more. He’d even help around the house while I hobbled around with a heavy belly, the saint. Just keep the baby. His baby. 

And so my son was born, and his father left for another ‘business trip’ while I laid in the hospital bed. That was also the day I heard the term ‘married single mother,’ muttered by a nurse to her colleague. She didn’t realize I could hear her through the door, or the colleague’s click of her tongue. 

I don’t know when I started hitting them. My earliest memory of my guilt was when my son was around five. I begged him so many times not to poke holes in the wall with a fork. We were renters, and I had tried everything I could think of to stop him. Hid all the forks in a cabinet out of his reach, sat him down and had several long, calm talks, and hid the stool so he couldn’t use it. 

I had underestimated the strength of a five-year-old, though. He dragged a dining chair all the way into the kitchen and next to the countertop. Climbed up the sheer drop of the cabinets while I was in a much needed bath and snagged a fork. While I was towel-drying my hair, a rare smile on my face, I walked in on him jabbing holes into the wall right next to a socket. I did what I promised myself I would never do when I had daydreamed about being a parent in my teenage years—I snapped. 

One spanking turned to two. Four. Eight. They just kept happening. I don’t remember half the times I raised a hand towards my children. All the times I dragged them to their rooms and did not let them out till dinner. How I threatened cutting off the heads of their stuffed animals if they destroyed one more wall, stole one more thing. Said that right to their tearful faces like a monster out of their story books. The evil witch who terrorized children and chopped off the heads of beloved dollies and teddies.

On the day I cheerfully told my oldest “Good morning!” and she flinched, I collapsed on my knees and bundled the little girl in my arms. I remember how my throat closed around my shallow gasps for air. It felt like my husband was sitting on my chest and I could only hold my oldest tighter. Hold her close and whisper apology after shameful apology. So sorry, my precious baby, for making you fear the one person you should always feel safest with. So sorry for being unable to stifle my hopeless rage for you. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. No one ever taught me how before I had you.

A couple of pills made the anger go away. The silk pillow the little white pills provided sapped me of my fury, my fight. For the first time in months, I felt safe to be around my children, and they now tumbled and horseplayed without fear of their mother. Whenever they got into trouble, I still shouted, but the drugs dulled the sharp edges of it. 

Soon, I needed more than a couple to feel safe around my children, so two or three became a whole palmful. Each bitter, chalky tablet no more foul tasting than my own self-hatred. 

My husband encouraged the crutch, loved how ‘agreeable’ it made me. When the pharmacy denied me a refill, he got in touch with a buddy of his, and I suddenly had an endless supply. 

Bolstered by my ‘self-control,’ I told my husband that I wanted another baby. A planned one. The two were growing nicely into their independence, and money was not the ever-tightening noose it once was because his boss moved us to a much cheaper state. Better yet, he could no longer take anymore business trips because of what the boss demanded of him. I wanted to experience motherhood without the nightmare of before. 

He agreed, and part of me doesn’t want to know why. During my pregnancy, I stopped taking the pills. I enjoyed life without the fog, seeing my beautiful children dance around through clear eyes. I had stretched out on the moth-eaten couch, a content lioness surrounded by her tiny pride.

My husband was less enthusiastic since I, for now, had the energy and brain power needed to fight back his ludicrous demands of laziness. “No, I will not get up and make you a glass of tea just because you don’t want to pause your game. No, neither will your daughter, do it yourself.” He grumbled about how he couldn’t wait for ‘that kid’ to be ‘out’ so things could go back to normal. I told him I might not take the medication anymore after she’s born, as I felt like I didn’t need it. Which was good, as that meant more money to spend on things like food.

The frozen rage he bored into me misted the air in my lungs, and I held my warm son snug to my chest. The young boy whined and cuddled closer, wrapping a tiny fist into my shirt. Blissfully unconscious and unaware.

A few months after that, my youngest was born. My husband then left over two hundred dollar’s worth of food to rot on the countertop while I was asleep in our bed, recovering from labor and then being forced to shop for groceries just a week after birth. Almost a month’s worth of food, gone, and I downed five pills in one go to starve the fire fattening underneath my breastbone. 

To worsen matters, he got fired from his job not a week after that. I heard rumors, of course. The few of his colleagues who came over before my husband lost his job couldn’t resist letting a few things slip, boastful as they were about ‘ripping off the boss.’ 

He refused to tell me how he got himself sacked. When I brought up the rumors, asked how exactly he ripped off his superior, and if I was about to be married to a felon, he stormed towards me. He shoved his face into mine. His nostrils flared, his pupils the size of a period. “Go ahead,” I had told him, calling his bluff. “Do it.” He raised his hand, and I didn’t move a muscle. “Do it.” 

At the last second, he folded. Lowered his arm and made himself scarce. Cuddled himself to his controller and played whatever shooter he wasted our shriveling funds on. He assured none of his children, nor his wife, that everything would be okay. Didn’t pick up a newspaper and search for a new job before we became homeless. Simply hoped that a friend of a friend would pull some strings and get him a new job. 

Someone was looking out for us, or at least my children, because that’s exactly what happened. He remained a timeshare salesman, which I despised. The new job paid pennies where his old one at least paid dimes, but he brought in enough to feed us. At least, after I buried myself in newspapers, scissors in hand, to cut out all the coupons, an infant snoozing on my lap. 

We still had to move somewhere smaller, and my new baby was without a crib and had to share the couch with me. I refused to share a bed with my husband, as his indoor chain smoking smothered every curtain, blanket, and sheet in a thick layer of nicotine. I could barely breathe through the tar layering my lungs with every breath, and I feared what such an environment could do on my little baby’s developing lungs. 

I barely remember her so young because of the pills. At least for the older two, I could remember most of their childhoods with clarity. Birthdays, Halloweens, and Christmases, with them usually in the cradle of my arms by day’s end. With her, my youngest… most of it was… gray. A splash of her laugh, a streak of her happy squeals, but not much else. 

I hate seeing the few pictures with myself during those years, my dead eyes staring through my daughter as she grinned at the cake’s candle, but I don’t have a choice. Those photos are the few clear images I have of my daughter growing up. They quickly became the few sources of her smile. 

The years soon revealed the obvious truth, that she was her siblings better. As soon as she took her first steps, spittled out her first string of sounds. When she grew old enough for her mind to truly turn and her eyes to fully see, her stare wielded a fierce intelligence I had not seen before. That I remember, the strokes of her brilliant mind. 

Jealousy is a disease, and both of her siblings fell deathly ill with it. When they first held her as a baby doll to play house with, they were as gentle as a deer with her fawn. As she got older, though, it was like they sensed it, her superiority. Nail imprints soon littered her doughy skin, no matter how many times I scolded them. 

She was three when her brother threw her right against the wall, my oldest laughing along with him. After I returned from the hospital, I almost screamed myself hoarse about how they could have killed her, but they didn’t care. The two children only stared back with guiltless, cold eyes. My patience shattered, and I banned them from holding her. The pair were so green with envy, they matched the healing bruises they had beaten onto her skin. 

My older son and daughter differed in how they mistreated their baby sister, though they both left their mark. Her older sister preferred mental torture. Petty insults my youngest was too young to ignore, and targeted taunts which dug deep into the skin and tickled muscle. Used her as a doll for her makeup, though did her face so horribly that the little girl cried when she looked in the mirror. My oldest destroyed her toys, drew on and cut up her clothes, and picked at every insecurity she had, until the poor girl bursted into screams and tears. 

It was only when my youngest fought back ‘too hard’ did she rake her nails down the little girl’s limbs and face. Twisted her arm until the younger promised to stop moving. Other than that, my oldest much preferred watching her brother thrash the little darling around. 

It was a miracle he hadn’t killed her by the time everything was said and done. He certainly gave it the old college try. His list of cruelties includes pushing her in front of a car when she dared to run ahead of him, ever the nimble little fawn. He would force her to play video games with him, then placed stupid restrictions on her and her alone. When she overcame these restrictions and won the round anyway, he’d punch her in the throat and stomach till she vomited. She was almost a wraith of a child because he also stole her food right off her plate, pushing a thumbnail into a delicate thigh if she tried to tell me. 

The child’s starvation could only stall the inevitable, though, as she grew stronger as the years progressed. Faster as well. One time, her brother overestimated his abilities, chasing her up a tree, which she scaled like the squirrels she chittered with. He tried following, slipped on a slick patch of moss, and the boy nearly broke his neck on the tumble down. When he blearily opened his eyes and searched the leaves, he spotted his target. She rested amongst the treetops, like gravity was only a suggestion. 

The youngster was a little fairy creature, touched by Nature. She talked to the squirrels and the geese, and the animals listened. They sat far closer to her than they dared with anyone else, accepting her gentle pats. The trees cradled her small form, wrapping her in their leaves to keep her warm and dry. Baby geese waddled behind her, and fall-painted butterflies rested on her hair before continuing their journey. 

Turtles wiggled out of the safety of their pond to eat blueberries out of her palm. Foxes glided between her legs and left their kits with her, and the mothers would return to the girl curled around the tiny balls of fur. While the boy clumsily stalked her, his sister not far behind, she flew into the safety of the thicket and her friends.

Her siblings were not her only predator, as my oldest children ensured. By the end of their smear campaign, no one wanted to associate with the ‘mute monster’ that was their sister. 

Bullies chased her through the woods in packs, my son the head of them, yet none could outrun her. Within a few minutes, the predatory children would be bent over as they gasped for air, their quarry far ahead of them. They always tried to cut her off from any trees, because no one had the stomach to follow as she went up, and up, and up to the sky. Scraping concrete and splintering bark callused her fingertips, the thickened skin rough when I hold her hand as we cross the street. 

The nature which nurtured her did not tolerate anyone hunting their imp. She would run to the protection of a resting flock of geese, and the vicious birds would wake up and attack the children for daring to touch their very large, featherless gosling. The neighborhood children screeched on more than one occasion about my child hitting them across the backside with the thin, baby branches of its parent tree, but could never explain how when she was so high above them. Foxes tracked down where the bullies lived and peed on their outdoor toys, especially the absorbent ones. The children also found out the hard way that squirrels have excellent aim. 

The trees and animals could not protect her in humanity’s domain, however. When the sun set and I called her back in, she went from one hunting ground to the next. In my attempts to protect her from the nocturnal predators wearing human skin, I put her in the arms of another. 

We only had two rooms for the children. The boy got his own, while the girls shared. It made sense, putting the girls together. I felt guilty not giving them their own room, as they deserved their own space as much as their brother, but I promised myself they one day would. 

Once my youngest grew firmly into her independence, and was not so small that a strong wind could carry her away, I’d get a job. Ignore my husband’s pleas to collect dust at home and bring in a second income the household desperately needed. The girls would get their own room. My daughter would have a den to hide in. As I folded tiny shirts with butterflies on them, pants of sunny-yellow, my heart soared at my warm daydreams. Yes, that’s exactly what I would do. Get a job and brute force all our worries away.

My oldest daughter made me not just a clown, but the entire circus. 

 

Halloween is my favorite holiday. You wander around at night, chatting with neighbors while the kids chase each other around. The rare freedom of being able to chow down on sweets and scare their peers and parents breathes life into the dullest of towns. We dress up without shame, enjoy the fruits of our labor, and the night reminds us that there lies beauty in the dark. Somehow, my oldest daughter telling me how she violated her baby sister hasn’t diminished my love for it. 

Experimentation gone too far. That’s how she described the rape of her baby sister that Halloween night, the sun dying on the horizon. A whoopsie the gravity of she only ‘realized’ while in the middle of the act, supposedly pushing the little girl away, ordering her to go to her top bunk and sleep. She claimed she cried all night, yet I doubted that. My oldest’s eyes were dry through her sobs as she confessed. 

When I asked her why on Earth she would fess up, morbid curiosity getting the better of me, she maintained her pretense of guilt. She was just so guilty that she needed to tell me so I could help her little sister and fix it. “You always know how to fix things, Mommy.” She hadn’t called me Mommy in years before that night, and my heart squeezed at the title.

I knew the real reason, though, and no amount of tender titles could blind me of it. She had visibly relaxed when she asked if my youngest said anything and I answered no. Still, not a tear in the girl’s round eyes.

This wasn’t the confession of a remorseful sinner, it was the self-preservation of a coward. She thought if she told me on my favorite night of the year, she could give me the sanitized version. Beat her baby sister to the punch in telling me, hoping I’d favor her side. 

My oldest didn’t ask herself why the fuck I would believe the word of a rapist. Of course I talked to my youngest the next day. My child told me everything. The darling first tried to keep certain details to herself, clutching the blackboard and dry-erase marker to her chest, because she didn’t want to hurt me by describing her assault to her own mother. I told her not to, though. “Don’t hold back, baby.” Let me have it.

Her first introduction to the concept of sex was a violent video of writhing bodies. Then dozens of videos over the coming weeks. Months. Her sister showed her these videos for months before raping her. Ground down her innocence before going in for the kill.

The child already knew where babies came from because of her documentaries. When she wasn’t running with the wolves, she was fighting for her fair share of screen time to watch lionesses stalk zebras and shoebill chicks fight for the privilege to live, and those documentaries show all the aspects of bestial life. It definitely made The Talk a lot easier.

But she had no idea how sex worked beyond fertilization. All the intricacies I needed to teach her before she became an adult. Gradually, until I felt she knew enough to learn the rest on her own safely. Gone. Plucked away like flower petals. 

Tears were a rare sight on the girl’s face. Her siblings used her as a whipping post so often, she trained herself not to cry. If her eyes stayed dry, they got bored faster. My baby cried then, though. Fat tears mixed with snot and spit. A waterfall of laments I drowned in as I held her close, our heads below water. 

Her sister maimed her. Her brother hunted her. The little girl’s father was apathetic at best, added to the collection of bruises on her body and heart at worst. All of that… and it was a potato gun which finally drained the last of her patience like an infected wound.

 

I’ve learned over my years that monsters have a way of finding each other. Like they can sense from across the room how the other lacks an important part of what separates us from the dogs. Two warped life forces emulsifying into something that could resemble a human soul. Maybe. 

My son’s lacking half came as a boy with kindred dead eyes. They called each other brothers-in-arms, chasing the other around with stolen knives and BB guns. I banned him from talking to the boy at first, my son already feral enough without a partner-in-crime to enable him when his sister wasn’t around. When he started sneaking out, I replaced his room’s doorknob with one that locked from the outside.

On the third night, I woke up to the sound of shattered glass. I raced into his room and a broken window, an empty bed, and an abandoned phone greeted me. The sharp edges of the window shimmered pink in the moonlight.

He, a young boy, ran out into the middle of the night without his phone, bleeding. That pissed me off more than his smashing the window or running away. If anything happened to him and he couldn’t call… He drove me batshit, and I despised how he beat his baby sister every time I turned my back. My blood boiled with how no punishment or plead got through his thick skull. If he were a random kid on the block and not my own, I might have very well hated him. Despite that, I was his mother at the end of the day. Something in my blood roared at the image of a patient white van anywhere near my boy.

I talked to his friend’s mother the next day. Told her about their thievery, the bullying, and how her son encouraged mine to break a window and run away into the night. Showed her the text messages from my son’s phone of just that, as well as the pictures of his sliced-up hands and knees. She flipped me off and slammed the door. As I walked away, the sound of the little demon’s laughter hounded my steps. 

We did not have the money to send him away, as tempting as it was. Forget putting him into therapy when we could barely afford to eat. My side nor my husband’s would ever loan us money to get the child therapy as well. My husband had burned them too many times. The familial grape vine flourished with decades of vapid gossip, and we were the rotten grapes on the bottom.

No relative in their right mind would have taken him in, nor did I want to subject anyone else to the child. He did not listen to his own mother. Didn’t fall in line with his father’s threats. The boy would sooner beat a relative into submission than listen to them. 

He was at the age where he was small enough for a grown man to snatch him off the street, but old enough where his fists caused damage. I boarded up the window, kept the lock on his door, and he responded by breaking it down and smashing the front door lock off. He put a fist through one of the glass panes for good measure. When he returned that day, deep slashes covered his hands, requiring a hospital trip. Hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage in a single night and we had yet to replace his window. 

There was little choice after that. I let him leave. The only caveat being he needed to bring his phone, and it had to hold a full charge. When he agreed without fuss, I forced my jaw not to slacken. An ominous feeling curled in my stomach, and I had to resist asking him why he complied without so much as a whine. I studied his little flip phone, a present for his tenth birthday. I knew his dried blood caked the spaces between the buttons, the hinges. In the end, I didn’t want to find out how he would react if I snooped through it again, still limping off an impressive bruise on my upper thigh.

So he and his friend had the run of the neighborhood, and the pair utilized the other’s strengths to full effect. My son was brutish while the boy was spry. He was impulsive while the boy was calculating. He was the gun. The boy was the trigger. 

The friend’s father taught his son all about how to create a potato gun, but not an ordinary one. Not the practical toy you’d make in a physics class for a guaranteed A. He taught a small boy how to create one capable of shooting with enough force to fracture stone, with the fewest materials possible. 

The neighborhood was a sleepy one, docile with years of little crime besides the petty theft of cocky and adventurous children. Because of that, it boasted a healthy population of hobbyists and DIY enthusiasts. There were hundreds of places to swipe a PVC pipe, a coupling, cement glue, electrical tape, and something to ignite a spark. 

When my daughter nested herself on top of a large tree, asleep as the trees sang a lullaby with their leaves, the boys went in for the kill. They stalked out of the bushes they shrouded themselves in and waited until she woke up. After her nap, she climbed across the branches. My son aimed the gun at her. A vixen saw the pair and growled, then screamed.

The spud hit the little girl right in the gut. Her back bowed with the force, nails scoring valleys in the bark. She was halfway to the ground when she dug her nails back into the tree’s armored skin, adrenaline supplying her the strength of an adult. 

Half her fingernails ripped off. A patch of skin was missing from her cheek, the naked flesh angry and bleeding, and a thousand tiny cuts designed bloody constellations onto her body, but she was safe. Then he shot her again, and she fell to the ground. Then the friend took the gun, reloaded with practiced ease, and shot her again before she could catch her breath.

And they kept shooting her. Shooting her and shooting her and shooting her until her lungs whistled and pink foam dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She forced herself to her feet, growling like a beast, teeth bared. They cackled and fired again. The fawn wilted, and she crawled through the thick mud and slippery leaves away from them. The predators followed her with twin grins. My son walked ahead until he was next to her, then kicked her in the side.

The entire time, she refused to scream. Besides a sharp sound from the first round, stony silence met each shot as she ran, then limped, then crawled away from them. Perhaps a grunt or a cut-off moan, but no more, not wanting to excite them further.

As a ‘joke,’ my son’s accomplice loaded the gun with nails and shot the girl right in the back, and a dozen met their mark. The metal nettles burrowed into tissue, severed veins. They scraped against bone and the little girl yielded. She screamed. 

She screamed with the force of an oak meeting the earth for the first time in centuries. The fury in the heart of a tornado. The fervor of a dormant volcano when it stirs. With enough agony, I heard her from my cozy spot in the kitchen. 

I raced to my little girl, the pain in my knees forgotten. The memories of me chasing my daughter’s dying breath blurred. The sickly yellow of the trees, the burnt orange of the fall ground, and the teardrop blue of the sky mixed like watercolors. 

Black and white flashes are the only things I recall when the memories land on my daughter’s battered body. They want to reveal themselves in their gory glory, but my mind shoves them back. A mercy, as the tactile echos already ghost across my skin at night.

Her feather-light body nestled against my chest. Her broken mewl as she recognized the heartbeat of her mother and cuddled closer. The sweet smell of her mixed with copper. The tacky blood caking my tank top. How it itched as it dried and flaked off my arms as paramedics swarmed my daughter. My stinging eyes when geese, vixens and their grown kits, and squirrels alike all gathered at the edge of the forest, shoulder to wing. Even the turtles had waddled from their lake. 

The trees howled with no wind, startling the paramedics and rubber-neckers. All sentinels for my daughter. All except me. 

She fought unconsciousness long enough to scare the daylights out of the paramedics, a fiery growl escaping her lips as she came to. A bud of mirth bloomed behind my ribs in spite of the gruesome state of her. The little imp has always enjoyed scaring people, though never in bad faith. Always with a smile. 

The child whined, twisted against the straps that kept her from aggravating her wounds further, and she stabbed her remaining nails into the foam cushion beneath. She hiccuped sobs as she fought against the straps, in search of her comfort. 

“I’m here, baby.” 

She turned to me, pupils dilating when she caught mine. Her eyes were viscous puddles of exhaustion as she whimpered for her mother. 

I do not know if it was the lights of the ambulance or if it was the waning moon, but her eye—the one not frozen shut—reflected like shattered ice. She snarled, teeth painted in streaks of crimson. The blood didn’t touch her canines. The fangs shone like icicles gleaming opal in the spring rays.

 

It’s obvious why she chose her brother. Her sister raped her violently over several sickening weeks, right under my nose, but my oldest was a coward. So much so, she admitted to the abuse just in case her baby sister spilled her guts. 

The boy was so stupid, though, it could almost be considered brave. He never learned, only took the punishment, waited, then did it again. This wasn’t the first attempt on her life, nor would it be the last. In a sick way, he was a greater threat to her well-being than her rapist.

He produced tears for the police, and they believed the words of a supposedly guilty boy. The officers didn’t even visit the hospital and asked my daughter if she wanted to press charges, or see if a few nights in juvie would straighten him out. 

A sibling dispute which got carried away, they told me the week after, as my daughter laid beaten in a hospital bed with broken bones and crushed veins. Nothing the parents can’t sort out by themselves. “He just needs a few kind words and a firm hand. Have him and his sister hug it out.” 

I wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves and slam the door in their faces. Instead, I smiled, told them I’d do just that, and swallowed down a scream as the front door clicked closed. My daughter would get no help from them. His friend, since this wasn’t his first time nearly murdering someone apparently, didn’t get the same merciful treatment. I have no idea what happened to him, but my son was now without his partner, the one being who might’ve protected him. 

He must’ve realized this too, as he rolled out the red carpet when my youngest returned from the hospital. She outright refused to use a wheelchair when the nurses and doctor asked, and opted for crutches. They were more comfortable for her to walk in, but the weakened girl had trouble getting into and out of the old car. My son, when he saw her having difficulty, raced to help her. She hissed at him, fangs bared, and smacked his offered hand away. Still, he continued to push his luck and brought her snacks and drinks, not a speck of it the girl touched.

Her brother was always nicer after his major fuckups. Stole from her less, complimented her, and chaperoned her to places like she couldn’t jump from tree to tree. Always after he knew he crossed a line. Particularly when she got that look in her eye.

My youngest avoided acknowledging her siblings. When she had no choice but to concede that they breathed in her air too, her eyes only reflected disgust. When they went too far, though, it was a different story. The child would study them with cold, pointed fury, like a shard of ice lodged into her eyes and she used the crystals as binoculars, zeroing in on weaknesses. That was when her brother was sugar, spice, and almost nice.

The last time I saw my son alive, it was an entire month after he almost murdered his sister. I overheard him inviting my youngest on a fishing trip in a neighboring neighborhood. Fishing was banned in our stretch of the woods, but his brilliant thought process was, because they didn’t live there, no one would recognize them. If someone fussed about it, they could make a run for it and go back home. How he didn’t get daily police rides baffles me. 

I expected her to refuse. Flip him off and go outside to her forest friends, as she didn’t need her big brother’s guidance to do either. The imp taught herself how to spearfish when she was only five with handmade spears. A necessity when winter came and the dining table was bare, and her siblings hogged every morsel they could. Ironically, while she dined on fresh fish, thick roots, and fungi, while drinking hot pine needle tea, her siblings thought they’d won as they gorged themselves on cheap spaghetti. 

No doubt the girl has also wandered into the other neighborhood before, as she’s explored every inch of the forest. The trees stretch for miles, the background and selling point for hundreds of houses. If there are trees to hide in and critters to play with, she knows of it.

Against all logic, though, my youngest agreed. Nodded her head with a honeyed smile and planned the whole day with him while I listened in, speechless. I should’ve known she intended for the next day to go a very different way, as she walked away from the conversation with a vicious, victorious curl in her smile, spinning her dry-erase marker between her fingers.

Now she’s delighting the police with her foul tongue. 

She’s never spoken before then, not truly. Whenever she wants to convey an idea, she writes it down (how she swirls the tail of her Gs steals my heart) or makes her little noises. An assortment of growls, whistles, and chirps only I can translate through experience. Her online teacher recommended a speech therapist, and my husband snarked that if the teacher wanted her in therapy, she could send him the check. 

Now I wonder if she could speak the entire time and simply chose not to. She plays the role of orator beautifully, even with her foul tongue. 

It’s deeper than I thought it would be, her voice. I always imagine it being high-pitched, like the bells on a reindeer, and as fragile as the snowflakes they prance through. Soft and sweet as mousse. 

Instead, her voice rasps like a rattlesnake. It does not ring, it tolls. She plays her vocal chords like a violinist and it lilts, twirling from note to note as she weaves a tale of a fight between siblings ending in tragedy. She was nowhere near her brother when he died, officers, as they butted heads once again.

“He couldn’t resist being a little shit, sirs.” The two officers interviewing her chuckle under their breath. “A comment here, a pointed jab there.” She gestures back and forth with her hands. “He lured me to the lake so that he could torment me. Mommy couldn’t be the referee if she wasn’t anywhere near us.” She blinks her eyes as they sparkle with tears. The girl scratches her head. Thick, long hair falls in front of her face, and it just so happens to blanket the half where she can’t hide a small quirk of her lips.

“I finally snapped when he poked one of my bruises.” She lifts her shirt and shows the two officers a bruise the size of a volleyball, and it covers most of her small stomach. It’s still black in the middle, a poisonous purple at the edges. The men cringe. “He laughed when I yelped and pushed him away. He always laughs.” The tears fall from her eyes on cue, like synchronized dancers. 

My youngest takes a deep breath and fidgets with her fingers. “So, I punched him.” The older officer elbows his partner when he laughs. I’m standing next to the policemen and say nothing when I notice how she lowers her head and bites her bottom lip. That’s what she always does when she fights down a smile. “I punched him in the face,” she points at her left cheek, where a yellow bruise hasn’t fully healed. “And then I ran away before he could think to chase me.” 

I vouch for her returning soon after the two had left. Barely an hour had passed when my youngest slammed the door against the pockmarked wall, tears streaming down her flushed face. I had jumped up from my place on the couch and she waved me back down. The imp climbed onto my lap and passed out not five minutes after. 

I did my part, calling the police when my son did not return as night fell and he refused to answer my texts, then voicemails, then relentless calls. The police responded on the double, and soon the whole neighborhood was combing the entire forest and behind every house in search of him.

They found her brother at the bottom of a lake, the same one he took her to. There was a length of old, rusted chain with a thick hook at the end. At the other end of the chain, a pile of cinderblocks. Someone had wrapped the chain around his ankle, then kicked the concrete blocks off the pier and into the pitch water below. 

The boy was old enough, heavy enough, to drag the blocks the last precious meter and into the water, but not nearly strong enough to fight against the burden and swim to the surface. He died alone. Terrified and in the dark. 

I am only relieved that he didn’t overpower my daughter and reverse their roles. 

Her brother, in his depraved quest to prove his superiority, ensured he would get no justice. The older officer interviewing her was at the scene when he tried to murder her. Watched firsthand how she hacked up blood, heard her agonized screams and cries. He, and the younger officer next to him after the other explained the incident, have little trouble believing that there was some leftover tension after her brother almost killed her. 

They believe every word she says, and why would they not? A sweet girl like her, with a hilarious vocabulary of creative and colorful curse words, who weaves tiny white flowers into her hair as she speaks to them about how cruel he was to her and why she just had to leave. Then she sits on the floor, criss-cross applesauce, out of breath. 

“Is my big brother dead ‘cause of me?” she asks, lip wobbling. “Would he still be alive if I didn’t leave him alone?” The older officer scoops the girl into his arms, and I wonder if he’s a father himself. He coos and rocks her back and forth, and the younger officer next to them piles on reassurances as well. She plays them both beautifully. 

The question of my place in my children’s morph from destructive darlings to cruel creatures will haunt my thoughts till I die. Did I teach them how to mutilate by spanking them? Give them a taste for torture with a pair of scissors to a teddy’s neck? How much did they inherit from their father, and how much did they learn from me?

I suppose it doesn’t matter. Not anymore. Before the police found my son in a lake and my oldest confessed to raping her baby sister, maybe I could have saved them. Therapy, paid by my going back to work while I ignored my husband’s pleas to stay a housewife. Let my daughter be taken into foster care, her siblings now having no human toy to maim.

It would have been so unfair to punish her by allowing strangers to steal her away from her home, from me, but she’d be safe. She could have even lived with my parents. Everyone would have been fine and I could have fixed things from there. 

There is no saving anyone now. There is no need. My youngest had handled it because I could not, and now the greatest threat to her life is a bloated corpse. Her siblings sealed their fate when they went just a step too far and turned a victim into a survivor. A child dictated by Darwin, and damned bound to win his favor by wit, not might.

They thought her prey, but she is a predator like them. The difference is, she is a patient little lioness, while my son was merely a yapping wild dog, her sister a spineless vulture. This brilliant, broken child, with the broken, brilliant mind, refuses to be cannibalized by either of them.

I indulge in a cigarette, the heat of the lighter cold against my skin, and take a deep breath. Blowing out the smoke, my daughter chuckles, for once sounding her young age.

“Mama, you look like a dragon.” Mama’s sorry for not being a dragon and burning this whole place to the ground, sweetheart. I make it a point to blow the smoke through my nose in the next breath, ignoring the officers’ disapproving glares, just to hear her sweet laugh once more.

During the interview, my daughter scoots to where I am standing near the cops and snuggles against my legs. My oldest chooses at that moment to enter the room, and she thinks it’s appropriate to ask when I’ll cook lunch while the police discuss her dead brother. The two officers gape at her, then share meaningful looks with each other. My youngest glares at her sister with frozen eyes.

Maybe she’ll be a dear and get her father after.