Maddy

**** Author's Note: I wrote this years ago and posted it on this website as an entry for a horror story contest. It won the contest, but unfortunately life intervened and made it very difficult for me to continue posting on this site at the time. Nonetheless, I wanted to repost this story because it is one of my very favorite ones. It's not beautiful by any stretch, but it's not meant to be. It's more of a character sketch. Always felt many things about the character of Maddy. She's crazy, but she's so much more than that. I hope you, errr... enjoy the story she has to tell...



As I was cutting his hair I was in a world of my own. I was thinking of the reality I had inherited and in some ways chosen. It was not for the first time I had reflected on this, and- admittedly- it would not be the last. What brought me out of it was the sensation of cutting not hair, but something softer, more tender. Cutting flesh and cartiledge. I saw him wince and bit my lip before staring down at my own trembling hands.

He reached up and tugged on his ear. When his hand came away bloody he spun around in his chair and looked me fiercely in the eyes. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, shaking his head. “It’s a fucking hair cut. It’s not rocket science.” His one eye- the one that his daddy had almost put out with a whip when he hooked him up to the plow at five years old- twitched with a savagery that I had seen there many times before. “Are you trying to kill me?”

I lay the scissor on the table and backed away. I must have been pale with realization then, because I reached my hand up to my mouth to stifle a gasp. I was suddenly terrified and excited with a secret knowledge; I knew what I had intended. Sometimes it takes a moment like that to really wake a person to their own natural, if unsavory, intentions. I could smell the blood- his blood- on my finger tips and realized as I touched my face that some would be left there as well, the traces of sin. I would have crossed myself then. I wanted to. Even though I’m not Catholic and even though he would have beat me proper if I had done it in front of him- Daddy was a strict Baptist- I wanted desperately to do it.

He glared at me. “Don’t just stand there like a dumb twat,” he muttered. He had picked up a dishrag and held it to his ear to sop up some of the blood. “Get a goddamned bandage before I bleed to death. There should be some unguent in there, too,” he called after me as I ran to the washroom.

I found a roll of gauze, a bit of tape, and the ointment as he had instructed and took them out to fix him. As I did I thought of the last time I saw my sister, and I thought of the years that had passed, and how at some time or another she had reached across the short distance between our beds and grabbed my hand and said, “Maddy, I want you to get out of here someday. You understand that?”

As I lay the gauze over the sizeable gash I had left in his ear, I thought of those words. My mind drifted off to that distant night as my hands did their work silently. She said it like she was making some statement in a play- one of the plays Mrs. Warner had required us to see as a part of our English class when we were still in school. “I want you to get out of here, Maddy,” she would say. “There’s so much more for you out there.”

The thing was- and as I slathered the unguent on the gash and affixed tape to the loose side of gauze, I knew it- there wasn’t much for me “out there”, as she would have put it. More to the point, there isn’t. There wasn’t then, there isn’t now. It’s a nice thing to think- castles in clouds, bright shining hope- but in the end a soul knows how true or false a statement is. When I was younger I was still willing to believe that all she was saying might be true. As I grew older I came to see things differently. Now, attending to a man who- even as I fixed up his ear- was trying to reach down my shirt and get some grabbing in, I knew that there wasn’t much better out there for a person like me.

I tried not to notice the coldness of his fingers, searching around in back for the clasp to my bra. I looked at him as he leaned over in his chair and his oily eyes, the left one a lighter, opaque blue like it was speckled with milkglass- peered at me knowingly. His thin red lips turned up in a startling and appreciative smile as he cupped first one then the other. I looked away from him. “Do you want your ear fixed or don’t you?”

He kept smiling, rubbing. His thumbs circled my areolas furiously, his tongue stuck out with concentration. He stared at them- two impish, small breasts- in his knotted hands. I finally cleared my throat and grabbed his wrists, yanking them out of my dress and pushing them away so hard that he nearly fell out of his chair. He settled back and looked at me menacingly. “You don’t know how good you’ve had it, girl,” he said. He pouted, rubbing his tiny erection as I knelt next to him, working on his ear. “An ugly thing like you ought to be damn proud to have anyone look at her at all.”

“Ugly, am I?” I looked at him.

“More puckered than a preacher’s asshole,” he chuckled. God, he was full of them. He had a hundred different sayings like that and none of them were nearly as funny as he believed them to be. His laugh was a husky growl that quickly became a hacking, wheezing cough- the kind I had become accustomed to. He thought I wasn’t aware of the pack of Chesterfields that he kept in the breadbox, defying the doctor’s orders. So many days, as I worked in the garden or in the sewing room doing alterations, I would smell the cigarette smoke- like incense on the wind- and I would pray, God, please take him. Please leave me with some peace. But he remained; he hadn’t gone just yet.

I went to the sink to wash my hands, my ears ringing with his coughing. As the water curled down the drain, pink with his blood, I gazed out at the bright day beyond the window. At the far end of the property, heavy with ripe fruit and censing the air with its sweet aroma, wild raspberry bushes grew with abandon- always had.

As I dried my hands I stared out at them. In my mind’s eye there was a memory- one of many- that came floating up out the abyss, like a ghost. Almost exactly like a ghost.

One summer day, when she was twelve or thirteen and I was only barely ten, my sister Kate ran into the forest and didn’t return until sundown. It wasn’t so strange, really. At the height of summer, both of us girls were known to run willy-nilly through the forest playing whatever came to mind after our chores were done. But Daddy had a bug up his ass that day, and when he went searching for her and she was gone, he got madder than I had ever seen him at such a young age. When she emerged from the thick of raspberry bushes into the clearing that night, Daddy was waiting for her. He had carved a hickory switch and beat her to within an inch of her life. He said he did it because he was certain she was having her way with most of the boys in town and he wanted her to pay dearly for it. In any case, Kate walked with a limp for days after that and winced when a person so much as looked at her. It was like the thought of our eyes on her precious skin was enough to burn. Maybe it was.

She disappeared the summer after that. No one had any idea where she might have gone, unless it was with some boy she was sweet on. But one thing that Daddy had been certain of was that, wherever she ended up, she’d be home soon. She may have been beautiful, but “Your sister has about as much brains as a drunkard has charm.” He would know, of course. Daddy used to be a drunk. It was what drove Ma away on a train to St. Petersburg four years before Kate disappeared and, in the eyes of the town, Ma and Kate left- both of them- just to get away from him.

I was the only one that stuck around. And, if for no other reason, for that one fact alone it seems kind of odd to me that I was considered the smart one. After all, if I was really smart I would have gotten out before the thought to leave even flashed through Ma’s mind. I would have made a life for myself, somehow. Being the smart one, I could have figured it out- so one would assume. I would move to a beautiful city and find a job, build a life for myself. I had seen boys at school go on to great things- one of the Childers boys when on to working in the state legislature and another boy from down around the train tracks, he went to school and studied strange animals and ended up with a job in some other country.

But that kind of thinking was something that I kept for myself- the dream that something better existed for me “out there”. Again, at a young age it helps to have those dreams, those goals. But it was always made clear to me that- brains or not- Kate was the one with a future. She was the beauty- the classic lady with charm and poise. I used to covet her beauty like a child chasing lightening bugs across a field, and- for me- such beauty was just as elusive.

It’s funny what you remember sometimes. I hadn’t thought of that day in years. In fact, I may not have really thought about it since Kate was still around to snicker and laugh at what a damned fool Daddy could be sometimes. She could laugh about it then because she knew what I had not yet come to know about him. She knew him for what he really was; the kind of person that had seeded our mother twice. The stock that we came from.

His voice was the one that brought me back.

“What in hell are you looking at?”

I turned from the window, dish towel still in hand, and looked at him. He was a small man and had devolved, over years of hard labor, into a hunched figure that constantly scowled. His husky voice, thick with the Chesterfields in the breadbox and a southern drawl that even I sometimes had difficulty understanding, was something that cut me worse at times than even his words. I stared at him for a moment, breathless, and then glanced out the window again. For a moment- as crazy as it seemed- I would have sworn that she was standing there, a phantom of years gone by. Kate.

“I’m certainly appreciative that you think so little of my time,” he said, hunching in his seat. “Get your bony ass over here and finish what you started.” He smiled at me then, calling my attention back to him. There was a glimmer in his eyes.
I did as I was told. The sound of the scissor shears opening and closing- that wrenching, metallic sound- was soothing somehow. It reminded me of the first job I had working a pressing machine in a factory on the far end of Lark proper. It wasn’t a wonderful job. It was grimy, it was hot in the summer and I came home smelling like grease and sweat and dust, but it was my first and only real taste of freedom. In those days you could take the bus all the way from the end of our road to the Lark council building for ten cents and I relished those daily rides because it got me away. It was the first and only time when there seemed some possible truth in the idea that there was something better- that promise that Kate had made to me once upon a time. But then Daddy fell ill, and after Kate left I had no choice but to take care of him. When she was around it was her company he preferred. But when all was said and done- when the Fates had their way- he was stuck with me.

“So what do you have going on today that’s so important?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He chuckled. “You may not have much use for me, but there are some in this town that still respect an old man. Enjoy his company.”

“No shit,” I muttered.

“Don’t sass your father.”

“My apologies, I’m sure.” I stared at his bandaged ear and at the blood already soaking through the gauze padding. It was a magnetic affect. Once my eyes had fixated on it- on my very own handiwork- I couldn’t quite pull them away. “You have a meeting to go to? You still in good standing?”

“Course I am. Not that it’s any of your business.” He sniffled. “Almost eight months sober.”

I nodded. “More or less.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I sighed, kneeling down to work on the trim of white hair around his head. “Well, I’m not the one that hid that bottle of Jack in the root cellar. Not the one that takes nips off it, either. So, unless we have a ghost or rats with a taste for whiskey, I’d imagine it’s probably you.”

My Daddy’s sobriety was a fabled thing, much the way people talked about Kate’s disappearance. They were as much myths as the old tale around town that there were mud people who came out of the swamps and the marshes every night and sucked souls out of the mouths of unsuspecting children. That one came from Bobby Wilder when he came home one day, heaving breath, and decided to explain it away to his domineering father by claiming to see mud people and not by mentioning to him that Mr. Hallett had caught him smoking reefer in the lane next to his barn. It’s interesting the way people and things take on a sense of myth.

I was nineteen when Kate disappeared, and it took no time at all for the mystery to take on mythical qualities. Some people said that she ran off with a boy who worked at the feed store, because right around the same time he split and ran off somewhere, too. Still, seeing as how he didn’t have two pennies to pinch, I couldn’t reconcile myself to that particular theory. It only made sense if it was some guy with money. Kate needed someone to take care of her. God bless her, she could have never done it on her own. Others said that she hitched her way up north, and occasionally I would hear from someone saying that they thought they had seen her out and about in some far off place, walking the city streets looking classy and well-kept. That was always my favorite story. There’s nothing as nice as a beautiful young woman who has done well for herself- married into money, living a happy life. At the time when I was hearing these stories, though, she would have been passing out of the realm of beautiful youth. I imagined her hips slightly bigger, her breasts hanging a little lower on her chest, and her face a more mature one with wrinkles beginning in all the right places. She would have the tempered appearance that only comes with age: sunny and dull all at the same time.
There were other stories, but these were the two that interested me most because they sounded the most like Kate. These were the stories that I repeated, the stories that I helped to circulate. She had always wanted more for herself than I imagined I would ever have. She was like the biggest, brightest flower in the garden- the one that everyone flocks to. In fact, the one phrase that almost everyone used to describe Kate at one time or another was “movie star”. I had never been to the movies, but I saw magazines on the rack at the store and I could see what they meant. I always thought she looked like Natalie Woods, personally. I could imagine her living the good life in a big city apartment somewhere, enjoying the best of everything. A woman of leisure.

That was something I would never be…

His fingers reminded me of this, sneaking up around my breasts again, cupping them, flicking them. His touch brought me from my daydreaming, from my remembering. I felt his greasy fingers grasping, grabbing, teasing, and nausea swept over me. It didn’t faze me to feel his calloused fingertips, not usually. Just every now and again.

“If I did start drinking, I don’t think anyone could blame me,” he said. His tongue stuck out of his mouth again and his blue eyes were transfixed. “The way you treat me. Such a goddamn tease.” I could feel his eyes on me as I moved around him, trying to remain focused on what I was doing. I forced his head back to a forward facing position and he shrugged my hand away.

“Well,” I said in exasperation. “If you don’t want to get cut again you have to quit moving. How am I supposed to get this finished?”

I suppose a soul can grow accustomed to anything if it has to. It is true, what they say. No matter how I resisted, his hands always found their way to the most private places- those places that no one else had ever been. But for me the problem was that no matter how he touched my nipples they would never stand on end the way he wanted them to. Then he’d get angry and knock me hard across the jaw and say that I must have a beau somewhere and that when he found him he’d clock him about the ears, drown him in Huchmann’s Lake at night when no one would hear his gurgling screams. Of course, the man couldn’t shit without my assistance, so how he could get up to dickens with a boyfriend that didn’t even exist was hardly among my larger concerns. I tried. I didn’t want to feel his fists into me- not that day. As I cut his hair, I willed my nipples hard just so he would get it over with.

“You just try it,” he spat. “Cut me again and I’ll stab you in the neck.” He grumbled, looking at the table, at the carving knife lying there. He stared at it out of the corners of his eyes. I saw him do it. It was a flash of consideration- the kind of consideration you give to a pie that you plan on eating, but a little later. Not right now. Not right now. He licked his lips. Twisted my nipple. “Yes,” he said, lost in a strange world of whimsy. His tongue nipped at the air like a lizard sunning itself on a rock. “I’ll cash your check, my dear. Short and sweet. You won’t feel a thing.”

I nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first time. I never feel it. No matter how much you paw at me.”

“Don’t be fresh,” he said. “Just cut my goddamned hair. Besides, I know you. A slut just like your sister. You only pretend not to enjoy it, just like she used to. But I’d see that look in her eyes- same look you get in yours. Looking at me like you don’t never want me to stop. You’re just willful and ugly. That’s the only difference.”

I realized when I turned twenty what I think most women eventually come to find out- women who come from homes like the one I grew up in. At some point, after all the other options are exhausted, you become the prize. He had always had a fondness first for Ma, and then- when Ma was gone- for Kate. That was why he had been so angry at the thought of other boys getting at her. Before Ma left, Kate and I would lay in our beds at night and hear things going on in our parents’ bedroom- heavy breathing and the creaking bed frame. It scared me, but I was younger than Kate who said that she knew what they were doing and that it was alright, that I shouldn’t worry. “He’s not killing her, Maddy,” she would explain. “He’s doing God’s will.” It was only after Ma left- at least that I know of- that God’s will changed.

Kate and I slept in separate beds with only a little over a foot of space between them damn near all our lives until finally, out of some strange fit just after Ma left, Kate started taking blankets and a pillow out onto the roof overhang just outside our window. There she would sleep, only coming in if it started to rain. She never said so, but I’m fairly sure that Daddy had been trying to get at her when they were alone in the house together; it had been quite some time since he’d done God’s will. But when he found out what was going on- that she was sleeping on the roof- he nailed the window shut in our bedroom and promised that if she ever did that again he’d make her wish she’d never been born. That same night, while we were lying in our beds, I heard him come into the room. The two of them whispered and I could hear Kate asking him not to, but it came to no use. I heard the jingling of his belt buckle and closed my eyes against it. I tried not to hear what was happening. I kept trying to block it out of my mind. On one occasion, as I closed my eyes and hugged my pillow, I felt his fingers on my shoulder while Kate’s bed was creaking. I felt him touching my hair. And then I heard her. “Don’t touch her, Daddy,” she hissed. “You touch her and I swear to God I’ll kill you in your sleep.”

I didn’t really think much about it at the time. That may sound strange but it’s true. Hatred is something that is learned- that’s what I believe. I didn’t learn to hate my Daddy for some time, or maybe I didn’t realize how much I had always hated him until it became so obvious that I couldn’t simply turn away from it. In any case, it’s funny what kids choose to see and what they choose to push out of their minds. I always remembered as the bed was creaking, as I turned toward the wall and closed my eyes tight and tried to ignore the sounds or let them become apart of the background noises- the crickets or the rain or the wind through the trees- I always remembered at those times that Daddy was “doing God’s will”. And there was a sense of nobility in that. How was I to know at that age that it was really not such a noble gesture? I thought of him as a respectable man. I thought of the act- the odd sounds that accompanied it, the groans, the vibrations shaking the floorboards and the wall when the bed clattered up against it- I thought of these things as disgusting and unmentionable, but only because they embarrassed me. When I was a young girl, my Daddy may have been mean and he may have said nasty things to me, but I didn’t hate him. I just wanted to impress him.

And, just for the record, he never did touch me; at least not until I was older. By that time, there was no one else to touch. The only man I ever consummated anything with was my father, and there’s a dagger in that for even the hardest of hearts, I think. What I can say now- a forbidden thing that it took time to accept- was that he was a proper asshole. In fact, assholes don’t come much cleaner or shinier than that man. And while there may have been many reasons he should have died, and a lot sooner than I decided to do it to him, this one reason was best: He enjoyed being a terrible person. He enjoyed being cruel. He enjoyed making people suffer, for whatever reason. He had done it to our Ma, he had done it to my sister and me, and he’d do it to anyone else that so much as gave him the time of day. He was a nasty man and it’s my experience that nasty only gets worse with age.

I knew that I was going to finish him off that day. I knew it as I was bandaging his ear; there was a will forcing my hand that I didn’t have control over. Perhaps, after all this time, it was actually God’s will. And I knew that his sideways glance at the knife on the table was a kind of warning shot. It was him or me. There were no two ways about it.

I felt his hands like children running between sheets handing on the line. He had turned his focus from my breasts and their limp nipples to my legs. Once found his rough fingers began to creep up slowly, feeling the stubble there, the dry skin- all the imperfections.

“If you don’t want these things shoved in your ear, I’d keep your hands out of there,” I said. “That’s what I would do if I were you.” The sound of his hair crisply cut, the way the sunlight caught those silver locks as they fell to the linoleum- these are the things I remember. Also, I recall the smell of talcum powder and sweat because it was high summer and the sun had come to bear down on our house. The one industrial fan that we kept in the kitchen was enough only to stir the air. It did nothing about the heat.

Snip. Snip, snip.

And oh, those hands of his. I wondered how Ma could have found anything to like about him or his hands; marveled that once I had found something to like in them. I wondered if it had been a mutual thing, his touching her whenever it happened. Had she wanted it or had she done it because he gave her no choice? It seemed strange that there was ever a woman who had found Daddy to be more than the groping, arthritic ogre that he was, that I could now admit some level of hatred for. In the past- I understood this now- I had been wrong about him. I had felt respect for the man before. I suppose it had been slowly eroding for quite some time, but it was blisteringly apparent to me as I tried to decide my next move that I had been wrong in my unconditional love for him. I had been wrong in my desire to impress him. I should have left years ago. I stared at him as his hands continued to climb the insides of my clammy legs and I felt the hatred growing with every passing over my flesh with his chapped, gruff fingers. I saw the hair growing out of his ears, the yellow cast of his aging body, the withering, liver-spotted arms that reached behind his chair and crawled over my skin.

“I’m warning you,” I said. “Leave it be.”

“Shut your mouth,” he moaned. He turned his head enough for me to make out his hawkish, withered profile. His nose jutted out like a broad, sharp beak. He rearranged the bed sheet that was slipping off of his shoulders and put on an indignant mask. “I’ll do what I damn well please,” he murmured. “You just worry that my hair gets done right. How about that?”

I pursed my lips; bided my time.

Snip, snip. Snip, snip.

I could feel callouses on the pads of his fingers and his palms. I supposed that years of working the land could do that to a person. I breathed deeply. I breathed as deeply as I could and felt a prayer go up to Heaven then. Stay my hand. Give me the power to deny this. It has occurred to me in the time since that afternoon that the act of murder- for as terrible as it may be- is still a private matter. It’s only in the aftermath of the act that it becomes a public event, scorned and made more horrific by the media and the courts and lawyers with sharp tongues and expensive suits making martyrs of the dead. Privately, I didn’t really want to kill him, I simply realized that I had to do it. I had to do it for so many reasons- that he was a terrible person, that he was wicked, that he had- in his way and his expectations- caused such horrific turmoil. But I didn’t want to. To try and explain it is silly when, again, murder is such a personal thing. I can tell you the ins and outs of it, how I did it, the play-by-play. I will do that, in fact. But for all the reasons that a jury wouldn’t understand why I stayed in that house so long to take care of him- even though he was miserable and cruel- those are all the reasons that no one will ever truly understand why I murdered him.

It was as his hands were on the homestretch that I said my last words to him. “You’ll not want to do that- what you’re thinking of doing.” After all, goosing a woman with a scissor in her hands is never a very smart thing to do.

And yet he did it. For all of my warnings, for all of the opportunity I gave him to rethink what he was doing, he did it. Which was when the scissor, in one fluid movement, went from someplace around his bandaged right ear into a jagged arch above my head. It came down and settled into the left side of his chest. Now, let me explain, when you do a thing like that it seems hard to believe at the time- in the instant that it happens. It’s as the seconds wear on that it becomes less unbelievable. It seems to everyone who has ever considered it that the passage of an object through skin, through flesh, should be a disgusting thing- that it should feel repulsive. Perhaps in some situations it does. But it didn’t feel repulsive to me. After all, it stopped him, didn’t it? His hands fell away from me, stopped their groping, their slimy climb up my bare legs, and suddenly I had the upper hand. It worked. That’s why I did it again. This time I hit the right side of his chest. He was still alive. It wasn’t as if he had died with the first or second swipe. I did it again. And again. And again.

What I found so bizarre about the entire event was that he didn’t really fight me at all. It was if he had expected what came to him that afternoon. Maybe he had secretly wondered what was taking me so long. Maybe, late at night, when I would hear him tinkering around in the root cellar- even as he told the boys down at the VFW that he was clean and sober- maybe he was doing it because he just wasn’t sure when he would push me too far.

And maybe that’s another reason that I didn’t just stop. I kept going. He was gasping for breath and I just went on stabbing him. It was such an automatic thing. Such a release. I thought for so many years that I didn’t have it in me to do it. But as my arm swung down and delivered the scissor into his chest for a sixth time, as I grasped my weapon of choice with both hands, wrenching it free of him to swing it down again, I could hear the nasty things he had said to me. I had always been ugly. I had always been the daughter that he was ashamed of. I was the one that he forsook for the sister that disappeared and broke his heart. I was the one that he put his fists into the day she left. I was the one that he started groping when we were the only two in the house, and then I was the one that he groped and fondled only because there was no one else. He had never loved me. He had never looked at me with the same desire in his eyes that Kate or Ma had been able to evoke.

I made the mistake in the telling to say that my last words to him were a few caustic warnings about where he let his hands do their creeping. In fact, there were other things that I said to him, as I attended his death more zealously, but I was never sure and never will be that he actually heard me. He reacted to them, and the manner of his reaction shocked me to my core.
I said something about Kate. I told him I would find her and she would be glad to come home now that he was dead and gone, now that he couldn’t have his way with her anymore. I said it and he laughed. The sound chilled me- it crept over my flesh, up the back of my neck, burrowing its way deep into my bones. The sound came as a hiss that momentarily stilled my hand. I held the scissor high above my head and stared down at his face, red with blood and craning back. His mouth was opened wide and his yellow teeth were pink and his eyes- especially the blind one- gazed up at me as if he had lost whatever sanity he had been able to hold onto; they rolled grotesquely back into his head. Air escaped him in short giggles, thick with fluid.

What was he laughing at?

“Stop it!” I screamed at him. “STOP LAUGHING!”

The scissor descended again and again and again. I could taste his blood and I was woozy, nauseous now not with the feel of his hands but with the smell that comes with death. It was a heavy smell of copper and raw flesh that haunts me even now. And eventually he did stop laughing. It wasn’t soon enough for me. Sometimes, when I think back on it, I’m not sure that the giggling ever really ended. He’s been dead for over ten years now and my life has changed in ways that I could have never imagined then, that day, as I cut his hair in the kitchen of a house that I left shortly thereafter.

That night I buried him deep in the forest that I knew so well. As I dragged his body through the detritus and the thick ground cover- wrapped in a blue tarp- I could imagine as clearly as I had seen Kate standing next to the wild raspberries the ghosts of our childhood selves, running through the trees, laughing. It was before everything that had torn our family apart- the jealousy, the misplaced anger, the resentment that a person doesn’t even realize until it suddenly lunges out of the shadows of the mind and then consumes it, like a mother eating its young.




In the weeks that followed, the police out of Lark showed only a passing interest in Daddy’s whereabouts. They poked about the property and asked their questions, but they knew him. My father had more than a few run-ins with the authorities in his time and had caused more than his fair share of problems- especially in the days before his attempts at sobriety. Besides the fact that, in reality, no one cared all that much about him, the town had been in a perpetual state of financial decline for years. The resources didn’t exist to perform the kind of investigation that was probably warranted. In the end, he was a missing person and- to my knowledge- so he remains; after all, why would I have taken his guff for years on end and then finally murdered him. Why wouldn’t I have just run off like Ma and Kate if things had been so bad? I told the police that my father and I had a very healthy relationship, that I loved him dearly. I even cried when they came to me- a feat I didn’t think I’d ever be able to manage. He became a mystery, a ghost that might very well roam distant cities and towns the way that Kate does, apparently even to this day. What few friends I retain and keep in touch with will still, on occasion, write to me saying, “I swear I saw Kate the other day… spitting image” or something of the kind. I don’t have the heart, or- at long last- the masochistic nature to set them to rights.

After he was buried, as I walked home through the pale blue moonlight filtering down through the forest canopy, I remember thinking: Today is the day I went crazy. I believe I even said it out loud to see how it would sit in the balmy night air. I didn’t recall a great deal of what happened after I felt the snap, after the stars erupted in front of my eyes, and it was only as time progressed that I was able to recall more easily the weight of everything that happened. After enough time went by I remembered more and more about that day- about my entire life.

I think at some point I had begun to believe the stories- the mythology- that followed my family. I believed, for instance, that Ma was really in St. Petersburg. For a long time I expected even to receive a postcard from her one day inviting me down, telling me that she had finally made a place for Kate and me. And then, after Kate was gone, I wanted so badly to believe that she was that classy, beautiful woman living a luxurious life in a city far, far away. But there are nights now- even with so much distance between myself and that house- when I can’t escape the truth, when even my dreams are colored by that blue moonlight, by the heavy aroma of wild raspberries, and by the weight of the truth that is- at this late date- inescapable.

The only thing I ever wanted was for him to love me. I think that’s why I stuck around. I wanted love. I wanted to be desired. Late at night, when I would hear him with Ma and then- later- with Kate, I wanted to know what it was like to be coveted in that way. To be coveted in the way that I coveted Kate’s beauty, because it made her special. And then, when I was finally special in my Daddy’s eyes, when he finally thought enough of me to touch me in the ways that no one else ever had, it was only because there was no one else. That, I think, was when I first began to hate him. That, I think, was when I first realized what I had done so that he might give me what he had always kept from me: his consideration, his desire. It pickled my desire; I began to hate him. I began to see him for what he was.

I took Daddy out further than I’d taken the others, out beyond the sass-a-frass trees where Kate and I used to sit and play Patti-cake. When I had buried him, I turned to two other mounds of earth. I noticed them only because I knew they were there. To the left, near where the earth rose into the jagged cliffs at the edge of the Childer property- that mound was where I had put Kate. And a little closer to home, on the other side of the creek bed, there was a slight hill where Ma lay in the same peace and quiet that had been undisturbed for over fifteen years. I said my silent goodbyes to all of them, because I felt myself being pulled away. I couldn’t stay. There wasn’t a reason to anymore.

In the minutes following the silence that ensued when my father’s laughter subsided, the one thing I had a hankering for was a nice, tall glass of iced tea. I didn’t even take the time to wash my hands. I clamored to the kitchen cupboard, grabbed a glass, and filled it quickly. Then I stood at the sink and gulped it feverishly. I had never tasted anything so good in all my life. When I looked out at the day it was bright with new possibilities. I knew that it was God’s will that I had done, and I felt strongly at that moment that I would be rewarded. Soon I would find myself walking through the streets of a distant city. I would have the life that so often I felt I would never know- the life that Kate and I had dreamed about. I would survive because that’s what I do. I do it better than anyone I know.

I’m the smart one after all. That’s what they always called me.