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Her teeth are like ivory knives. “I don’t know,” I say.
“If you love me, you’ll have to cut off my head.”
Somehow I have a sword in my hand and am swinging it. The cat is changing like Lila did, but she’s getting larger, growing into something monstrous. The audience’s applause is deafening.
* * *
My ribs are throbbing, but I force myself to swing my legs off the bed. I walk into the bathroom, piss, and then chew up a handful of aspirin. Staring at myself in the mirror, taking in my bloodshot eyes and the mass of bruises near my ribs, I think over the dream, about the cat looming over me.
It’s ridiculous, but I’m not laughing.
“Is that you?” Grandad’s voice comes from down the stairs.
“Yeah,” I call back.
“You slept late,” he says, and I can hear him muttering, probably about how lazy I am.
“I’m not feeling good,” I tell him from the stairwell. “I don’t think I can clean today.”
“I’m not that great myself,” he says. “Rough night last night, huh? I drank so much I don’t remember most of it.”
I walk downstairs, cradling my ribs half-unconsciously. I stumble. Nothing feels right. My skin doesn’t fit. I am Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men have failed to put me back together again.
“Did anything happen you want to tell me about?” Grandad asks. I think of his eyes seeming to blink in the dark. I wonder what he heard. What he suspects.
“Nothing,” I say, and pour myself a cup of coffee. I drink it black, and the warmth in my belly is the first comforting thing I remember feeling in a while.
Grandad tilts his head in my direction. “You look like crap.”
“I told you I didn’t feel good.”
The phone rings in the other room, a shrill sound that jangles my nerves. “You tell me lots of things,” Grandad says, and walks off to answer it.
I see the cat on the stairs, her white body ghostly in a beam of sunlight. She blurs in my vision. My brothers were uncomfortable, but not for the reasons I thought. Not because I was a murderer or an outsider. I was such an insider that I never even knew it. I was inside of the insiders. I was hidden inside my insides. For a moment I want to dash all the crockery to the floor. I want to scream and shout. I want to take this newfound power and change everything that I can touch.
Lead to gold.
Flesh to stone.
Sticks to snakes.
I hold up the coffee cup, and I think about the muzzle of the gun melting and shifting in my hand, but no matter how I try to summon that moment, the cup stays. The slogan keeps reading AMHERST TRUCKING: WE LIFT STUFF on a glossy maroon background.
“What are you doing?” Grandad asks me, and my hand jerks, sloshing coffee onto my shirt. He’s holding out the phone. “Philip. For you. Says you left something over there.”
I shake my head.
“Take it,” Grandad says, sounding exasperated, and I can’t think of an excuse not to, so I do.
“Yeah?” I say.
“What did you do to her?” His voice sounds thick with anger and something else. Panic.
“Who?” I ask.
“Maura. She’s gone, and she took my son. You have to tell me where she is, Cassel.”
“Me?” I ask him. Last night he watched Barron kick me in the stomach until I blacked out, and today he’s accusing me of masterminding Maura’s escape? Anger makes my vision blur. I grip the phone so tightly that I’m afraid the plastic case is going to crack.
