“Why? To keep me away from you? Don’t you want me by your living side?” I lowered my wide eyes just inches from his, and brought the blade up close to his straining, yellow nostrils. “Would you rather I didn’t speak? Would you rather I cut my own tongue out, make myself mute like my mother?” His eyes went very wide and he shook his head violently from side to side.
“What, Father? What is it you want to say?”
I pulled him up by the shoulders, a little frightened by how light and frail he was, and pressed his lips to my ear.
“No…” he said. “Speak, damn you!”
“Did it…herself…”
“Did what?”
“Cut her…own…tongue out…”
I pushed him back down into his pile of silken pillows.
“Liar!” I said, raising my fist to strike him.
“No!” he said, suddenly finding his voice from somewhere down deep before it cracked off into a whisper again. “True…”
Calming abruptly, or rather moving off beyond rage to a calmer, more clear, more vicious place, I once again lowered my ear to his lips.
“Why did you leave, Father?”
There was a gurgle in his throat, and then, “…her…house…”
“What do you mean, ‘Her house’?”
“…kept me there. Gave me everything to keep me silent. Made me…”
“Made you what?” My voice was regaining its edge.
“Made me…” He was breathing very unevenly, and said with great effort, with what a fool could have taken to be pleading in his eyes, “You.”
My voice was very calm now, and I made sure he could see me drawing the blade through my fingers, letting it glint off the weak light from the amber reading lamp.
“You’re lying,” I said. “You’re lying like you always have to me. Your life is a lie from beginning to this, the end. You twisted my mind from as early as I can remember. It’s a sewer now, Father. It always will be. I am scared to death just to be outside that mansion. Just coming here made me tremble and sweat. My life is a catalog of unnameable things, sick things, tics and neuroses that I can’t escape. I fear everything. Except you.” I brought the blade down slowly, delicately toward his old man’s chicken neck.
“Did it for you, go back,” he croaked, looking at my eyes, not at the blade. “Hybrid. She…hated you. Only way to keep you alive. Statue,” he said, his face suddenly getting very red, blood pumping into it from the ruptured machine in his chest and making his eyes nearly pop out of his face. His voice became, for a moment, very loud and clear. “Alfred! She was from the woods, not like us! Go back, save your life!” He grabbed at me with his spindly arms, his twiglike fingers. He tried to pull himself up, tried to clasp his vile body to mine. “…back…”
His grasp loosened then, and he slipped, like a flat rock into a pool of water, down into death.
I sat up, panting, and looked down at h
im; the blade felt sharp in my hand and I entertained for a moment the notion of carving him up anyway, of taking the pound of flesh I had come for and at least giving to my mother the sacrifice I had vowed. But instead I lowered it into my coat and stood up. He was pitifully dead, and in death he appeared much less the object of hate; the soul had left, leaving only meat behind.
It was then, when I was leaving his bedroom and passing the massive, gilded mirror over the dresser by the doorway, that I saw something that made me stop.
My skin had turned red. I thought immediately of the meat I had eaten in the past months, of the bounteous meat I had eaten in the past days in the City. I shook my head to clear it, turned on the bright lamp on the dresser and once again my color was correct. I smiled knowingly at myself: for a chilly moment my teeth looked yellow and I thought of all the oranges I had eaten—the back of my throat became uncontrollably dry and it felt as though something tiny was ticking around back there—but then this passed too.
“Fool,” I said, and left the apartment in haste, throwing a fleeting glance at the statue in the foyer before passing on.
Everything outside was blue.
Overhead, there was a fat full moon, and as I looked up at it, it turned indigo and my neck began to ache, giving me trouble in lowering it.
I sat down on a bus and then a train, and my feet went numb.
I now felt, inside me, the movement of my organs and the gathering of bread crusts as they pressed out through my ribs, hernia-like.