one bloody thing after another . table of contents . about the creators
Chapter two The Kitten. -- Margaret gets back outside and everything is so bright and open. Everyone is busy going to work. Coming home from work. The carrier is heavy in her hand, and the kittens are mewling. The baby, too. They don't like the sound of the cars. And when she looks inside, the black kitten is just looking back at her. She likes him, she realizes. He doesn't like her at all, and it makes her like him. Back at the house, Margaret locks the door behind herself, and the kittens and the baby are still making noise. Annette can hear them from her room, and it drives her crazy. She can hear them and now she is pounding on the wall. Margaret looks through the peephole, into her room, and the chains look good. So she opens the door and goes in. The kittens are quiet now. They can hear Annette, and have no idea what to make of those sounds. The baby keeps crying. It doesn't have the sense. Annette hasn't eaten in two days, and she is desperate. "Homework lonely makeup mother ice cream," she says. Margaret doesn't look at her. Right beside the door is a CD player, ready with Annette's shitty bagpipe highland inspired rock music, and Margaret presses play. The volume is up full blast. Then she opens the top of the carrier, and reaches in for the fat arms of that woman's baby. She pulls out the mewling white kitten, then the grey. The other white one. Outside in the hall, she leans her back against the door. The music is so loud that it drowns everything else out. The kitten carrier is on the floor beside her, and inside it, the black kitten is still sitting. He looks like he expects her to pull him out, too, and toss him into that room, but she doesn't. He's wrong about her. He ought to look grateful. Inside the room, though, Annette is getting louder. You can hear her over the music now. More words. There's blood on her shoes and Margaret feels a bit sick, but after a while Annette calms down and the music is the only noise again. The little black kitten is mewling and Margaret closes her eyes and pretends she is just home from school. Her sister Annette has the music up too loud, even though she knows Margaret has to study. As soon as mom gets home, she'll turn it down. But you can't just tell on her, she'll deny it. She's so aggravating. Look at her, look at the look on her face, behind mom's back. Smug and self-satisfied. Human. In the morning, Margaret wakes up on the couch thinking that she's just fallen asleep, and it's afternoon. Her mother is in the kitchen, cooking macaroni and cheese for her and Annette. Everything is right for a few seconds, but dreams don't last. Their mother hasn't come back to them. The newspaper has a picture of that woman on the cover. Margaret sits down to read it on the front step, with the kitten on her lap. It's the cover story and they are aghast, downtown in newspaperland. Aghast! A young single mother, murdered! And her baby has been kidnapped. It doesn't mention the kitten at all. "They don't mention you," she tells him, but he doesn't seem offended. What does he care? In the kitchen she opens a can of wet food for him, and he perks up when he hears the sound, like Annette when she hears the door. Margaret hasn't named him yet. She probably won't. She wishes her sister would eat wet cat food. But Margaret and Annette tried that with their mother, back before their mother got loose. They tried that first. Then they tried raw steaks. Bloody. It still wasn't fresh enough. After breakfast, the kitten follows her down the stairs, padding along down the hallway to Annette's room. Darling little sister Annette will still be sleeping. She was up all night, howling and upturning furniture. But it's quiet time, now. Margaret unbolts the door, and pulls it open. She puts the bucket down, and she cleans up as best she can. There's blood everywhere except a big half circle, where Annette's chains let her reach to lick the floor. But out past where the chains extend, there is blood, and chunks of kitten. Chunks of the poor missing baby. Annette is curled up in the corner, and she looks peaceful. Her shirt is ripped, and underneath it, you can see the holes, where their mother took her organs. She isn't breathing, either, but she is pawing at the floor, lost in some dream. The trick is not to look at her face. Her face is bent out of shape, but still recognizable. There are too many teeth in her mouth, now. It is torn open at the sides. Split along her cheeks, so the weird jagged stones of her teeth can breathe. It would be better if it was just a twisted mess of a face, but it still looks like Annette. The mouth has split in a small twist on the left side, like her old smile. When it was their mother down here, chained in the corner like this, Annette and Margaret would argue. This was when she was still Annette. But Margaret didn't mind the arguing. At least, when they were fighting about it, they were sisters. It was just the two of them, taking care of the thing their mother had become. Only, they couldn't agree about how exactly they should care for her. The first time they gave their mother a live animal to eat, it was a dog they stole. Mitchie. He was from the apartment building down the street. They used to see him all the time, on their way to school and back. Every day, he went out for a walk with his old man owner, and every day Mitchie would run into the woods. He was old, and he couldn't run very fast. But he would run into the woods anyway. Margaret and Annette would walk home from school, and that old man would be standing there at the edge of the woods, stooped over, hollering and hollering. "Mitchie, you get out here right now. God damn it, Mitchie." And eventually Mitchie would come tottering out of the woods. They were cranky, blind old men together. When the two girls realized that their mother needed live food, Margaret wanted to buy birds, from the pet store. Or maybe they could try to trap pigeons, she said. They were animals but they weren't pets, you know? They weren't a part of someone's family. "Do you know how hard it would be to catch a pigeon?" Annette said. So they came home with Mitchie, and they put him in the room with their mother and ran upstairs to get away from the sounds. Margaret turned on the TV, as loud as it would go. They didn't talk about it, until late that night, Annette knocked on her sister's door, and climbed into the bed. She put her head on Margaret's shoulder and she said, real quiet, "Do you think he's still out there calling for Mitchie?" Now there's no arguing. Annette will wake up when the sun goes down, and soon Margaret will have to feed her again. She just wants to sleep some more, but there's always more work. The kitten sits in the doorway and watches as Margaret cleans up drying chunks of baby, and he yawns. ONE BLOODY THING AFTER ANOTHER image copyright emily horne 2008. text copyright joey comeau 2008. |