The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

Vietnamese.”

“The cops had him inside for a while about six months ago,” she said. She produced a piece of paper from the hip pocket of her jeans.

He took it. It was a printout of a year-old story from the local Anchorage newspaper about an arrest for assault in the first degree made by one Dupre Thomas Jefferson, aka Da Prez. The victim was one Charles Louis Carson. Jefferson claimed he had simply been defending one Loretta Igushik, street name Sweetness. Igushik, Jefferson said, was a friend whom Carson had allegedly severely beaten in the course of a lovers’ quarrel.

Brendan said, “You mean about Carson being Senator Carson’s son?”

“Read down.”

He read some more. “You mean the quote from the unnamed source in the investigation saying at least Da Prez made sure the johns didn’t mistreat his girls?”

She stood up and hit the trash can dead center with the cup. “Swish, score, two points, big team, two points.” She looked at Brendan. “Did I mention, Brendan, that the Suulutaq Mine donated a satellite dish to the Niniltna School? And a computer for every desk in every room in the building? These days, school kids in Niniltna could log on to the International Space Station if they wanted to.”

5.

“WELL, KATE?” said the big man with the red hair and the food-spotted tie.

“Well what, Brendan?” Kate said.

He looked at the double doors that led into the courtroom. “Justice done?”

He was looking at the doors as if he could see through them, as if the three girls were still in sight. “Brendan,” she said, “you noticed there was a majority of men on the jury, right?”

He was still watching the doors. “Huh?”

“You didn’t even use up all of your peremptory challenges. Didn’t you think it might be better to have a balance of the sexes on a jury for a case like this one? On a jury you wanted to swing your way?”

“Yeah,” he said, unheeding. “Men. Jury. Sure.”

“Yeah,” she said. “What I thought. Brendan, look at me.”

She had to say it again before he turned his head. “You want to sleep with Pauline,” she said.

He blushed and looked furtive.

“Don’t despair, you aren’t alone,” she said. “Every man on the jury felt the same way. So did the judge. And you all wanted to adopt Laura, and you all wanted to pick up your lance and mount your destrier and slay anyone who laid a hand on Linda. I’d bet large on every man who watched any of this on television feeling the same way. Barring that, I guess you can all write checks.”

His blush subsided. “So what if we did?”

“I’m just trying to answer your question,” she said.

Irresistibly, his attention returned to the doors. To them he said, “What question?”

“Was justice done,” she said, and looked at Mutt standing next to her, ears up, yellow gaze flicking between them. For a four-footed mammal with incisors of that size, justice was pretty much summed up in a “Hurt me or mine, I eat you” ethos. Come to that, the Akulurak sisters weren’t that long out of the Alaskan Bush themselves.

“What?” Brendan said.

“Never mind,” Kate said.

Her words were lost in the din when the doors opened and the Akulurak sisters walked out at the head of what had all the appearances of a parade. It included most of the members of the jury.

Kate’s eyes met Pauline’s over the crowd as it swept by. Pauline, hand in hand with her sisters, paused for one infinitesimal moment, just long enough for Kate to get the uncomfortable feeling that she could read Pauline’s mind.

What else was I supposed to do? Let Rod keep on fucking me and Laura until Linda got old enough for him? It wasn’t like we got any help, from you or anybody else. We did what we had to do to get out, and then we did what we had to do to stay out. So, yeah, we chose Prez, and we killed Prez, and we lied and said somebody busted into the house and did it, and I made sure there was enough evidence that at least I would be tried, and I made sure every single filthy thing that bastard Rod and that bastard Prez made us do was in people’s faces every minute of every day. Now we’ve got a safe place to stay and a quarter of a million dollars in a bank account, and we’re good until I’m old enough to keep house for all three of us. You got a problem with any of that?

The parade swept by, still in thrall to the siren song of the three girls at its head.

Maybe Kate didn’t have a problem with it. Maybe it was justice, of some kind.

“Come on, Mutt,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

LESS OF A GIRL by Chelsea Cain

SOPHIE SAYS NOT TO WORRY — that fourteen-year-old girls get a lot of practice cleaning up blood. She says they are experts at it. They scrub it off the crotches of their underpants, she says, and off their blue jeans. They clean it out of their bedsheets and mattress pads. They wipe stray drops off the bathroom floor, off the toilet seat, off their hands, out from under their nails. They bleed like stuck pigs, Sophie says. They hemorrhage. She says, watch a fourteen-year-old girl stand up from a chair, and half the time she’ll glance behind her to make sure she hasn’t left blood on the seat.

She says I should stop staring and get the paper towels.

“Under the sink,” she says, “in the kitchen.”

Her bedroom door is painted the color of an infected sore, and is covered with posters of actors wearing fake vampire fangs. Last year the door was yellow, and papered with pictures of horses.

It has been a long time since I’ve been out of the room.

I like it here, in the room. The smell of cherry lip gloss, pina-colada-scented candles, cotton-candy-scented hair spray, the Tide laundry detergent her mother washes her sheets with, hamster pee and sawdust, an orange peel that’s been rotting in the trash can under her desk for two weeks, talcum powder, and glue.

But now I can smell none of that.

Now it is sweat and blood and butchered meat.

“Paper towels,” Sophie says again. She looks down at Charlotte’s corpse, at the blood on the carpet, and frowns.

I reach for the doorknob and open the door to the hall.

“Don’t let my mother see you,” Sophie calls.

It’s like walking the plank, going off the high dive.

The hallway is thirty-seven steps. Framed color photographs of Sophie and her family line the walls. Their eyes follow me. They are wearing sweater vests. They are wearing white turtlenecks. Now they are wearing denim and leaning against hay bales. Now they are lined up on the beach in front of the cold Pacific Ocean.

I am walking, but I can’t hear my steps on the carpet.

Now they are dressed in holiday velvet in front of the Christmas tree. Now they are lying side by side making snow angels.

There are seventeen stairs down to the first floor.

I can see the pale blue glow of Sophie’s mother’s laptop. It smells like hair dye and charred wood and rotten grapes. She is sitting on the couch, with her feet up on the coffee table next to a glass of wine.

I have made a life out of moving silently, avoiding detection. I can stand against a wall so still that in the right light I am practically invisible. I am the thing you think you see at night in your room, before your eyes adjust and you decide it’s just a sweater slung over the back of a chair. When your hand slips off the mattress at night, I am the creature you fear will grab it from under the bed. I am Sophie’s naked, hairless twin. Her exact shape. Her budding breasts. Her skinny legs. I have her scars, her bruises.

The paper towels are under the kitchen sink. Sophie’s mother buys Brawny. It’s expensive. But Sophie says