There. A shadow in the window. Just a tiny movement but she spots it because by god she stayed still. Her heart ramps up but she doesn’t move. Let them wonder. Let them ache for food and become greedy at the thought of all her warm flesh out here for the taking.
For the biting.
For the rending.
How will they get to her? How old are they? Will they be stiff from the cold? Or have they retained enough of their humanity to know to put on warm clothes?
“You.” The word is a sigh in the wind and she isn’t sure she hears it until it comes again. It’s deep like a man’s voice. She doesn’t move because he’s given up the element of surprise but she hasn’t. He probably heard the car’s tires squeak-crunch through the snow. He knows someone is here and his hunger will flush him out.
The car is at her back but she checks behind her anyway, trying to keep the fear from pushing her into a mistake that could cost her her life. Something could be crawling under the car at you right now, says the fear. Something could run at you from that coop.
Her stomach roils but she stands her ground and waits.
Maybe she will freeze out here, turn into a block of ice. Would they consider her a treat? A fleshcicle? Forty-something flavored. High in fear hormones and grief.
Yes. They’d think her delicious.
“You come.” The voice is closer. She can’t see where he is but he’s outside now. It’s a good sign he’s not talking in complete sentences. He’s an older one, which means he’ll be less fleet of foot. That, combined with the cold, means she might survive another encounter with them, another day of this hell.
“Pretty lady.”
If it’s possible for her to get any colder, she does. This voice is higher, louder, and more articulate.
“Pretty,” they say, drawing out the word.
She counts to ten, counts as she slowly turns her head this way and that, trying to figure out where the hell they are so she can kill them, can blast their heads off, can watch their brain matter spray, can know for a goddamn fact that they’re dead.
There. One of them is standing by the far corner of the house. She sees his longer hair flapping in the wind. He’s slowly creeping out, his fingers clenching spastically, greedily, as if they can almost feel themselves tangle in her hair. Any hair, because he doesn’t know she’s here. He hasn’t seen her yet because she hasn’t moved.
They’re like T-Rexes, a voice says, reaching fingers from the past to torment her now. Like the movie T-Rexes. They can’t see us if we don’t move.
It isn’t that they can’t see. It’s that they aren’t interested in what doesn’t run. They like prey.
Maybe a fleshcicle wouldn’t thrill them after all.
The thought is dreamy as if she’s floating up and away from her body. While she floats away, her body swings the gun to one side and fire flashes. She imagines a bullet cutting through that cold air, slicing through snowflakes, melting them with its heat. When it impacts the man, his skin splits, his skull cracks then shatters, his brain rips as the bullet tears through.
Blood splatters and it is as satisfying as she imagined.
“You!”
She pivots and fires again. The bullet goes wide. She plunks gracelessly back into her body as the “You” charges at her. He’s seen her movement, he’s heard her noise, and he’s hungry. She fires again and then he’s toppling her, slamming her into the ground hard enough to knock the breath right out of her. She hasn’t even gotten the chance to get her arm up to brace under his chin and all she can think of are his teeth where are his teeth when will he bite her will he bite her face oh god her nose she can’t …
He’s silent. He’s still.
Her breath is gone, forced free of her lungs and for ten thousand million moments she is sure she will never draw a breath again. Sometimes, when children are horribly abused, they don’t grow. Psychosocial dwarfism is caused by extreme emotional deprivation or stress. Her heart, her lungs, her brain, perhaps they are done, stunted, unable to do one more thing because the weight is too heavy, the grief too much to bear.
Then she gasps bitter air that hurts, that reminds her she’s alive whether she likes it or not.
She shoves the man off her and staggers to her feet, a twinge in her side that’s more than a twinge, more like a sharp stab, but that she can’t think about it because it doesn’t matter what it is. She brings the gun back up and waits.
Better to be cold than dead.
Better to be cold than dead.
Better to be--
11
Then
Lana and I met at a soup kitchen. She was volunteering her time when I barged in, hot on the trail of a kid I was mentoring. Back then I didn’t have the best boundaries and I was pretty sure I could save the world one LGBTQ teen at a time.
My quarry was a fifteen-year-old kid named Jerri who thought she could find her father if she hunted through all the homeless in Seattle. Not only was this an almost impossible task but it wasn’t safe, not for a petite little thing like Jerri. But she had a face full of acne and five people’s worth of personality, a dragon in a Chihuahua body, basically, and no one, including me, was going to tell her what she could and couldn’t do.
I loved her to death. She also made me want to take up drinking.
That day it was hot and humid. Jerri had led me on a wild goose chase through Pike’s Place Market, down the waterfront and back again until we ended up in this tiny, hot building filled
