Page 96 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“I’m not finished. I won’t—”

Pain rips through my thigh, hot and fast and bloody. I hear a scream I barely recognize as my own, even recognize as human, a noise not unlike the one my mother made beneath the wheels of the car. I am on the ground before I realize he has shot me.

He shot me. My father shot me.

He walks toward me, gun still drawn. I stare down the barrel. The muzzle is agape in an eternal shriek. And the wound—it burns, God it burns, and I am paralyzed. I cannot even move enough to press my hands on the wound to stop the blood gushing from my leg. The pain radiates to the furthest reaches of my body. It screams up my spine, into my brain, the roots of my teeth, down to my toes, all the way to my fingertips.

“Run,” my father says. “Get up and run.”

No words form. My mouth is numb. It is all I can do to keep breathing. The world has gone blurry.

He stoops and grabs a fistful of my hair. Something cool nuzzles against my shoulder—not the gun, no, that’s in his other hand. It’s his wedding ring. And I suddenly think of my mother dressed in white, committing herself to this vile brute who calls himself a man.

He fires the gun at the ceiling from beside my ear. The ringing is so loud it doubles me over. “I told you to get up and run. Will you listen to me now? Get up! Get on your feet!”

I don’t have time to reach for the switchblade. I do the only thing I can think to save myself.

I rear up and bite his nose. I taste the blood and I feel the chunk of flesh I’ve taken with me. It rolls between my gums like a pinball as he falls backward, his hands clamped over his face. The gun planes across the floor.

“Fucking bitch!”

I claw my way on top of him and bear my full weight down upon his chest. Now is my chance. I am so desperate to breathe that I choke on the air. Before I can reach for the switchblade, he rams a fist into my solar plexus, and now I am wheezing, my vision turning green at the corners, so starved for oxygen that I would tear a hole in my own throat for a single gasp.

The gun skids to a stop in front of the pyramid of twelve-packs. He bear-crawls toward it.

I use the shelves to pull myself to my feet, but I collapse as soon as I straighten my wounded leg. The blood courses down my leg like honey from a forbidden hive, thick and sticky and somehow unbearably cold.

Get up, Providence. Get up.

One more time. I drag myself upright. He inches closer to the gun.

I reach for the switchblade as I drag myself down the aisleway, bottles of liquor shattering against the ground in my wake.

And I don’t think twice.

I throw myself down on him.

I plunge the knife through the back of his neck.

The knife hitches as it severs his vertebrae. He collapses beneath me, and I sense the moment the life leaves his body as he goes limp on the floor. And it is delicious. One more thrust,I tell myself, just to make sure, and this one is cleaner, slicing through with ease. I stab him until the tip of the switchblade clatters against the floor and bounces away from me, until his blood mingles with my own. It coats my hands and soaks my shirt. It is a lifetime of rage finally exorcized from my body. You’ll shoot me like a fucking dog, will you? I’ll eat you like a fucking dog, you sick, sick man. And me, I’m sick too. Sick for doing this, sick for delighting in it so brazenly, sick for pretending I was not driven by revenge or fury, the sadistic desire to end another person’s life. But that’s okay. I have the right to the last laugh. I get the last fucking word.

This is my pound of flesh.

Finally. Finally.

Harmony, Grace, I’ve avenged us. It’s over now. We’re free.

The pain roars through me again, stronger now than before. Everything goes white.

The world resurfaces in fragments as I fade in and out. A crowd. The same man who wolf-whistled at me uses his shirt as a tourniquet on my leg. An ambulance.I haven’t seen that much blood since my granddad showed me the old slaughterhouse in Gordon.A hospital. They jostle me around on the stretcher, and they aren’t running, which I find funny because I’m certain I am about to die. An operating room. The doctor smiles as me as I fight against an anesthetic sleep and beg him to save my moth tattoo.Count backward from ten, all right? You’re in good hands, miss.

And it turns out, he’s right. I wake up in a barren hospital room, mummified in blankets pulled up to my chin. The curtains are drawn, but the room is lit by the blinding hallway fluorescents and the artificial glow of the machines at my side. Oxygen tubes dangle from my nose and IVs sprout from the crook of my arm.

I peel the blanket back to look at my wrists. No handcuffs.

A nurse comes running when I hit the red button on my bedside. She checks my vitals, blinds me with a little flashlight that she asks me to follow with my eyes to make sure my brain is still intact. The surgery was a success. They removed the bullet, she tells me, and I’m very lucky it didn’t hit bone. She says more, but I still can’t hear out of my left ear and I’m too shell-shocked to tell her so. I am convinced this is a dream, a hallucination from the edges of a coma, and when I do wake up, it will be in a prison hospital, bound to the metal bedframe by my ankles and wrists, a khaki jumpsuit at the foot of my bed.

“The doctor … soon.…. . important … someone else … talk to … let him in?”

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