And his arm never grew back

If she hadn’t seen that lizard’s tail grow back, maybe she wouldn’t be so obsessed with fighting. She hadn’t cut the tail; she wasn’t cruel like that, at least to animals. But maybe she was what the mothers always whispered about her. Unusually – unwomanly – cruel to that poor little boy with the pet lizard.

She was devil mostly in name then. A ghost story told midday. You see, she had seen the blood spurt like those that witnessed the nails into hands, and she didn’t faint but rose to her feet quickly. She didn’t flinch even when she stuck that dirty knife into his skin. When she’d seen that cowering boy weeks after holding the lizard in one hand, whole tail and all, she thought maybe the town was right. Maybe it wasn’t right for a little girl to like fightin’ so much. Maybe she was born under a red moon and would see hellfire. And maybe she liked it better that way. 

Years later she would realise just how much she enjoyed teaching people lessons. She’d laugh when her aunt said once how she hoped her brother’s daughter would’ve followed suit as a professor; apples falling softly from tree branches as it were. Aunt Susie still has the postman searching headlines for family reunions and university additions. She’d laugh again when she remembered how she’d tried to convince her fellow maidens that there was something academic in the way she, as the saloon-sitters called it, “went about her business.”

She’d picked a medical pamphlet from a pocket once, so she knew what that red fountain of youth meant. What dissection men wanted from the earth.

‘So, you’re interested in being a doctor?’ asked the knife peddler. He’d make his rounds on this side of the mountains before the cold set in each year. Hauling treasures and mostly bad news. ‘I’m sure that makes your parents proud.’

Her little fingers turned a page to a pretty sketch of open-heart surgery.

She stayed focused on the colour of each atrium, following their curves with her finger. ‘Do you know if the butcher knows how to read?’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t tell me.’ She flipped the page to a new redness.

When the kitchen door frame gained a few more notches, the boys stopped pulling her into alleys and started running into them as soon as they saw her shadow. But she didn’t have much time for them, or the town really, except for the butchers and the books. Seemed destined that those stores would be so near each other in town, as if she’d had no choice but to become what she became. When she returned those anatomy books, several pages missing and several more worn like a fanatic’s bible, the bookstore owner wondered what a creature he had a hand in making. Eyes bright and vigour in her arms, he was almost proud.

‘Did you know the butcher don’t read but he cuts the pigs almost the same way?’

She called the butcher Bacon. He spoke like he had bones in his mouth and stood like a sailor; salt spray of iron and scales made meat. She watched his every movement from a stool he’d placed behind the counter for her years before.

‘Is this the wet stone?’ she pointed at the dark slab.

‘Does a snake bite?’ Wagging his head as he put the blade to its surface.

‘Slim says you sharpen them with your teeth.’

Bacon laughed and she imagined that’s how pirates sounded.

She tried to get a look at them, to see if they were thin and sharp like razors. She thought they’d look funny because of the size of him. Like the loud sound a little finch makes. But his mouth opened and shut like a fish; a gaping thing.

Slim smirked when she told her about the razor teeth and how his ears had gone a little red when she’d asked Bacon if he could read. They looked over to the shopfront and heard the smack of cleaver on bone.

‘I bet he wanted to but couldn’t so he switched from people to pigs.’ She’d been thinking the same thing so they laughed the same way. ‘It isn’t so different.’

‘I know. Sometimes you oink instead of speakin’.’

•

She hoped she wouldn’t spend most of her life like this. It ran through her head, that thought, at the worst times. When she should have seen the glint of that same pocket knife in the boy’s hand, she was thinking of the short horizon that wrapped around the town; the glare of a sun that was looking elsewhere. Still, the glare hit the small blade like a beacon and-

‘Jesus, she grabbed it!’ accompanied by a few shuffling feet. She’d barely heard them, feeling only her fingers grasp the blade harder, thinking back to that pamphlet and what scalpels could do to skin. 

A standstill.

She’d been walking in the shade of the back alleys behind the main street, avoiding people and heat on her way home. It was her well-worn path. Rock eroded from constant rain.

The buzz of the main street flooded down each break between the buildings and she liked to listen to the cut-up dialogue. She was passing behind the schoolhouse when she saw them, would-be heroes in their formation, waiting for her like the second coming. 

The first drops of blood fell into the dirt and most of the boy’s friends skirted from her as if even her blood could harm. Like they’d planned a sacrifice and were shocked when a bit of magic happened. She felt like howling.

‘Just let go already freak’ and a hand reached out to grab a fist full of her hair. 

Most of those boys that grew into men still don’t talk about how she’d fended them off in the frenzy. It sat easier with them that she was actually wild and grew fangs and had a tail that was sharp, that cut.

She only really remembered watching his hand start to tremble as he held the handle when even more blood seeped from her palm. The red was the same as before, like she’d been the lizard this time and the boy was asking if she’d grow back from this. If she could take it. 

With her bloody fist and the blade, she ran when the schoolhouse backdoor opened and the boys stopped to scatter. Bacon dropped his knife when she stopped at his open door and it made the sharpest sound. One she knew her stolen knife couldn’t make.

When she sat down, his apron crowded the floor by her feet as he knelt to sew up her palm. Her stool stained by animal blood, new and old.

‘They’ll say it was me, won’t they? They’ll-’

‘They’ll kill you someday.’ He wiped his brow, or his eyes, she didn’t see.

She winced when he knotted the bandage. He held her hand in his for a moment and it felt on fire. She hadn’t read about that.

When Bacon told her to leave town, she pulled her hand from his, but he grabbed it back and dragged her home. She remembered him, still in his apron, in their kitchen talking with her parents. Him still sitting at the table with Ma after she finished packing a bag. How all three of them stood at the platform in the dusk of that day as her train left. 

•

She walked into the house through the back porch, trying to get the damn screen door quiet – but it let out a screech that cut through the empty house, hitting cold coffee mugs in the sink and dried out biscuits left on the table. Her parents must have left for work early in another town - or whatever it was they did these days.

She spotted a set of bowls on the ground and scoffed. Thinking back to the years they denied her a pet, knowing the town would accuse them of being possessed by their own child to give it animal sacrifices. The girl that swept ants so her Ma wouldn’t drown them in a home-made trap. 

‘It doesn’t smell in here. Must not be a cat.’ She turned to see Slim and Chica already searching the cupboards for coffee and sugar. Rodeo called out from outside that she didn’t want sugar or cream.

‘No cream in the house. Pa hated it.’ She was looking at the wall that used to have a mirror but was covered now by newspaper clippings of her. “Coroner’s Pride: Three Dead Again in Big Creek.” “Gang Cut to Pieces.” They’d penciled over the damming bits and circled the dates and locations; the “Alive” on the wanted poster. She could hear her Ma cursing as she scratched out “vicious, cold-blooded” and Pa telling her to relax, the paper never did nothing to her.

A laugh rose up from Chica, “‘Maidens Strike Again: Gainsville Cemetery Loaded Up.’” “Do y’all even remember Gainsville? Remember that-’

‘Three-legged horse’ she and Slim said in unison. She smiled back at them laughing and sat down to pick at the biscuits, still searching for herself in all the fragments. The biscuits were dry, but a better meal than they’d had in ages.

Her mouth watered at the smell of the warm, loaded tray her Ma put down on the table in front of her. A sun in the middle of their tiny kitchen. She’d burnt her fingers too many times before, so she learned her countdown; 32 seconds and she could break one open to see its steam cloud disappear into the paneled sky above her. Her Ma laughing every time she started counting, ‘You must really love these bisc-’

‘They keeping tabs on you? Trying to hunt you down or something?’ Rodeo sat down next to her, squinting to read the bits and pieces about her hanging from the wall.

'Rodeo! Jesus,' Chica smacked her.

‘Where are they anyway?’ Hands up with her eyebrows like she’d been caught red-handed.

‘How would I know Rodeo?’ she said, sipping from the cup Slim handed her. The coffee smelled the same as before she left. She liked that.

‘Good point. Hey this coffee is ace, can we take some?’

‘Sure, I’ll leave a note. Slim did ya want to say anything to your ‘rents too?’ She got up and stopped at the end of the counter where there was a drawer that was always stuck and had everything you could imagine in it - string, tacks, several knives and a can opener. Under the dried leaves she’d gathered as a kid and bits of copper wire cut too short or too long, she found paper bits and a couple pencils. She picked the chewed one like she’d been there yesterday, grinding down on it while reading at the table. Pa fiddled with his beer and tried to sneak a look at her books. Ma smacked her head for chewing on the only good pencil.

‘The house is gone, passed it earlier. Can’t imagine they’d move.’

‘They hated that house, you hated that house. I can imagine they moved.’ She started chewing on the pencil, looking at the blank little note.

Slim shrugged, ‘I suppose that’s true. Say I’m glad they moved then.’

She scribbled something down as the gals packed a few cans from the pantry and the remainder of the coffee. She walked back into what used to be her room and returned with one of the family photos they took just before her parents sent her to her aunt’s. Slim was putting the mugs in the sink – giving her parents’ some company.

Her room was untouched, well kept. She’d almost forgotten what it was to have a room in a house.

They didn’t stay long, what with the town sheriff’s personal vendetta against her. They’d managed to sneak in with the dark dawn and leave as it was adolescent.

‘Is that all then?’ Rodeo started leading her mare out towards the mountains; a pink blaze behind them that spread across the sky.

‘Just wanted to say hello is all. Keeping tabs, as it were,’ she called in response. They rode in pairs as the trails got thinner.

She looked back at the houses below and Slim stopped next to her. A valley open to the sun’s glory.

‘Hey, do you remember that lizard-’

‘Jesus. Again, with the lizard.’ Slim rolled her eyes and started up the trail. ‘You act like it was some sort of curse.’

She smiled, following her and seeing that same red in the morning rays. ‘I suppose it was some sort of blessing then.’