Twenty-Four

TWENTY-FOUR

Sarah tripped over the threshold and fell into the living room. Her glasses were back in the bus, and the heavy crucifix slapped against the side of her face. Though her vision blurred, the mother and daughter could be clearly viewed in their embrace across the room. It was like something from the Francis Bacon paintings her children had studied at school, the ones that upset her so much she’d written to the principal requesting the artist be removed from the curriculum. What she saw now was a grotesque knit-work of meats, impassioned and ungodly.

It made her sick.

As Sarah crawled across the musty carpet, Michael entered behind her, hands still on his head. Like Jed, the first thing he noticed was the smell. As a child, he’d talked his mother into buying him two pet mice for his birthday. This room smelled like the cage his pets called home—musty newspapers and urine and captivity and blood. Because unknown to his poor mother, one of the mice was cannibal, and it ate th