Free Frog Music by Emma Donoghue

if they don’t know what fucking is.)
    Blanche stares at her hands, willing them to be steady. Surely she can do this much, get her own stinking clothes off. First she tackles her right boot, finally undoing that wretched gaiter. Then the blood-spotted mauve skirt, the bodice, the sleeves so narrow she can barely wrench them over her knuckles, the stiffened corset, sweaty chemise, petticoats, and knickers—she drops them all on the sandy ground.
    Blanche avoids looking down at herself. Nothing glamorous about her in this brutal light: raw, peeled, hideously bare, with the reek of death about her. Scooping the water over her shoulder fast, she scrubs herself with the rag. For all the heat of the morning she shudders as if she’s scraping off her own skin. She takes the nailbrush to her long fingernails so hard that her fingertips are soon sore.
    Small mercies: Blanche has an extra corset in her bag to cinch her into some simulacrum of her usual self. She rotates her bustle, checking the cotton sheath of every metal band. One brown stain, the size of a penny … but that can’t be helped, and Blanche doesn’t mean to trail around as flat-skirted as some hick, not today of all days. She tightens the tapes as if girding on armor.
    The bag holds no garment quite right for the morning after a murder. She finds herself dithering between a skirt with orange and white stripes and a blue plaid one with deep matching flounces. Hurry, hurry . But telling herself that doesn’t make it any easier to choose. This is absurd. A prickling burr of a tune dances in the back of her mind: “Then I was gayest of the gay …”
    After yanking on the blue skirt, Blanche adds a yellow jacket-bodice, yellow striped stockings, and a pair of white mules with little heels. Pulls out her second-best parasol. That’s all she’s got, all she thought to stuff in her carpetbag before she marched away from number 815 Sacramento Street exactly a week ago. Everything else Blanche owns in the world is still there. Her apartment, her whole goddamn building; it’s her name on the deed. But she can’t go home, can she? Home is the last place in the world she should go if she means to stay alive another day.
    She checks the bottom of the bag. Her fingers meet a bottle. A diaper. A beloved black doorknob.
    Blanche stares at them with prickling eyes. She was forgetting P’tit. How—
    Because I’ve been shot at , she wants to scream. Because I’ve been caked with my friend’s blood . Of course Blanche has never really forgotten her son. All week, since she found the macs gone from the apartment, and P’tit with them, she’s been looking for the baby, fretting over him, waiting for the moment she’ll get him back safe. Right now she’s just preoccupied with staying alive.
    The word, like a fist in the face. Alive .
    Blanche crouches on the dusty ground. Not sorrow, exactly, more like a weight, a cartwheel rolling across her chest and coming to a stop. A sense of her own stupidity so overwhelming that she can’t draw a breath. Because what reason has she to believe that Arthur hasn’t done away with the baby too?
    Think it through, she orders herself. With a crazy sort of logic, like Arthur’s. Say that he somehow discovered where Blanche was hiding. He bought or borrowed a shotgun and set out for San Miguel Station yesterday evening. What would he have done with the baby? Left him with Ernest? No; Ernest can’t stand P’tit’s caterwauling . Would Arthur have hired some neighbor or one of their old lodgers to keep an eye on P’tit while Papa was off murdering Maman?
    Blanche would like to believe that. She really would. Even if she never sees P’tit again, if she could believe him alive and well …
    But P’tit’s his own son!
    He’s always been Arthur’s, Blanche reminds herself, but that hasn’t meant Arthur’s been particularly interested in the baby’s welfare, or even his existence. After having P’tit on his hands for a whole week,