Free One Bloody Thing After Another by Joey Comeau

fresh enough.
    After breakfast, the kitten follows her down the stairs, padding along the hallway to Margaret’s room. Darling little sister Margaret will still be sleeping. She was up all night, howling and upturning furniture. But it’s quiet time, now. Ann unbolts the door, and pulls it open. She puts the bucket down, and she cleans up as best she can.
    There’s blood everywhere except a big half circle, where Margaret’s chains let her reach to lick the floor. But out past where the chains extend, there is blood, and there are chunks of kitten. Chunks of the poor missing baby. Margaret is curled up in the corner, and she looks peaceful. Her shirt is ripped, and underneath it, you can see the holes, where their mother took her organs. She isn’t breathing, either, but she is pawing at the floor, lost in some dream. The trick is not to look at her face.
    Her face is bent out of shape, but still recognizable. There are too many teeth in her mouth, now. It is torn open at the sides. Split along her cheeks, so the weird, jagged stones of her teeth can breathe. It would be better if it was just a twisted mess of a face, but it still looks like Margaret. The mouth has split in a small twist on the left side, like her old smile.
    When it was their mother chained in the corner like this, Margaret and Ann would argue. This was when she was still Margaret. But Ann didn’t mind the arguing. At least, when they were fighting about it, they were sisters. It was just the two of them, taking care of the thing their mother had become. Only, they couldn’t agree about how exactly they should care for her.
    The first time they gave their mother a live animal to eat it was a dog they stole. Mitchie. He was from the apartment building down the street. They used to see him all the time, on their way to school and back. Every day, he went out for a walk with his old man owner, and every day Mitchie would run into the woods. He was old, and he couldn’t run very fast. But he would run into the woods anyway.
    Ann and Margaret would walk home from school, and that old man would be standing there at the edge of the woods, stooped over, hollering and hollering. “Mitchie, you get out here right now. God damn it, Mitchie.” And eventually Mitchie would come stumbling out of the woods. They were cranky, blind old men together.
    When the two girls realized that their mother needed live food, Ann wanted to buy birds from the pet store. Or maybe they could try to trap pigeons, she said. They were animals but they weren’t pets, you know? They weren’t a part of someone’s family.
    â€œDo you know how hard it would be to catch a pigeon?” Margaret said.
    So they came home with Mitchie, and they put him in the room with their mother and ran upstairs to get away from the sounds. Ann turned on the TV , as loud as it would go.
    They didn’t talk about it until late that night when Margaret knocked on her sister’s door and climbed into the bed. She put her head on Ann’s shoulder and she said, real quiet, “Do you think he’s still out there calling for Mitchie?” And in the morning, Ann woke up early to clean up what was left of Mitchie so that Margaret wouldn’t have to see.
    Now there’s no arguing. There’s nobody to argue with. Margaret will wake up when the sun goes down, and soon Ann will have to feed her again. Right now, Ann just wants to sleep some more, but there’s always more work. She has to clean this up. The kitten sits in the doorway and watches as Ann cleans up drying chunks of baby, and he yawns.
    just
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    Jackie puts her hand on the walrus and she can hear the warm, rushing blood. She doesn’t know if it is a boy or a girl. A girl maybe. Her blood is warm. Her eyes are full of blood and she is pink pink pink. She’s staring at Jackie with those eyes, and Jackie is smiling at the zoo security guard like she’s not terrified. The