Free Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem

some nights he woke up screaming.
    “Okay, Bobby,” Luke said. “So what you want to bet over?”
    Her daddy grinned, his lips stretched tight. Two year ago, when Sadie was first seeing her breasts, her daddy had come to her in her bed and kissed those breasts goodnight. “Ever see a man et a live mouse afore?”
    “Seen a geek in Kingsport oncet,” Buck said. “Damn fool bit the head clean off a squeaker!”
    Her daddy grinned again, staring straight at the wall of Sadie’s bedroom. “Well, that’s what I’m aimin to do.”
    Her daddy brooded most of the time. At least he had ever since Sadie started growing.
    “Give you a quarter, Geek Man!” Luke shouted.
    “Hey, me too!”
    “Well now.” Her daddy gazed down at his long, dark-brown fingers as if admiring them. “Buck, you find us a mouse. Should be one in the woodpile out back.” Buck leaped to his feet, stumbled, cackling, and then stomped out of the room.
    Sometimes her daddy stared at her a long time. When her momma talked about her seeing boys soon her daddy just laughed. “Too ugly,” he’d say.
    One day she saw him looking through her boxes, holding her dresses up. She’d wondered if he was sniffing around for blood. Momma didn’t give her daddy everything he needed, but Sadie was never clear on what it was she was supposed to do about that. She was just a girl, and Daddy wanted more than that.
    Buck didn’t come back for a long while. She’d always heard Buck was good at catching little critters, but catching a live mouse inside a woodpile with it almost dark outside — Sadie couldn’t imagine nothing much harder than that. She waited nervously, her forehead getting sore from rubbing it against the wall when she shifted, trying to see as much in the front room as she could. She was going to miss it — she had to leave for the Grans soon. But just as she was about to give up Buck came back with a mouse, dangling it by its tail. It had some blood on the side of its head, which looked a little lop-sided. It struggled weakly. “Tweren’t easy,” Buck said, “had to mash it up against the house a little with my boot.”
    “That’s no way to treat a critter,” her daddy said in a scolding tone of voice. “And I bet that mashin you done dont help the taste none. Go on, give it here.”
    Her daddy held the mouse tight in his right fist, only its little furry head exposed, its eyes tiny coals, its whiskers trembling.
    He held his fist up and shook it at Sadie’s bedroom wall, a serious expression on his face, like he was going to toast somebody like in that movie she saw over in Wise County.
    Sadie knew that in his way her daddy loved her and that in some way her momma was wrong for trying to keep love out of their house. Love ought to be in a house, somehow.
    He stared right at the crack Sadie was peeking through. He stared right into Sadie’s eyes. He knows I’m here watching , she thought, and started to go away, thinking for just a second her going might save the mouse’s life. But she was held by her daddy’s eyes, by the way he held his fist, the seriousness of the whole thing.
    Suddenly her daddy’s fist went up to his mouth and she almost thought he was going to gently kiss the little head, when blood splashed over his nose and down his hand. He took the fist away and the blood covered his chin. The other men were laughing, sputtering, cheering. And still he stared at her. Sadie’s lower belly tightened.
    The tension made her sick, but the wetness didn’t come between her legs again. She held her daddy’s eyes grimly, even watched while he chewed. He knows, he knows , she thought.
    She had to spit out the blood taste, the bad mouse taste, for several minutes before she could leave the house. She continued to cough and spit on her way to meet the Grans.
     
     
    S ADIE GOT TO the place in the road where she was to turn and climb the rock-studded path to the Grans. It was more like a goat trail; the preacher went the back