Right to Life

She untied it and lifted the rubber ball out of her mouth. She never liked this part. The ball was slimy. She didn't even like the feel of it when she had to take it out of her own mouth. Much less somebody else's.

"Second, you get this. Hold out your hand."

She handed her a thin faded cotton nightgown. It used to be her mother's. Her mother was dead three years now or would be in December and she'd ransacked the house for anything that might be of use to them before they sold the property. No sense wasting. Most of what she took turned out to be less useful than she'd thought. The nightgown, for instance, had sat in mothballs along with a bunch of other stuff in a box in the attic ever since. It was much too big for her. And much too big for Sara. But it would do. After a washing it still smelled faintly of mothballs but that hardly mattered.

Thanks, ma.

"You can put it on."

She said nothing, not even a thank you, only found the neck of it and then the bottom and pulled it on over her head. Kath guessed she'd have to tell Stephen about her lack of gratitude.

"But the real treat, because of the mark and all, is you get to sleep on a mattress tonight. An air-mattress. Otherwise you'd never get any sleep, you know? Stephen pumped it up for you. See? Here, lean down and feel."

She took her arm and guided her hand.

"Nice and soft, right? You need to use the toilet or anything?"

She shook her head no.

"Okay, move over here and lie down and I'll scoot you in. Careful not to scrape the bandages or it'll hurt like a bitch. Plus I'll have to do you up all over again."

She watched her ease herself down, favoring her right hip, then move her legs in along the mattress and lie slowly back, once again favoring her right side.

It still wasn't going to be an easy night, she thought. Air mattress or no air mattress. Burns hurt. And what was it that they said? you bang your elbow once, you'll probably bang it again. She'd roll over on the burn at some point for sure. None of that was her problem though and Stephen was waiting for her upstairs in the bedroom. She knew he'd want to fuck tonight. She didn't know if she could handle it if he got as energetic as he had the night before. She'd be wearing the bruises from that little session for days.

They also said that killing makes you horny.

She supposed she had the proof of that one.

" 'Night," she said and pushed the panel into the box and swung the headpiece shut and threw the lock. As she stood again she smelled her own perspiration wafting up at her.

If they were going to fuck she was definitely going to need a shower.

Sara felt it immediately down at the end of the box.

The cat lay curled at her feet.

She wondered when it had crept in and how it had avoided getting hurt by the sliding panel and thought that well, cats were very agile. She'd known that since she was a girl.

She'd learned the hard way.

***

Her cat Tiggy was then just a kitten. She was only five or six herself and loved him to distraction. She probably drove him crazy half the time, always wanting to pick him up and hold him, chasing him around the house trying to pet him. But he was patient with her in his catlike way and tolerated her hugs and kisses until his own enjoyment began to wear thin, at which point he'd signal that enough was enough with a little meow and more often than not she'd let him drop then and let him go his way.

Sometimes though she wouldn't, not right away and the reason was his breath. His breath was one of her guilty pleasures. His fur smelled wonderful. But in some ways his breath smelled even better. It smelled to her like the seashore. It always did, whether it was fish or chicken or meat-flavored food he'd been eating and this she found amazing. It was warm and rich and its salty tang reminded her of summers by the shore. So sometimes she'd wouldn't let him go at the first meow. Instead she'd hold onto him, nose up close to his mouth for a whiff of his breath on the second meow. She wouldn't let him squirm away.

And just this one time he bit her.

They were out on the back lawn sitting in the grass and she was holding him, holding him too long and probably too tightly and instead of meowing the second time as he usually did he nipped her nose instead. Not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to hurt and make her angry, actually suddenly furious at him and when she thought about it later as an adult she realized she must have seen the bite as a kind of rejection. A rejection of her love just like her father's rejection because she was a girl and not the boy he wanted. Like her mother's merely qualified acceptance. Like other kids' rejection because she was fat and not yet pretty.