Fiction
Bones You Crack With Your Teeth
A family unravels after a horrific crime
Note: This is the second installment in a series. You can find the first installment here.
Kitty Lister tore off her nails, one by one, with her hands. She was determined to get down to the quick, that one. Kitty did it because she was bored and hoping for blood, desperate for a kind of wound that only comes from vulnerable skin. When there’s nothing to shield or protect it. But all she got was a palm of half-moons and a disappointment rivaling the blizzard that threatened to black out their house.
Kitty patted her hair, stiff from a bottle of spray. The sides reminded of her shark fins, sleek and swift, cutting through water on a hunt. At night, she stood over her mother’s sleeping body and shook her head, willing the fins to move. Kitty opened her mouth and bared her teeth until her mother whimpered. Cried in her sleep. Was it because her father had raped a pack of Lithuanian girls and maybe killed one of them? That he’d been part of a ring of balding, paunchy men who paid the town pharmacist to stuff the girls with bottles of Love’s Baby Soft and air freshener? Transformed their pale faces into coconut cream pies? Hey, sweet girl. Daddy’s here with the frosting.
