Jeff Lindsay - Dexter is delicious

Inside, Rita was in the kitchen cleaning up. Lily Anne burbled in the bassinet, and Cody and Astor were already back on the couch in front of the TV, playing with the Wii. Now was the time to start, to set things straight between us, to stamp out the embers of Brian's influence and get these children moving out of the darkness; it could be done. I would do it. I went straight to Cody and Astor and stood between them and the TV screen. They looked up at me and seemed to see me for the first time tonight.

"What," Astor said. "You're in the way."

"We need to talk," I said.

"We need to play Dragon Blade," Cody said, and I did not like what I heard in his voice. I looked at him, and I looked at Astor, and the two of them looked back at me with smug and self-righteous irritation, and it was too much. I leaned over to the Wii's control box and pulled its plug out of the wall socket.

"Hey!" Astor said. "You lost the game! Now we gotta start over on level one!"

"The game is going in the trash," I said, and their mouths dropped open in unison.

"Not fair," Cody said.

"Fair has nothing to do with this," I said. "This is about what's right."

"That doesn't make any sense," Astor said. "If it's right then it's fair, too, and you said…" And she was going to go on, but she saw my face and trickled to a stop. "What?" she said.

"You don't even like Chinese food," I said sternly. Two small and blank faces looked at me, and then at each other, and I heard the echo of what I had just said. It didn't even make sense to me. "What I mean is," I said, and their eyes swung back to me, "when you went out with Brian. My brother. Uncle Brian."

"We know who you mean," Astor said.

"You told your mother you went for Chinese food," I said. "And that was a lie."

Cody shook his head, and Astor said, "He told her that. We would have said pizza."

"And that would have been a lie, too," I said.

"But Dexter, you told us already," she said, and Cody nodded. "Mom isn't supposed to know about, you know. All that other stuff. So we have to lie to her."

"No, you don't," I said. "What you have to do is not do it anymore."

I watched astonishment blossom on their faces. Cody shook his head with bewilderment and Astor blurted, "But that's not-I mean, you can't really-What do you mean?" And for the first time in her life she sounded just like her mother.

I sat down on the couch between them. "What did you do with Uncle Brian that night?" I said. "When he said you went for Chinese food?"

They looked at each other, and an entire conversation went on between them with no audible words. Then Cody looked back at me. "Stray dog," he said.

I nodded, and anger surged through me. Brian had taken them out and found them a stray dog to learn and experiment with. I had known it was something like that, of course, but to hear it confirmed fed my sense of moral outrage-with my brother and with the children. And oddly enough, even as I drew myself up into a lofty tower of righteous indignation, a small and mean voice whispered that it should have been me who did this with them. It should have been my hand guiding their fledgling knife strokes, my wise and patient voice steering and explaining and teaching them how to catch and cut and then how to clean up when playtime was over.

But that was absurd; I was here to lead them away from darkness, not to teach them how to enjoy it. I shook my head and let sanity flow back in. "What you did was wrong," I said, and once more they both looked blank.

"What do you mean?" Astor said.

"I mean," I said, "that you have to stop-"

"Oh, Dexter," Rita said, bursting into the room wiping her hands on a dish towel. "You can't let them play anymore; it's a school night. Look at the time, for goodness' sake, and you haven't even-Come on, you two; get ready for bed." She hustled them up and out of the room before I could do more than blink. Cody turned back to look at me just before his mother pushed him into the hallway, and his face was a jumble of confusion, hurt, and irritation.

And as the three of them clattered into the bathroom and the sounds of running water and toothbrushing came back to me, I felt myself grinding my teeth in frustration. Nothing was going right. I had tried to bring my little family together, and found my brother there before me. When I tried to confront him, he had fled with the words still forming on my tongue. And I had finally begun my important job of shepherding the kids away from wickedness, only to be interrupted at the crucial point. Now the kids were mad at me, Rita ignored me, and my sister was jealous of me-and I still didn't know what Brian was up to.

I had worked just as hard as I knew how to be the new and squeaky-clean straight-arrow family man I was supposed to be, and at each attempt I had been slapped down, sneered at, and utterly crushed. Irritation grew inside me and morphed into anger, and then that started to change, too, as I felt a cold and acid bath of contempt burble up inside: contempt for Brian, and Rita, and Deborah, and Cody and Astor, for all the dribbling idiots in the whole stumble-footed world -and most of all, contempt for me, Dexter the Dummkopf, who wanted to walk in the sunlight, smelling the flowers and watching rainbows curl across the rose-tinted sky. But I had forgotten that the sun is nearly always hidden by clouds, flowers have thorns, and rainbows are always out of reach. You could dream the impossible dream all you wanted to, but it was always gone when you woke up. I was finding that out the hard way, each new reminder grinding my nose further and further into the dirt, and now all I really wanted was to grab something by the throat and squeeze The monotonous drone of Rita and the kids saying their prayers came down the hall at me. I still didn't know the words, and it was just one more annoying reminder that I was not really Dex-Daddy and probably never would be. I thought I could be the first leopard in history to change his spots, but in reality I was just another alley cat forced to dine on garbage.

I stood up. I just needed to move around, try to calm down, collect my thoughts, tame these weird and wild and brand-new emotions, before they carried me away on a flood tide of stupidity. I walked into the kitchen, where the dishwasher was already whirring away at the dinner dishes. Past the refrigerator, its ice-maker clicking. I walked into the back hall by the washer and dryer. All around me, through the whole house, everything was clean and functional, all the machinery of domestic bliss, in its place and ready to do exactly what it was supposed to do-all of it but me. I was not made to fit under the counter of this or any other house. I was made for moonlight gleaming off a very sharp knife and the soothing ratchet of duct tape purring off the roll and the muffled horror of the wicked in their neat and careful bonds as they met their unmaker But I had turned my back on that, turned away from all I really was, tried to fit myself into a picture of something that did not even exist, like squeezing a demon onto a Saturday Evening Post cover, and I had done nothing but make myself look like a complete idiot. No wonder Brian could so easily take away my kids. I would never bring them away from the dark side if I couldn't even give them a convincing performance of virtuous normality.

And with such a vast amount of wickedness in the world, how could I beat my bright blade into a dull and functional plowshare? There was so much yet to do, so many playground bullies who needed to learn the new rules to the game, Dexter's rules-there were even cannibals abroad in my very own city. Could I really just sit on the couch and knit while they worked their horrible will on the Samantha Aldovars of the world? After all, she was somebody's daughter, and someone felt about her just the way I felt about Lily Anne.