Jack Ketcham - Right to Life

"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.

The cat sensed her fury instantly and began to snarl and spit, a small bundle of teeth and claws and though she'd never seen him angry before and it scared her, she held him away from her and let him writhe and struggle and she squeezed until the cat let go with an ungodly wail of abject fear and she realized what she was doing, terrorizing a small animal, taking out her anger at somebody on an innocent kitten. And heartsick, attacked by sudden tears, she dropped him to the grass.

He ran. But she couldn't let it go at that.

She had to get him back. Hold him, pet him, stroke him. Reassure him that it would never, never happen again and let him know how sorry she was and that she loved him.

So she ran too.

There was a woods behind her house and a brook, narrow and fast-running after a rain like the one they'd had the night before and the cat ran away from her back through the grass and scrub, the cat small but incredibly fast and nimble for its size and she couldn't catch him, he kept avoiding her, she was running as fast as she could and scaring him even more she knew by chasing him but her guilt was huge and overwhelming and she couldn't stop. Not until she had him home again, until she was sure he wouldn't run away for good from the monstrous awful thing she'd done and suddenly, there was the brook.

The cat ran along the stones by its bank but he was in full panic by now and he slipped and fell right in front of her eyes too far away to reach. She screamed and saw him try to scale the rock he'd fallen from but his claws could get no purchase and he began to drift downstream, his meow a piteous thing now tearing at her heart, an infant calling for its mother, the cat's eyes terrified, astonished, as he started moving fast away from her in the deep pull of the stream.

She plunged through the brush trying to get ahead of him. Trying to go faster than the stream, refusing to take her eyes off him for a second, unmindful of the branches scratching at her face or the brambles tearing at her legs but only watching as though her gaze alone would stop him from drowning. She saw him go under and come up again and claw at a rock and whirl in the current, scrabbling with his paws, trying to stay afloat and all the while his wailing in her ears and the sounds of the rushing stream and finally after an eternity it widened, slowed and she stumbled into the water and had him in her hands, Tiggy so cold and wet and fragile, she could feel his heart racing against her own chest as he clung to her for dear life and gone suddenly silent, looking every which way out through the woods as though he'd never seen them before. As though the whole world were new and frightening and she couldn't even say words to comfort him she was crying so hard, she could only stroke and pet him. And then the miracle, the absolute miracle happened.

At the steps to their porch he started to purr.

As this cat here in the box with her was purring.

She didn't know if it was this cat or remembering Tiggy's forgiveness that started her crying but they were the first tears she'd shed that were not in fear or pain for a very long time. She couldn't move much inside the box but she bent her knees until they pressed against the top and shifted sideways until her shoulder hit the right side and reached out in the dark and wiggled her fingers.

"Come on" she whispered. "Come on. Come here."

The cat fell silent. She was aware only of the throbbing burn and the unyielding wood and the dark until in a little while she felt the soft short silky fur beneath her fingers and felt it nuzzle and mark her with its lips and cool wet nose and the warmth of its body as it lay down to settle in against her thigh. The cat immediately began to purr again and she thought there was no better sound in the breathing world.

"There's a good girl," she murmured. "There's a good little girl. There's a girl."

And then another miracle occurred.

She smiled.

He dreamed that he sat in the basement on a folding chair with his ear pressed to her swollen belly. She was huge now, her navel protruding and he was speaking to the baby not to her. He could feel his lips move over the tight smooth flesh of her belly. She was naked, her arms and legs spread wide against the X-frame and inside her the baby was listening. Understanding each and every word but unable to answer him, not yet fully formed for speech.

That didn't matter.

He told the baby about the world, about its cruelties, its ability to slight even the most talented, the most honest, the most sincere the human race had to offer. He told it about war and killing and hypocrisy and foul tainted passion and the baby listened, understanding each and every word even if the mother didn't – couldn't – understand him at all. It was as though he were speaking a foreign language as far as the mother was concerned. That annoyed him. Then angered him. He was going to have to punish her.