Chelsea sat unmoving in her clean, freshly pressed blue and white cotton sundress, on the dank and stained bedspread in the motel. Her hands were folded across one knee, legs primly crossed, spine erect and eyes, unfocused, directed at the torn wallpaper in front of her. An observer would see her as calm, even serene, with her face set in a small smile. A pale, freckled girl with something deep and seemingly pleasant to think about. Only when an inquisitive roach scampered across the instep of the sandaled foot, paused for a moment to contemplate whatever it is cockroaches ponder, then continued its journey across the foot and off the other side completely unnoticed by the young lady might the observer pause to wonder what it was that coursed through her mind.

It was blood. Other things, too, naturally, existed in the thousands of images that careened around her head, but every one of them was covered in blood. And rage. Past, present and future were indistinguishable in the red haze. History twined around fantasy until one became the other. Being four feet tall and pushing a dark-haired girl out of a treehouse to watch the blood from the subsequently split scalp soak her Spongebob t-shirt was the same as burying a fist in that same tangled rats’ nest while straddling the chest of the girl, now a woman, on a Hathian street, and pounding her head into the pavement until there was a scarlet puddle running into the gutter. Spreading her legs for the first time beneath a rutting, heartbroken farmhand, her ‘comforting’ of him turning to goading laughter and pressing a handgun into the dirt-encrusted paw as the blood-tinged ooze coated her thighs equated to bruised and bitten-open lips during an up-against-the-wall in this very room, and the teasing suggestion that the foreign punk make the bitch disappear.

But she hadn’t disappeared yet, had she? She still stuck like a bone in the throat, the nasty cunt and her goody-goody self. With her perfect little job and her perfect little baby and now her perfect little house out on the far edge of town… Chelsea’s face moved just a bit at the thought of her cousin, all alone in that new house, not so very far away, but far enough. The tip of her shell-pink tongue edged to the corner of her mouth, moistening it with a vermicular motion before disappearing again, the smile unchanged.

With a fluid economy of movement, she uncrossed her legs and rose from the bed. Grabbing her purse from the nightstand, she reached in and moved aside the pretty pearl-handled flick-knife to retrieve her lipstick. She applied the frosty pale coral shade in the bathroom mirror, smoothed down one stray strand of hair and flashed herself a winning smile before she went out into the scorching afternoon.