Lucinda reached for what her eyes saw but her mind did not believe.
Her fingertips touched it, pulled away.
A child’s drawing on a piece of lined yellow paper, long hidden behind the giraffe picture.
Stick figures. Two of them. On their sides, hand in hand. One larger than the other, with long dark brown hair. Like Sally’s mother’s.
One smaller, with pigtails. A girl.
Eyes X’d out.
Red slashes across the necks.
All around them, scribbled red crayon. Dark, ragged. Furious. The paper torn from pressing. Blood. Pools of angry blood, so deep and waxy it seemed to be wet. Hovering above the figures, in a black scrawled sky, an evening star. The arms. The legs.
“Christ,” Lucinda said.
She looked at the bulletin board.
At all the other coloring book pictures.
She lifted up one of a bumblebee.
No.
One of a rainbow.
No.
Of a cat.
A puppy.
Horses.
She tore them down. Behind each page hid another drawing, each more gruesome, more graphic and angry than the last, of things no child could know unless they’d lived it, or glimpsed its potential within another person.
She stared at the drawings, heart racing so hard it was as though the valves were stuck wide open, her blood a wild, hot torrent.
She was too hot. She reached to clutch the desk edge for balance, but her fingers would not obey. The rag doll slipped from her weakening grip to hit the floor with a dead thud and a mechanical cry: Help me. I’m hurt.
Darkness descended.