Then
Daphne has seen things die before. Last year she was in the garden on the old stone bench, not reading but rather holding a book and staring off into the distance, constructing a scenario in her mind in which her parents died in a car crash and she was badly injured. In the daydream she lost a leg and had a prosthetic. She ran a race and people wrote articles about her. Her sisters cheered.
The rat crawled out of the bushes. It pulled itself along the ground on its belly and stopped several feet from her. Its head rested on the ground, its black eye fixed on her. Its breathing was slow and labored. She knew immediately it was dying. It had probably been poisoned. Her father had the boxes set up around the house. He’d told her not to mess with them, and she hadn’t, but she looked up the poison and exactly what it would do. The blood in its body wouldn’t clot and it was dying from the slow accumulation of injuries created simply by moving, muscles flexing and tearing in microscopic ways that were meant to heal. Being alive just meant that your body could put itself back together faster than it tore itself apart. The poison adjusted the equation.
It could take days.
Several hours later her father found her there, still waiting for the rat to die. He made a face and got a shovel and brought it down three times, hard, stopping each time to check if the creature’s sides still rose and fell, and then it was done, and she didn’t find out how long the poison would have taken after all. Her stomach was twisted and pinched and her hands shook as she went to get the trash bag for her father.
“I put it out of its misery,” he said, and she felt guilty that she hadn’t thought of how horrible those hours had been. She teared up. “It was just a rat,” he said, and shook his head in disgust.
Her mother’s breathing is weaker than the rat’s. It has a wet, gurgling quality to it, and it comes unevenly, but it persists. A faint pulse flutters at her throat, and her eyes are open to slits, unfocused but looking at Daphne, who kneels beside her. Daphne puts a hand against the wound on her mother’s chest. She pushes down. Her mother lets out a noise, a whining moan of pain, and Daphne snatches her hand away.
“Shh, shh,” she says, trembling hands brushing the hair back from her mother’s face. She thinks of the rat and of the swift downward swing of the shovel, and thinks wildly that she shouldn’t let her mother suffer like this. Misery, she thinks, and the word repeats in her mind. She pulls her sleeve up over her hand and lays it over her mother’s mouth, pinching her nostrils shut, and holds it there. Her mother doesn’t struggle.
A floorboard creaks. Daphne’s head whips up.
She is not alone.