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Valentina didn’t dare to look down. Father had a knife, pressed up against her mother’s arm, dragging it slowly up and down to open up thin lines. She watched them split up, open up into red blood, drooling, dripping onto the carpet.
There was something ironic about that, she noticed in the place she hid in the back of her mind. The sticky orange mess she’d made of the carpet to start all of this wouldn’t be half as hard to clean up as blood would be.
But Father was a hypocrite.
“Are you sorry, Valentina?” he asked, and she was. From the back of her mind, she felt herself sob, fall to her knees, mutter pointless apologies.
Her mother screamed. Father had pressed harder, cut deeper, and she blinked away the tears frantically to look back up, to see the yellow of fat peek out of its red red home, wink at her, blaming her for being weak, for looking away.
She kept her eyes open, and Father went back to being gentle, to just leaving shallow little patterns over her mother’s exposed shoulder.
“Apologize to your mother,” he said, and her emotions twisted out from under her again, choking her throat in hot guilt, pushed her so far back in her head that she couldn’t get her eyes back up, not even when her mother screamed again, when the blood hit the carpet in thick wet drops. She was frozen, terrified, beating against the walls of her own mind to try to yank the reins back into her own hands.
She had to do something. She had to do something. She had to look up. She had to.
She opened her eyes (when did they close?) and looked up at Father, at the dark red spikey flair of his anger, at the wooden imp that grinned behind his ear, the black mold rot that clung to his skin. Saw the lavender-white fear-pain that her mother tried to focus through, the knife deep into her shoulder.
Her hands didn’t move, she couldn’t stand. But there was something awful and spiteful inside her now, twin to the malice that radiated out from the imp that looked back at her.
“She’s not the one who was watching me,” she lied. “She was in the kitchen. There was nothing she could have done.”
The imp flicked its tongue. She thought it might be hungry, hungry for blood.
She would feed it. “It was Jessica.” His favorite, right now, until he got tired of her. “She watched it happen. Didn’t do anything.” Jessica twitched, in the background, lavender fear twitching under her skin, drowned out by the candy red desire that Father kept his women soaked in.
“I would never –” Jessica tried to start, but Father didn’t listen to people. He dropped her mother, kept the knife, turned on Jessica, and Valentina grinned with the same manic smile as the imp.
“She’s a liar.” She thought about Father’s eyes, how they lit up when Guillaume played with his victims until no one could sleep from the screams. “You should hurt her,” she said, caught up in the rush of power. “Cut off her breasts.”
The imp cackled silently, and she held her breath.
But it worked. Father’s knife took its time, and Valentina enjoyed every moment of the pain, watching Father break his own toy.
When he finished, she ran, hid in the upstairs closet, clasped her hands over her mouth and stifled the laughter that bubbled forward. She tricked him. He’d broken the toy she’d chosen, not the one he’d picked to hurt.
Jessica was left for dead when they moved, feverish with the necrosis that had sunk into her wound from his rotting, powdery hands.
For the first time in her life, at seven years old, Valentina won.