Near the Bone by Christina Henry (ebook reader color screen txt) 📗

stomach, something that burned and bubbled like acid. She stared at the man she’d lived with for more than a decade as he picked up the knife on the table, weighed it in his hand.

Who are you?

“The knife is a last resort, you might say,” William said.

Mattie started. She’d completely forgotten she’d asked him about the knife. She’d even forgotten for a moment where she was—no, when she was. These memories that surfaced piecemeal were dangerous. They stopped her clock, made her drift away. When she drifted, she made mistakes. When she made mistakes, William got angry. Mattie was determined not to let him get angry at her again, especially not when he was in such a strangely cheerful mood.

“A last resort?” she asked, giving all of her attention to him. She couldn’t afford to think about anything else right now.

“In case it gets close,” William said.

William would never be able to kill the creature that way. Never. She hadn’t been able to see its body clearly in the darkness but she knew it was enormous. The chances of William, say, slashing its throat were practically zero. He wouldn’t even be able to reach the creature’s throat. And then it would rip him up with its claws and that would be the end of William.

The end of William. Her heart leapt when she thought of it. The end of pain. She almost couldn’t imagine it, a life without pain.

But should you be thinking thoughts like that? Should you be thinking about William dying?

(Yes)

William placed the knife back on the table and frowned at her. “That eye looks bad, Mattie girl. Does it hurt?”

This was sometimes a trick question. Sometimes he wanted to know for certain that he’d hurt her because she deserved it. And sometimes he wanted her to say her wounds didn’t hurt because it was insulting that her own husband would harm her. She studied his face for a minute, tried to divine the correct answer in his eyes.

“Yes,” she said, pretty sure this was what he wanted to hear, and it was also true. Her eye hurt so bad it was getting difficult for her to move around. It throbbed constantly, and the fluid under the lid seemed hard now, like it had taken on a new form.

He grasped her chin with his fingers, turned her bad eye toward the light. Her stomach muscles tensed, braced for a sudden change in mood. Occasionally the sight of his handiwork would increase William’s fury.

“Going to have to drain it,” he said. “Sit down.”

Mattie waited while William collected two clean cloths from the small basket under her worktable. Then he took out needle and thread from her sewing kit. Finally he took his small knife—the one he always carried at his hip for little tasks throughout the day—and the needle, and heated up the tips of both in the fire.

She knew what would happen next, because he’d had to do this before. That had been many years ago, and it had been the other eye. Mattie had a little scar on her browbone from the stitches. It had mostly faded.

How old was I? Twelve? Thirteen? It was before I started having my courses, I remember, because he was angry about that. He said I looked like a woman and it was about time I started bearing children, but I hadn’t started bleeding yet and that meant he couldn’t touch me. And I didn’t really understand about having my courses, my “woman-time” as he called it, and when I asked him about it, he hit me and later my eye swelled up, though not as bad as this time. He’d seemed sorry about it, too.

(Just like he seems sorry now but don’t you fall for it, Mattie. You know what he’s like, what he is underneath the skin.)

William cradled the back of Mattie’s head with one hand and raised the knife with the other.

“Don’t you move,” he warned.

Mattie wouldn’t, knew she wouldn’t, because she was afraid of the knife coming near her eye. For a moment she even thought it was all a trick. She watched the knife descending, the sharp blade coming closer to her face, and thought, He knows. He knows about Griffin and C.P., he knows they came to the house and he’s going to cut out my eye in retribution.

Then the tip of the knife slashed across the top of the swollen mass. Fluid gushed out and ran over her eye and down her cheek. Mattie whimpered.

“Hold that cloth underneath it,” William said, shoving one in her hands. “Let all that stuff come out.”

She pressed the cloth against her eye, underneath the wound, which felt like a flowing waterfall on her face. More and more fluid ran out, a deflating balloon. Her eye, relieved of the intense pressure, already felt better.

William had taken the other cloth and was dipping it in cold water. He returned to the table holding a sliver of soap and the wet cloth.

When it seemed like Mattie’s eye was mostly done running, he gestured for her to take the cloth away. He dabbed at the cut with the wet cloth, then rubbed the sliver of soap over it. Mattie cried out as the soap touched the open wound.

“I know it stings,” he said. He almost seemed gentle then, almost like he cared about her. “But we’ve got to get it clean or else it will get infected. And what will I do if my girl is sick?”

William hated it when she got sick. He hated it when she couldn’t take care of herself, when she couldn’t cook or clean or look after him. He never hit her when she was ill—she thought that some part of him considered it unfair to strike her when she was already weak—but he would stomp around the cabin growling like an angry bear until she was back to normal.

He rinsed out the soap by holding the wet cloth over her face and squeezing water into it. Mattie