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ceiling until dawn.

CHAPTER TWELVE

    Y ou were out last night and you didn’t tell me.” The Hagbeast ladled an oily sludge into his breakfast bowl. Her eyes flicked blankly across the table and into the corners of the room, a false front running interference for her words.
    “You know Mama needs to know where you are all the time.”
    “Why?”
    “So I can be sure you’re eating right.”
    “You shouldn’t have pissed on Dog.”
    “I should have pissed down its throat and drowned it. Where did you go?”
    “The roof.”
    She chuckled. It made her neck shake. “You moron. Staring at the people out there won’t change anything. You can’t be like them, don’t you know that? You’re part of me, you little fuck, part of this place, and you’ll die here.”
    Steven tipped whatever it was she had served him out onto the table and threw the bowl across the room. He didn’t bother to stand.
    “And when I do, it’ll be a long time after you and I’ll have someone to love me when I go.”
    The Hagbeast snorted into the greasy early-morning air.
    “Who’s going to love you, Steven? I used to live out there before you infected my cunt. I know what they like and what they love. And it isn’t you. Hear me, you piece of shit? It isn’t you.” She spat on the floor and caught her breath. “Clean up that mess, you fucker, and eat.”
    Steven didn’t move. He looked into those empty eyes and decided it was time to test himself.
    “I know what you’re doing with this food.”
    The Hagbeast’s face went dark with blood and she shouted each word distinctly. “I am not trying to poison you!”
    “Yes you are.”
    “I’ve told you before, Steven, I eat what you eat. How can it be poison?”
    “Because it is. I can feel it in me.”
    “For the last time, cunt, it’s only food. Now eat it.”
    “It’s shit.”
    “If I eat it, you will as well.”
    “Not anymore. From now on I’m going to make the food.”
    “What?”
    The Beast lurched upright, slavering and working her mouth incredulously. Fat slewed about her frame under the sudden acceleration. She planted her fists on the table and roared: “No!”
    The stink from her throat wrapped itself around Steven’s head. He stood up, breathed it in, drew back his arm … and hit her. A single short hook to the side of the head. He felt the impact travel through his bones, the sandpaper crunch of his knuckles against the coarse skin of her face. For one wild moment he wanted to keep on hitting until she was a bleeding sack of shit, draped shapeless over the back of her chair. But he couldn’t do it. Instead he watched a white smear of disbelief shade out from the red mark on the side of her head.
    She looked at him through eyes veiled with the calculation of shifting power balances. Her features held no trace of pain, only a drenching hate that boiled with the reassessment of options.
    Steven held her gaze, but it was a war. The hard seconds thudded into him, working on his knees and stomach, searching, weakening, all the time getting closer to finding a path to that soft interior where reassertion of the dominances scattered by his blow might be possible.
    It was time to go. Her scrutiny threatened the glory he felt burning about him like the cold fire in some picture of God. This first small act of defiance was too valuable to be risked here in the flat light of the kitchen. It must be gathered in, protected, allowed to grow and to extend into time, raising structures in its slipstream that would shelter him in the future.
    He put his head close to hers and said into her face, “I make the food and you eat it.”
    He left the room as she started to shriek.
    “Fuck you, you fucking moron! I know what you’re doing. Anything you can make, I can eat. My guts held you for nine months, you can’t get worse than that. You think you can beat your mother? We’ll see. We’ll see about that, you dogshit.”
    Her ranting followed Steven down the stairs like