The Darkest Evening of the Year

was committing. Now she ignores the ruins.
    Harrow suspects that, this time, Piggy has outwitted her mother. Instead of giving the most elaborate dress of her creation to her favorite doll, perhaps she has given it to her least favorite.
    This is a small triumph, but in the child’s life, there is no other kind.
    If Moongirl realizes that she has been deceived, she will make Piggy pay dearly. Even now, Harrow can see how the woman struggles to contain her fury at the child’s indifference to the savaging of the doll.
    Like Harrow, Moongirl has the cold intellect of a machine and a body that is machinelike in the perfection of its form and function, but she only pretends to understand and control her emotions as Harrow understands and controls his.
    The range of her emotions is limited to anger, hatred, envy, greed, desire, and self-love. He is not sure if she realizes this or if she thinks she is complete.
    While she cannot exert iron control of herself, she understands that she empowers herself by repressing her emotions. The longer that anger and hatred are unexpressed or only partly expressed, the purer and more poisonous they become, until they make a more potent elixir than any that a wizard could concoct.
    She sits beside the desk, glaring at her daughter, and though her long-distilled hatred is lethal, she will not strike a murderous blow yet. She will wait through this night and the following day, until—very soon now—she can have all the deaths that she most wants.
    “I bought the potato salad special for you, Piggy.”
    The blades of light penetrating the cracks in the storm shutters are not pellucid or golden any longer, but a murky orange. The cut-glass vase has gone dark. The auroral glimmer has disappeared from the ceiling over Piggy’s head.
    Thin spears of orange sunlight touch only the wood surfaces of the furniture, here a decorative pillow, there an oil painting of a seascape.
    Yet by some curious mechanism of soft reflection, elfin light twinkles in unlikely corners of the shadowy room: in the glass beads of the shade on the lamp that stands on the far side of the child’s bed, in the glass knob on a distant closet door….
    “Piggy?”
    “Okay.”
    “The potato salad.”
    “Okay.”
    “I’m waiting.”
    “I had two cookies.”
    “Cookies aren’t enough.”
    “And a sandwich.”
    “Why do you do this to me?”
    Piggy says nothing.
    “You’re a little ingrate.”
    “I’m full.”
    “You know what an ingrate is?”
    “No.”
    “You don’t know much, do you?”
    Piggy shakes her head.
    “Eat the potato salad.”
    “Okay.”
    “When?”
    “Later,” says Piggy.
    “No. Now.”
    “Okay.”
    “Don’t just say okay. Do it.”
    The child neither speaks nor reaches for the potato salad.
    Diamonds dark at throat and wrist in spite of the desk lamp, Moongirl rises from her chair, snatches up the potato salad, and throws it.
    The container strikes a wall and bursts open, splattering the plaster and showering the floor with spit-spiced potato salad.
    Bright tears sting Piggy’s eyes, and her wet cheeks shine.
    “Clean it up.”
    “Okay.”
    From the desk, Moongirl seizes the pieces of the ruined doll and throws them hard across the room. She grabs as well the open bag of cookies and throws that.
    “Clean it up.”
    “Okay.”
    “Every smear and crumb.”
    “Okay.”
    “And don’t give me tears, you little fat-faced fraud.”
    Moongirl turns and, diamonds darkling, strides from the room, no doubt to settle herself with her collection of cleansing solutions and emollient lotions for face and body, in a dreamy two-hour regimen that seldom fails to leave her in a better mood.
    Perched on the arm of the upholstered chair, Harrow watches the child. As simple as she is, and plain and slow, she has about her a mystery that intrigues him and that seems in some way deeper than the mystery of her mother’s madness.
    Piggy sits for a minute, unmoving.
    As though her tears are as astringent as rubbing alcohol, they swiftly evaporate from her cheeks. In remarkably short order, her eyes are dry as well.
    She opens the second lunchbox bag of potato chips and eats one. Then another. Then a third. Slowly she empties the bag.
    After wiping her fingers on a paper napkin, she pushes aside the tray and picks up the doll on which she was working when her mother and Harrow first entered the room. She merely holds the doll, does nothing with it other than study its face.
    The odd thought