The Darkest Evening of the Year

mine. You’re mine, Piggy Pig. You belong to me, Piggy Pig. Nobody takes what’s mine.
    Her nice Bear dead and all the blood and her mother whispering You’re mine, Piggy Pig.
    And here on the desk is a knife like the Bear knife.
    If Piggy’s father comes, Mother will kill him.
    She wants Piggy to know what will happen. That’s why the knife on the desk. So Piggy will know.
    Mother wants Piggy to know there is a chance of getting away but, no, not a chance after all, because nobody takes what belongs to Mother. She wants Piggy to have hope, then steals it from her.
    But Mother doesn’t know, whatever happens, Piggy has HOPE Bear gave her on a silver chain.
    “My guy here, Piggy, he wonders why I ever had you in the first place, a little mutant like you.”
    She means the man standing in the doorway. Piggy is afraid of this man more than others who were before him. He makes Mother worse. Mother is much worse since him.
    “There was this big rich guy, he built homes, name was Hisscus. He couldn’t make babies, he had bad seed.”
    Piggy looks her mother in the eyes. She reads Mother’s eyes, and in there with all the scary, Piggy sees some truth.
    So she can’t look at Mother’s eyes anymore, Piggy works the scissors on another picture.
    While she cuts, she listens close, not understanding half, but when Mother tells truth, it’s a big thing because she never does.
    “Hisscus, he wasn’t married, but he wanted a baby in the worst way. Didn’t want it officially. Wanted an unofficial baby.”
    From the corner of her eye, Piggy sees Mother glance toward the man in the doorway.
    “Hisscus knew this doctor who was like him, would deliver the baby at home, no birth certificate, no record.”
    Mother laughs at something the man in the doorway does.
    Piggy keeps her head down.
    “So I had your daddy knock me up,” Mother tells Piggy.
    This doesn’t mean anything to Piggy. She listens closer.
    “Didn’t have an ultrasound scan to determine sex or anything.”
    The closer Piggy listens, the less sense Mother makes.
    “If I gave him a girl, Hisscus would keep it. If I gave him a boy, he knew people who wanted the same kind of candy he did, but who liked the opposite flavor, so he could trade it to them for a girl.”
    In the doorway, the man whistles very soft and low. He says, “What’s colder than dry ice?”
    “Me, baby,” Mother tells him.
    Neither of them is making any sense. Ice is wet.
    “Hisscus had this second house, cool place, up the coast. I was going to live there, get a big fat paycheck every month, whatever I wanted. When the maid came in to clean, she wouldn’t know about the secret cellar.”
    Piggy doesn’t understand what her mother is telling her, but she knows for sure, without knowing how she knows, that whatever she does right now, she must not look in Mother’s eyes, because what’s in them now is scarier than anything before.
    “Then, Piggy, you pop out of me, stupid fat-faced little Piggy Pig, and the whole deal falls apart. He doesn’t want a little Piggy Pig in his secret cellar, not even if he’s got me, because I wasn’t what he wanted most to begin with.”
    “Blackmail?” says the man in the doorway.
    “That’s why I kept the little bitch,” Mother says. “I tried to play that angle. But I didn’t have proof. He’d been totally clever. He tried paying me off with chump change, and I took it, but I kept pushing for a year—and then it turned out he knew how to push back hard.”
    “After that, why didn’t she end up in a Dumpster?”
    “By then,” Mother says, “I thought old Piggy Pig owed me big-time, and I like to be paid what I’m owed.”
    Mother picks up the knife.
    “Piggy’s been paying me good interest, but it’s about time I get my principal back.”
    Mother gets up from the desk.
    “Piggy, my guy and me just had a bonding moment.” To the man, she says, “Now you know it all, you think I’m too nasty for you?”
    “Never,” he says.
    “So are you nasty enough for me?”
    “I can try to be,” he says.
    She laughs again. Mother has a nice laugh.
    Sometimes, no matter what happens, Mother’s laugh makes you want to smile. Not now.
    They leave and lock the door.
    Piggy alone.
    She doesn’t know what any of it meant. But whatever it meant, it didn’t mean anything good.
    She puts down the scissors.
    She says, “Hey, Bear,” but though Bear will always be with her, he does not answer.
    Mother and the man talking, voices