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was. That is, of course, if she is indeed your mother.” I could
feel Tom’s hand moving around inside my mind, seeking out
a secret for the seizing. I felt his power washing through
me. He found something. “What’s this? Tell me, who are all
those children in cages? Who put them in there, I wonder?
Care to tell me?” His claim over me increased with each
pass of his hand across the emerging face of the tarnished
memory. Tom forced my arms down to my sides, allowing
my father’s blazing fist to crash into me, crushing my left
eye into pulpy blindness. Tom bellowed through my father’s
fire-breathing mouth, “Who put them in the cages, Vincent?”
My name. He found it. He was running amok through
my mind, carelessly flinging secrets to the wind like a child
pillaging a toy box. Strangely, I found myself trying to
mentally reinforce the barriers around the secreted memory,
though I wanted nothing more than to know it.
My father carefully studied my face even as he went
about destroying it, blow after bone-smashing blow. I could
tell that the eyes which now looked upon me belonged only
to him, and something powerful was stirring within them.
Another layer to the hidden memory was torn away
beneath a storm of Tom’s laughter, and a terrible knowledge
began to trickle into my once abandoned recollection. I
remembered that the cages were filled with little muses.
There were also paintings, such beautiful paintings, filling
the walls of a wine cellar. I remember looking out at it all
from my own cage, which hung from the ceiling by a rusty
chain. He put them in there.
Before the memory could reach its terminus, my father
roared like never I’d heard, his stolen body freezing,
disallowing even the slightest twitch. He was trying to fight
back the Secret Eater’s grip. Tom only laughed at my father’s
efforts, but perhaps sensing a change in the wind, chose to
rip my memory free of its prison rather than entertain the
slow process of recollection to conclude its awful course.

178 | Mark Anzalone