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dragging behind them, freeing my blood into the darkness,
giggling like pull-string dolls, eyes blacker than funerals.
I dove into the deepest silence I could manage, hoping to
lose them in my wake. But it was no use, I was trying to
outswim barracudas. They were only toying with me, and
we all knew it. It was the nature of our game. I could never
hide from them. Never evade them.
At the best of times, I was only their plaything, and that
night—the worst of times—my heart wasn’t in it at all. I
could never hurt them, not even for Mother. I just sat upon
the floor, waiting for them to take me, my whole purpose
forfeited. My test failed—I wasn’t the one my mother
needed. I lowered my head in surrender.
While I could not hear them, I knew they were standing
over me, my wonderful sisters. “It will be our secret, dear
brother,” they said in whispered unison. I could feel them
slip my bone-handled blades into my limp hands—the knives
which formed the principal scaffolding for my skills with
a blade. They were warm and wet with blood, my sisters’
blood, as my sisters had drawn them across their throats. It
was all they ever wanted in the world—to join me in spirit.
Here was the real test, to see the task completed, without
shedding a single tear. I held the two of them close, their
whispered blood falling across my shoulders and down
my back, gossamer waterfalls of bottomless red. Their
sweetened smiles were like hot tears against my skin, and
they whispered again, “Whatever joy is left in this world,
dear brother, we will find together, as one. Now, do what
you must. What we all must.” There was no visual memory
of what came next, only the deepest refusal for knowledge, a
pictureless recall of events wrapped in such darkness as I’d
never known, before or since. I do not know if I cried. I hope
that I had, test be damned.
Afterward, the floor shook as if the world were coming
apart beneath the rage of a mad god—my father would not
come to me like a lamb, but as a lion. His test was violence,
342 | Mark Anzalone