The letter came in a black envelope, and everyone knew what that meant.
It sat on the counter all morning, daring someone to say something about it. Some people did — a muttered “sorry for your loss” as they paid — but more people tried to ignore it. Pretend it wasn’t there. Pretend they weren’t staring at it.
Katters preferred those people, who were as uncomfortable with it as she was. That was something that made sense.
Zebra came down the stairs at eleven, sauntering into the shop in as good a mood as he ever was when it was his turn to work the barber shop. But he frozen when he saw the envelope, and when the door swung shut behind him, it sounded like something breaking.
“Who is it for?” he asked, too conversational. Like he didn’t really care, even though he, too, couldn’t stop staring.
It seemed Katters was the only one who could. She hadn’t looked at it since she’d set it down four hours ago. “Me.”
He picked it up anyway, letting out a breath and dropping his shoulders. “Who’s it from?” Actually casual, now, that it wouldn’t affect him.
“I haven’t opened it.”
She did look, now, watched him run his thumb over the address like it might change. She felt queasy. Seasick. As though the world had lost something that was keeping it stable.
“No guesses?” he asked.
She shook her head, but there were only two people it could be. She didn’t know how to feel about either of them.
Zebra turned the envelope over and broke the seal with his thumb. She didn’t say anything as he pulled out the crisp, white letter and started reading it, and she didn’t say anything when he re-folded it and put it back inside.
He tapped the envelope against his palm, frowning. She looked away to lock the register.
“What do you want to do for lunch?” She sounded casual, too, but she wasn’t as good at it as Zebra was. Her voice came out tired. But tired was better than scared.
“You should read it. Or I can tell you what it says, if you’d prefer.”
“I don’t want to know. It won’t change anything, they’re both already dead to me, anyway.”
“It already has changed something. That’s why you should read it.” He set it back on the counter. “Or, I can tell you what it says.”
She walked away from the register, and the envelope, to lock the inside door. “I want to go somewhere for lunch. Cheese fries or something — something cheap.”
“Pauline.” She stopped.
“Pauline Jones, it says.”
Everything broke away from her, crashed into the sea below the world. Everything that had been stable — everything that had made sense.
“Are you okay?” His voice coming from someplace where solid ground still existed. Soft, for the voice that had just fired a name through her like a bullet.
When she didn’t say anything, he stepped toward her and continued. “The funeral is in two weeks. You don’t have to go.”
As though that mattered.
“I’m fine,” she said. Still no fear in it. That was important, that was something to hold on to. “Like I said, as far as I was concerned, she was already dead.”
Another step forward. “I know you weren’t close, but it’s okay if you—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Something other than fear, something familiar — something that could ignite and keep her going. “I want to get lunch, like we do every day, before I have to come back here and open the shop again, like we do every day. It doesn’t change anything, and I don’t care.”
“Alright.” He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. But he sucked on his teeth until some tension broke in him, and he said, “You don’t have to open the shop again when you come back. You can leave it closed.”
“What part of ‘nothing’s changed’ are you not getting?”
He shrugged again.
She brushed past him to get to the shop’s door and he didn’t push back or snap at her or anything. He got to stand on stable ground, got to be comfortable with where he was. It wasn’t fair.
“I’m going to Big Sweet’s,” she said, holding the door open. “To get some cheese fries. Are you coming with or not?”
“Do you want me to?”
Frustration came out of her in a growl, like smoke curling between her teeth. She let the door swing back shut and glared at him. “We have lunch like every day. Why wouldn’t I want you to come with me now?”
He glanced at the envelope. “You are kind of in a mood.”
His tone now — harder, sharper — did sound like the sort of voice that could shoot through a person.
“In a mood?” she repeated. “What kind of mood would that be? Irritated, maybe, because I want to eat lunch before the sun goes down and you keep — you won’t make up your god-damn mind?”
“I’ll make up my mind, if that’s what you want.” He leaned against the counter, crossing his arms and his ankles. “Go without me. Have some dairy you’ll regret in an hour. Take your time, since I held you up, and I’ll eat lunch here and watch the shop while you’re gone.”
More glaring. Irritation burning into something else inside her, the smoke and fumes from it choking her, making her nose run.
“Fine,” she snapped, and left.
Katters couldn’t sleep. She tried for an hour before the weight of her blankets and the stillness of the house got to be too much. Before giving in to the images that came to her in the dark, gave up on not thinking about things.
She pushed the animals off of her and got out of bed. Spike woke and watched her, his ears cocked; Brutus slept through it. As did Zebra, across the room.
She needed light. To be looking at something that wasn’t her own imagination. But she didn’t want to disturb anyone, so she slipped out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.
Carpet turned into tile, cold beneath her feet. Her scaled feet. Her scarred feet. Scarred for her own good — scars that said she could be normal, if she just tried hard enough.
They matched the scars on her hands. Fingers and toes almost white, from growing back and growing back and growing back.
She flipped the coffee-maker to manual and started the pot. And then she went out to the shop and got the letter.
It was heavier than it looked, printed on thick, high-quality paper. And it was printed, not hand-written. Copies sent out to everyone and all over. Can’t spare any personal touches for immediate family, of course, that sort of favouritism would be frowned upon by Our Lord the Almighty, and we can’t afford that this late in the game. Not when someone’s standing at His door.
Or maybe it was personal. Maybe it was her — maybe they just didn’t care enough about her to send her anything special. Maybe when she’d turned her back on them, they’d turned their backs on her.
She went back to the kitchen, poured herself some coffee.
It was almost perverse, how formal the letter was. How it kept itself distant from her and anything she may or may not be feeling. Like a weather report — Pauline Bernadine Carissima Jones née Ikin died of natural causes on the fourteenth. Humbly request your presence at the wake and funeral.
Deepest sympathy in your time of grief.
Deepest sympathy for your loss.
Deepest sympathy as your Ma forces her way back into your life in the best way she knows how.
It was signed by Henry Jones, almost like an afterthought. No personal touch with that, either, but then, Da never was one for personal touches. He was always distant, too. Had to be, Katters thought, to do the things he did. Had to be, to take his knives and make her look human.
“Katters?”
Zebra was at the bedroom door, a blanket bundled into his arms. Katters had slid down to the floor, sitting there with her back against the counters and the letter propped against her knees.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked.
“I made some coffee.”
“Have you drank any of it?”
“No.”
He walked over and sat next to her. He didn’t say anything, but set the blanket down between them.
She folded the letter and set it on the floor. “She called me, before the trial. Said I was a disgrace, that I’d learned nothing, that she was ashamed of me and hoped she’d never see me again. She got that, I guess.”
“That was the last time you spoke to her?”
“Yeah. Almost twenty years ago. I keep saying, she was already dead to me. I was dead to her.”
Zebra nodded.
She pulled the blanket around herself, tight around her shoulders, balling it into fists over her chest. “I didn’t,” she said, “want,” she continued, “to disappoint her. I never wanted. To disappoint her.”
He nodded again and she sighed. “I guess I shouldn’t have run away, then.”
“You did what you had to.”
“That’s what I tell myself, anyway.”
“No,” he said, looking at her. “You did what you had to. I may not know everything, but I know you couldn’t have kept living there.”
“Maybe I just wasn’t trying hard enough.”
He turned more, to face her. “Stop that. You didn’t fail them. They failed you.”
“I just wanted,” she started, but she didn’t know how to finish the sentence. There were a lot of things she wanted from her parents, but to admit that she never got any of them felt wrong. Felt dirty, somehow. So, instead, she leaned against Zebra and said, “I can’t even cry. Ma would be disappointed in that, too. Caitlín can’t even mourn properly, won’t be keening at the wake, what a shameful thing.”
“Caitlín?”
“That’s my middle name. It’s what she used when I was being a ‘monster’.”
“Oh.”
“It’s where I get ‘Katters’ from.”
He put his arm around her. “You don’t have to cry to mourn properly. However you mourn is doing it properly.”
“Right. It just means I’m not human. Just some demon thing left with them as some kind of trial, a test of their faith. Shameful thing.”
“You’re spiralling.”
“I’m not spiralling, I’m mourning. You said I can do it however I want.”
“Okay.”
She shifted, until she was more laying against him than leaning. “I didn’t miss her before I knew she was dead. That’s not fair. It’s not fair that I miss her at all.”
“It isn’t,” Zebra agreed.
“She knew I wasn’t really some kind of demon, some kind of monster,” she said. “But she didn’t know if the rest of the world would know that. That’s all it was, she wanted to protect me. And I was ungrateful.”
“Sure,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“But she—” Katters sat up suddenly, pulling herself away from Zebra’s touch. “They hurt me. They fucking hurt me, both of them.” She stood and started pacing the kitchen. “Fuck ‘for my own good’. They — always with shame, with disappointment, with fucking disgrace and — it hurt. I could barely walk.”
She stopped, phantom pains creeping into her feet, stabbing through the cold floor. “They only stopped with my hands because I couldn’t do chores. But the feet only slowed me down, it didn’t stop me. But it hurt. And my ears. I get more attention for how they grew back than I would have for having them in the first place.”
Zebra stood, too. Next to her at first, but he leaned against the counter when she stepped away.
“They shouldn’t have done any of it,” he said.
“You think I don’t know that?” she snapped. “But they didn’t know any better. They thought they were helping.”
“Didn’t they? Know better than to mutilate a child?”
“Don’t. Don’t make me defend them.”
“Okay. Sorry.” She picked up her coffee — cold and bitter — and poured it into the sink. “I tried so hard for them. And I still want to. I just feel like if I try hard enough, they — that I’ll. But she’s dead now. She’s gone.”