Normal, Suburban Girls
When cars linger longer than they should, Daddy buys bulls because dogs aren’t enough. He finds them advertised in the back of the PennySavers we use for the woodstove when we’ve run out of bills to burn. The little one is Marciano, after his favorite boxer; he doesn’t name the other one.
The other one remains hunched under the sycamore like a monk, but Marciano’s always moving, chewing and chewing without ever seeming to swallow. When it tries to cross the invisible line we aren’t supposed to cross to attack the garbage truck, it yawps like it’s been shot since it’s forgotten what’s around its neck. Daddy didn’t bother to gradually increase the voltage, like he did to us.
It's Jacie who sees the first lawn sign from her window, YES ON 4, stenciled over a giant bull’s head. But when she tells me to look, I only stare at the fathers in lawn chairs drinking beers in the driveway while their daughters huddle near the street and whisper secrets or swap blood oaths or whatever it is that normal, suburban girls do. Some nights, I give them names like McKenzie and Savannah and Rebecca and pretend to brush their hair with Mama’s hairbrush that Jacie hid when Daddy burned all of her things. I imagine I’m their mother, stroking their hair and warning them to stop walking by the house with all the cars in the driveway that smells like a garbage incinerator with those girls that never speak.
Even though she knows better, Jacie looks up what the sign means on Daddy’s computer, and I fill in the vocabulary sheets she’s printed from the homeschool website. They’re trying to outlaw all beasts from residential properties she whispers. I write down words prostrate and squalor and wonder what type of beasts they mean. Later, Daddy steals their signs to use as target practice, and Marciano runs in circles with every shot. The other one doesn’t move at all, no matter how much Daddy tries to get it to.
When the fathers come by, we hide what needs to be hidden and sit on the porch, still as stone, and Marciano sharpens his horns on the fieldstone foundation of the house. They stay on the street and yell to Daddy that this is a neighborhood, there are statutes regarding the size of a yard needed to pasture livestock, that we should just move already, that this kind of town isn’t for us. Daddy yells back that he ain’t pasturing nothing, just protecting what’s rightfully his, except he doesn’t say it as nicely as that. I can tell it spooks Daddy, though, because he paces and makes phone calls and people start showing up. Except Marciano can’t tell the difference from who should and shouldn’t be there—red-eyed truck drivers, pockmarked teenagers, rambling women who won’t stop talking—and charges at them all, their pockets shaking like maracas as they flee.
The other one remains prostrate (right, Jacie?) by the porch, its gray legs tucked under it. I put my head against its side and listen for a beat that’s barely there and check its clouded eyes and remember how mama once said she’d rather be dead than live another day like this. I take a rag and find the bleach and ammonia and go to the basement for the other chemicals from where Daddy keeps them. I grab Daddy’s gas mask, which smells like the balloon Jacie was able to steal for my birthday last year, and bring the rag to its snout. I am about to cover its nostrils when I hear the rumble.
On the side of the house, Marciano kicks up a whorl of dust as it tries to dislodge its horns from the foundation. The more it claws and scrapes, the more stuck it gets, the more the foundation crumbles. Pieces of fieldstone break apart and its raging feet. I hold a piece of broken rock over its head, and my muscles flex and burn and ache like I didn’t know they could. Marciano’s eyes morph from anger to fear, which I’ve learned aren’t all that different in the end.
Then I hear it, a painful snort from the porch. The other one moves its head enough for its tongue to loll out of its mouth. It finds a clump dead grass and begins to chew.
I heave the stone through Daddy’s window.
The way he looks at me—all eyes and closed mouth—I should be afraid, but Jacie’s behind him, pointing for me to run, and as my feet start to move, I can already I feel the wetness of their whispers in my ear, their fingers linking through mine, finally pulling me with them, down our street.
Brian McVety lives in Longmeadow, MA with his wife and three daughters. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared in JMWW, Variant Literature, Reckon Review, Litro Magazine, Arcturus, Porcupine Literary, Tiny Molecules, BULL, and elsewhere.