Leporine Darling

(CW: Child abandonment + endangerment, minor violence.)

I’m doing the right thing, Mirielle tells herself, as she stirs the children’s soup. Beef stock and red wine have darkened the mixture to a rich, oily golden color, bobbing with unevenly chopped pieces of celery, carrot, cabbage. Two whole, dried bay leaves drift on top, swirling with each stroke of her ladle. No one could judge me. No sane person, no mother. Yes. I am doing the right thing.

The thought seeks to comfort her, the weighted fishing line that keeps her tethered to the bowed rod of her body, bent in obeisance to the stovetop and its steady flame. The soup bubbles gently. She draws in a slow inhale through her nose, savoring the heady scent of aromatics and simmering vegetables, willing the strained thrumming of her heartbeat to slow as she does. Panic will serve no one. Panic makes a poor role model. One hand around the ladle, the other in her apron pocket, caressing the slim wooden figurine housed there in a compulsive self-soothe.

She tells herself, again, I’m doing the right thing.

Fiber, vitamins, flavor. Then, the protein—lean rabbit meat, portioned into boneless chunks for the children’s softer teeth, the bones retained for her youngest to gnaw on.

Samuel has been fussy lately as his milk teeth grow in, whining and gnashing his inflamed gums all hours of the day. Mirielle has tried everything to relieve his discomfort: teething toys, gum massages, chilled washcloths, cold fruit. Nothing has worked except for rabbit bones. He likes the texture, and the firm, smooth surface for his tiny grip.

“It’s a little macabre,” her wife, Lily, had murmured once, watching Samuel babble and flail his spit-slick rabbit femur in his bassinet. “But I guess he isn’t crying anymore.”

“I’ll take macabre over inconsolable any time,” Mirielle had replied. It hadn’t seemed so macabre to her, anyway. Maybe it was their differences in upbringing that made Lily cringe at the sight of a baby playing with bones, or shudder and cover her mouth whenever Mirielle slaughtered a goat to restock their deep freezer. Lily is a suburban girl, born and raised, with city inclinations. Mirielle grew up on a farm in the heart of Missouri. The extent of animal death in Lily’s childhood memory was a euthanized pet here and there; Mirielle started watching her daddy gut trout before she could even walk, organs dripping on the damp grass and fine scales glittering in the midday sun.

Their marriage has come with a great many compromises, mostly in the form of Lily being given extensive warnings about what animals will be utilized in tonight’s dinner, when, and how, so she can steer clear until every last drop of blood has gone swimming down the drain. For Mirielle’s part, she tries to be courteous. She understands some people are just squeamish. It’s a difference in sensibilities.

She’d thought that was all it was, the first time Lily complained about their secondborn.

“Arley killed a frog today,” she’d murmured into Mirielle’s arm, curled in a loose half-moon against her body in the dim glow of their bedroom.

Mirielle had been reading by lamplight, absently petting Lily’s auburn hair with her free hand. At the first words she’d spoken in a while, Mirielle glanced away from her novel, making a questioning sound. Lily exhaled through her nose.

“The kids were playing in the yard. I was watering the cannas when I heard Ruth suddenly start yelling, and I thought maybe someone had hurt themselves, or they were fighting. But when I went over to them, she was just crying he killed it, he killed it, over and over again.” Lily plucked Mirielle’s drawstrings with one hand, lips pursed in a thin moue. “Ruth had found a frog and Arley smashed it. With his bare hands. It was fucking awful, all the blood and slime between his fingers, and Ruth losing her mind—I tried to wash it off as fast as possible, and when I asked him why he did that, he just… shrugged. I don’t know, it freaked me out. It took hours to calm Ruth down.”

“He’s a baby,” Mirielle had said. Arley had been three years old at the time. Their firstborn Ruth was five, and Samuel not yet conceived. “I don’t know if we’ve really explained what death is to him yet. Maybe he didn’t understand why it upset you.”

“Maybe.” But Lily still sounded uneasy.

There were other things, over the years. Arley, methodically cracking every blue speckled egg in a fallen robin’s nest, one by one. Arley, biting Ruth’s hand so hard it drew blood and sent them all to the emergency room. Arley, pulling up every single one of Lily’s new hydrangeas from the garden. More than these episodes, it was often that even his appearance and mannerisms ratched Lily’s anxiety about the whole situation:

“Do you even notice the way he looks at us?” she’d demanded once, in a harsh whisper. “At Ruth? His eyes—”

“He has a genetic mutation,” Mirielle had snapped back. “The doctors told us.”

“It’s not albinism, it doesn’t affect his whole body.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Admit that he’s not normal, and it isn’t just growing pains or a phase. He needs help, Miri, help from people who aren’t us.”

Mirielle had put her foot down. “I’m not sending our son away because you’re paranoid.” And that had been the end of that.

It wasn’t like he was disobedient or even naughty most of the time. He was a bright, quiet kid, maybe a little destructive when he was bored and maybe he struggled with empathy, but Mirielle knew he wasn’t bad. For all of Lily’s worries about his mental health and hypothetical personality disorders, at heart, Arley was a little boy who clearly needed extra support, not condemnation.

Mirielle had believed this for most of his life. It wasn’t until Samuel was born that she began to feel what Lily must have felt, rinsing a frog’s innards off of their toddler’s palms while Ruth wailed—that gnawing, creeping feeling, cold in her core.

Fear.

Arley was six, Ruth was eight. Ruth adored her baby brother, still does—she’d begged to hold him at the hospital, loves to play with him and include him in games when her friends visit, even insisted on feeding him many times during his first few weeks of life. Arley… had not.

It’s normal, Mirielle told Lily then, for kids to not bond with new siblings right away. Ruth took a while to adjust too. Give them time.

Weeks passed. Then months. Arley went from wary distrust to outright hostility towards Samuel. Ruth confessed to Mirielle one night, in a small, timid voice, I don’t like it when you guys leave Samuel alone. Arley doesn’t like him. And in an even softer mumble, I don’t like it when you leave me alone with him either.

Then the escalations. Knocking things off the shelves near Samuel to wake him up from naps. Splashing water on his face to make him cry. Crouching beside his rocker on the floor, prodding at the vulnerable fontanelle on his head with harsh, jabbing fingers, until Lily swept in and forcefully separated them. Demanding that Ruth give him Samuel while she was cradling him, and clawing her legs bloody with his nails when she refused. The final straw for Mirielle had been when she caught Arley sneaking into their bedroom at night to stare at Samuel in his crib, eyes wide and empty in the dark, baring his teeth in an ugly snarl when Mirielle told him to go back to his own bed.

The fear crept in. They’d tried everything. All her reason and logic and motherly protests sputtered like candleflame in the face of the truth: Samuel and Ruth were not safe in the house with their brother. And the fear crept in, kept creeping in, hooking sharp claws into her ribcage and needling her every time she breathed, every time she held Samuel to her breast and knew that Arley was watching across the room, with his strange eyes and uncanny tilt of the head, just waiting for her attention to lapse. Lily was right.

So Mirielle has come to a decision.

She serves the soup for dinner. It’s a quiet affair. Ruth, once a bubbly and talkative kid, has shrunken in on herself since Samuel was born, and now eats with her elbows hitched close to her chest, eyes fixed on her bowl. Lily feeds Samuel carrot puree in his high chair. Her own food is untouched. Mirielle tries her best to eat, but the insistent churning in her gut is making it difficult to swallow without gagging.

Across the table, Arley sips his soup slowly. His whole body is hunched over the bowl, head bent low, delicately chewing pieces of meat and vegetables. His nose twitches every once and a while, a little spasm of movement that Mirielle had once considered a charming quirk, but now makes something clench in her chest. His hands rest on the tabletop, too long and spindly for a child of his age. His nails end in sharp points. His hair is little more than peach fuzz, his preferred length, tawny and mottled, unlike anyone else in their family of blondes and redheads. His eyes—those eyes that Lily has never liked, not since he was born—are set just a bit too far apart on his face, his irises colored a deep brown with odd, elongated pupils that reflect no light.

Looking at him now, Mirielle barely sees her son.

The soup tastes like ash.

She sets her spoon down, clearing her throat, and everyone stills. “Arley,” she says, dredging up some distant echo of a smile as his gaze flicks up to her. “Since your birthday is coming up, I have a little surprise for you.”

Arley perks up at this, sitting straighter, and Mirielle is given the eerie impression of a rabbit snapping to attention. “What is it?”

“It’s a little out of the way, so we’ll have to drive there. After dinner, we’ll go.” Lily and Ruth are both looking at her. Mirielle doesn’t take her eyes away from Arley. “Finish your soup, baby, then get your shoes on.”

After dinner, Lily silently takes Samuel to the master bedroom to nurse, her expression hollow with resignation as she slips by, accepting Mirielle’s quick kiss on the cheek with a kind of passive relief that makes Mirielle nauseous. Ruth slinks out after her a few minutes later, disappearing into her own room. Good. It makes it easier to spoon a carefully-measured dose of midazolam syrup into a water bottle, stirring it over the kitchen counter while she waits for Arley to lace up his shoes in the living room. When he’s ready, she presses the bottle into his hands, smiling.

She slides behind the wheel of their family car, her heartbeat a dull roar in her ears. Arley buckles himself into his booster.

“Where are we going, mama?” he asks, swinging his heels curiously.

She looks straight out the windshield. “You’ll see.”

* * *

Their home is not truly rural, but it doesn’t take them long to get there. Mirielle drives until the wide, rolling green hills disappear into rising trees, the forest swallowing them whole; she drives until the sun slips firmly beneath the horizon, casting the land in a warm, shadowed twilight of early spring; she drives until the thrum of cicadas in the eaves of the world and the weaving of black tarmac beneath the car are the only things that exist.

It is only when they are far, far from home that she finally finds the courage to speak.

“Arley?” she says, and hates herself for how her voice quivers.

“Yeah, mama?”

“I want to tell you a story.”

“Okay.”

“When you were in my belly,” she begins, easing back on the gas until they’re only just cruising. She doesn’t want to miss her turn. “I got pretty sick. It scared your mom, and your sister. They didn’t know if I was going to be okay.”

Arley’s eyes find her in the rearview mirror, dark and piercing. Mirielle swallows thickly.

“They thought I was going to die. So your mom decided to make me my favorite food, hoping it would make me better. Except your mom isn’t very good at hunting, is she?”

“No,” Arley says, and grins. He sips his water. “She always cries.”

Mirielle nods. “Right. But she did it this time, for me. She caught something pretty rare. We don’t get a lot of snowshoe hares around here, it’s too warm for them, but one of them got caught in her trap. She cooked it in a stew for me. It was the best hare stew I’d ever tasted. I swear, to this day, that it saved my life, and made it possible for you to be born. I think… I think she didn’t cook it all the way, though. So the hare wasn’t all the way gone. I’ve always believed that—that the soul sticks around if you don’t cook it right, that heat cleans the animal better than a butcher ever could, because it gets down to something deeper than the skin.”

She chances a glance in the mirror. Arley is still listening, but he’s blinking slowly now, blearily, his hands slack around the water bottle in his lap.

“So,” she says, dragging in a breath, “I ate that stew, and the hare’s soul went inside me, and found its way into my belly. It probably wanted to live more than anything else. And you were going to be something new and living one day. So it… it took you from me. And I gave birth to it instead.”

Arley’s head slumps backwards, tipping against the booster seat headrest. His eyelashes flutter, and for the first time, Mirielle sees something spark in him, a realization that something isn’t right, and he lets out a low, pained whine like an animal with its hind leg in a snare, a sound that could almost be her name.

“I know, baby,” she says. Her knuckles are white around the steering wheel. “I’m sorry. But I need—I need your siblings to be safe. I love you. I love you, okay?”

Arley whimpers. He shudders, his whole body convulsing in an aborted jerk as he tries to struggle but finds his limbs weak, unresponsive, the midazolam suppressing his central nervous system. Even an adult would find it hard to resist the inexorable drowsiness. It doesn’t take long for him to still completely, succumbing to the drug.

It is silent in the car for a long time.

When Miriam reaches her destination, she parks on the side of the road, off the shoulder. There are no marked paths. These are not tourist woods. No one comes here at this time of year for anything but using the main road as a throughway.

She climbs out of the car and unbuckles Arley from his carseat. He’s limp in her arms, head lolling, and she does her best to keep his cervical spine supported as she carefully picks her way through the trees, phone flashlight tucked into her breast pocket to light the way. Night birds chirrup in the boughs overhead, interspersed with the sawing of crickets, the spongy give of new growth under her boots in the burgeoning spring.

She walks, and walks, and walks. Arley doesn’t stir.

Finally, she slows to a halt in front of an enormous fallen tree, shadowy and gigantic in the sleepy evening. She kneels at the base of it, where the moss forms a green pallet, and gently lays Arley down, ensuring she doesn’t jostle him too much. For a long moment, she kneels in the grass beside him, cupping his cheek and thumbing over a smudge beneath his eye, soaking up the soft warmth of his skin. She bends down to press a kiss to his forehead.

“I love you,” she breathes, and means it. But love cannot be her only consideration. She remembers Ruth, muffling her sobs into her hands as Mirielle dabbed her bruised, bleeding legs with antiseptic. She remembers Samuel, babbling happily in his bassinet, unaware that the hands stretching out to him were too-long and too-sharp, his brother’s jaws parted in hunger, not laughter.

I am doing the right thing.

She rises to her feet. Her phone’s compass leads her back to the car. The woods fade behind her, transforming back into open fields, farmhouses dotting the landscape, pinpricks of stars decorating the canopied sky. The road takes her home, and when she walks inside in a daze, Ruth is there to greet her—wrapping her little arms around Mirielle’s waist, burying her face in her stomach. Mirielle squeezes back, cradling the back of her head.

“Go to bed, honey,” she whispers. Ruth slowly disentangles herself. “Everything is okay now. You’re safe.”

Her heart aches when Ruth nods, visibly relaxing. She walks Ruth to her bedroom, tucks her in, and shuts the door.

She finds Lily in bed with a sleeping Samuel, pressed up against the headboard warily. Mirielle climbs into bed on her other side, bringing her knees up so that they’re curled around him on all sides, and strokes a fingertip down the side of his small, precious face. She makes herself meet Lily’s pensive gaze.

“It’s done,” she murmurs.

Lily breathes out shakily. She takes Mirielle’s hand and squeezes, so much relief in the action that Mirielle has to bite down hard on her inner cheek to keep herself from crying. It would wake Samuel.

Samuel, for whom she has done the unforgivable.

Samuel, for whom she would do it again.