Paradigm (9781909490406) by Ceri A. Lowe Page B

Big, thumping chunks of ice that battered the wood boards across the windows that Hutchinson had strengthened after they had eaten. The flat started to look like a prison.
    â€˜Those hailstones were vicious,’ he said, stepping in from the balcony. ‘And it looked like it was going to be a nice day today.’ He took a large swig of the rum. His eyes were bloodshot and wild looking.
    Alice shook her head and sat down on the sofa. ‘I’m tired,’ she said and curled up with the blanket around her.
    â€˜We’ll need to change your bandage before you go to sleep,’ he said and stripped the blanket from her legs. He picked up the scissors and started shredding the rest of the sheet on the floor.
    â€˜I don’t want to,’ she said, ‘sir.’
    â€˜Don’t disobey me,’ he said in an angry voice. ‘You will sleep when I tell you to.’
    Alice scowled. ‘It’s my house,’ she said under her breath.
    Hutchinson’s eyes bubbled and a thick drool of spit gathered at the corner of his mouth. His fabric-ripping became more frantic and exuberant.
    â€˜Your house?’ he shouted. ‘This is a situation of war. And in situations of war there are often things that we don’t want to do, but we do them anyway.’ He grabbed a length of sheeting and turned it into a makeshift gag. Alice kicked and screamed as he wound it around her head, tying it in a tight knot. Then he grabbed her knee and massaged the cut with his thumb. She tried to scream again but it got lost in the cloth.
    â€˜But we have to be brave,’ he said. ‘Now hold still.’ As Hutchinson moved over her undoing his belt, Alice pushed and squirmed but he had her pinned down, stinking of rum and peaches, traces of cream on his face whiskers like a vicious tiger.
    â€˜You’re my little girl now,’ he said and reached for the rum, holding Alice with three bony fingers.
    â€˜Get off me,’ she screamed from under the gag and he laughed: a deep, throaty laugh that chilled her bones to the core.
    â€˜You’re your mother’s daughter, aren’t you?’ he said and he leaned slightly off balance to swig the drink. It was enough. In the splintering of a second, Alice reached down towards the carpet for something, anything to beat off Hutchinson. Her fingers found the blunt, black metal scissors that her mother had used in making clothes for her when she was a little girl, scissors that were older than her mother, belonging to her grandmother and carefully carried from house to house, holding a legacy of history in their dull metal blades.
    With everything she had left in her, Alice reached around and plunged them into Hutchinson’s side, just below the armpit, driving them through the thin muscle until they hit bone. He didn’t scream or shout but instead he wheezed out a long, monotone growl. It was terrifyingly easy, frighteningly simple.
    Then she pulled the scissors out and pushed them back in again until his blood dripped over her and he slumped, breathing shallowly on top of her.
    â€˜Help,’ he mouthed. ‘Help me.’
    Using the scissors as leverage she pushed him off onto the floor. It wasn’t as physically hard as she thought it might have been—had she considered it in advance—but the disgust of his filthy, ugly body was enough. She stuck the scissors into his heart one more time and left them there, pointing outwards like a sun dial as the evening crept into twilight.
    â€˜Now you see it, now you don’t,’ said Alice, her hands shaking and numb. Hutchinson’s chest rose and fell and then rose again. And then he, and everything around him, fell silent.
    Alice stood by a crack in the wood covering of the balcony and breathed in deeply. Everything was cold and dark with just the lap of water outside. She watched as the pieces of wood and toys and trash and shadows of dead cats bobbed up and down around