The Meadow 41 my most powerful attributes—and because all our first names evoke flowering plants. My services are used only in the worst cases. “Exterminating Angel” is trademarked, and I am one of only two women who bear the title on her SafeGuard business card that requires a special light to read. But lately I have a problem. The problem is my rage. A bit of it has sloughed away each year of the past ten years as I enact my own thwarted revenge for others’ trauma. Each trigger pulled, each monster ended, and I insubstantiate a little bit more, grow less human, less visible even to myself. You are disappearing, I hear more often than not now, at the very moment I feel the bullet spring, joyous, from the muzzle. It’s a child’s voice echoing up through the rage, eerie with truth. It is my voice, perhaps, from a happier time: That afternoon with my mother out past the city limits, the sun shining through her hair, a little butterfly net tied to her belt for me to catch insects for my jar. My hand brushed the tops of the wheat, other hand in hers. She sang a sad song, most of the words of which she’d forgotten. She hummed, sang, hummed again. I was mesmerized by her voice. A little grove of trees across the field toward which we walked. I don’t remember getting there, or leaving that place. Soon you will be gone. The child’s voice frightens me. I feel something stalking me through the hate. Something wants to find me out. I hide in my anger, but it is becoming hard to stay concealed. So little anger left. Twenty years ago, Juniper found me on the landing of our apartment complex. I was fourteen. I’d finally killed my father. I’d been a prey animal for years, my insides honed with reflex. Invisibility was survival. My heart was a cataract in my chest, all frosted over. I stood motionless, stunned, staring at my bloody hands. I could feel blood on my face and in my hair.
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