Blackfoot Forest and the things that i've loved are the things i have lost

his mouth was cruel and crocodylinae and all spectral contempt; it was in some measure worse than the tenantless socket that was the womb of grotesqueries living within his skull. not the less, the moonsilk color of her fur hid the paling of her brow and despite herself she found his pupil, staring defiantly into it. within a hairsbreadth of the sleveen she stood firm, unflinching, lifting her chin as he searched her for some fraught nuance in this hairline intimacy. she burned the ends of her nerves, melting the fibers, twisting and sealing, so they could no longer be frayed to unspool for his midsommar bacchanal. he would not bind her in gyves, nor pluck the petaled tears from her bittersweet nightshade gaze with his hue and cry or iguanid glance. 

of course of course of course he’d remark the tiniest tremble of her chin and root out the hesitancy in her heart like a fox availing itself of the earths magnetic fields, using them as rangefinders to dispatch the trembling, snow-interred field mice belowground.

phaedra dare not take her eyes away to follow where he looked; dare not put her hand in the unlidded cookie jar, for that she knew inside there were only scorpions poised to sting. instead, as merrick's attention was elsewhere, the girl staked an "are you stupid?" look of desperation at aerasha before losing all heart that the woman had the mother wit to pick up on the creosote man's wrongness.

as for phaedra, the profound sense that something or someone was about to break bad stirred in her bowels. 

but she was no field mouse, and her flesh would not ensanguine his fangs tonight. she would fight and fight and fight and fight and

a father, i mean.
and you have one.
you have one 
you have oneyou have one
"i do. don't i?" she thought. a communal parent to be shared by many, and the lions took more than their fair share. what was left for the lamb but a whit of his affections?

“you did so, else you wouldn' be here,” she challenged precociously in regards to his alleged fatherlessness. “liar,” squinting her eyes at him. her brain flung a chancla at her head for possessing such a petulant tongue and her throat contracted as she worked to swallow a tiny gulp that felt stuck, shifting gradatim as merrick’s eye reeled back from the ashlar edges that was doubtless her charnel vault. phaedra withheld the curious skirt of her eyes. if i do not look i am safe
 
shifting, shifting, shifting steps, rounding away from him … 

the girl paused her fiddlefooting, ears feathering to merrick as he shared his success at siring some loinlizards. the man’s voice was coarsened like fragmented rock in hessian sack, knocking and grinding against each other. rank breath stirred with the air around them; lychmouth. phaedra yanked her snout away and clicked her teeth, unspeaking, watching him with a surly look knuckled into her brow, the rugose skin along her whiskers and snout spasming as he stepped in close, stooping so that only phaedra may see the refashioning of mannered placation on his face to seismic rage. 

if fear was the currency of his depraved gratification, she would boldly upturn her purse for his discovery that neither silver nor copper would fall from its contents. 

her die had already been cast so phaedra parted her lips to further defy him, but his patience ran thin in a matter of heartbeats. in the next moment, a terrible noise was flushed from his black putrid throat like hundredfold black pheasants from the weeds of his teeth. she balked, the fur around her shoulders lifting, her slim haunches straddling the earth. she met his eye with a resentful stare, mouth clapped shut when the sylph made to move between charles merrinson and the child, her frilly voice threading a pretty ribbon around the tension rather than cutting it as like to be intended.

phaedra took such an unthinking window of opportunity that she jumped into thorny shrub, unfeeling of their biting nicks as adrenaline welled into her bloodstream. she hunkered down and drew her teeth defensively at merrick, pinpricks of red beginning to smear her white coat as she ensnared herself deeper into the tangle with backward strides. "no, you stupid" she finally answered his shout,  "n' your dad prolly replaced you," like mine replaced me, she thought sullenly before going on to give him the business and the company car, "with girls! ones with both eyes! an' breath that an't smell like skunk! du bist das hässlichste ding, das ich je gesehen habe!"