Their closets shared a wall and if Brendan sat in his, carefully balancing himself on top of a pile of stuffed animals, while Tyler sat in his, Brendan could hear every word. Brendan listened last night and knew that the gods had had enough of him stalling for courage. They were threatening to ruin Tyler’s life (his brother had fucked up really bad with that weird bitch and now he could be totally fucked) and the only way Brendan could help him would be to man up and finally give the gods the sacrifice they wanted.
While Dad cooked eggs in the kitchen and Bobo and Booboo donned Mexican hats and pursued the weekly carrot thief, Brendan reviewed his list of sacrifices.
1—kick person down stairs
2—push person off roof
3—set person’s hair on fire
4—burn person’s house down
5—drown person
6—make person choke on carrots (ha!)
7—bury person alive
And the list went on and on for almost two pages until
45—run person over with car
Of his list, Brendan could cross off over half the options because there was no way he could steal a car, or drive one, or overpower someone enough to drown them or make them choke and he certainly couldn’t bury anyone alive. The rest of the options were possible, but not without their challenges. Number 33, for instance, required him to suffocate a person. That could be done if the person was tied up, but that required Brendan to come up with a way to strap someone down first without them fighting back.
The solution was easy, of course. Their cat, Lizzy, who Dad called Lizzy Borden for some reason, would be easy to sacrifice. He could tie her up and suffocate her or drown her in the sink or even put her on the train tracks that ran behind the elementary school—hell, he could even try to remove her beating heart—but killing the cat would be pointless. His goal was to protect his family. Certainly Tyler’s life was more important than Lizzy’s, but Brendan considered the cat a good member of the family who always offered love and affection without complaint and never meowed in the middle of the night to be fed like his friend Kyle’s cat did. Brendan could snatch a cat from the neighborhood but the community rules prevented any pets from roaming freely or being left outside unattended, so a cat would have to escape for Brendan to get his hands on one. Catching a cat that didn’t want to be caught wouldn’t be an easy task. Besides, the gods wanted human sacrifices. As the book said, in really bad times when things were their most horrible, only a human sacrifice would work.
The easiest of the sacrifices—kick person down stairs—also offered the other crucial ingredient Brendan needed: anonymity. Performing a sacrifice for the gods only to be caught and punished defeated the purpose. He needed to be able to get away with it without any connection to him or anyone in his family. He could kick someone down the stairs at school and run away but there was always a chance that another kid or a teacher would spot him. Falling down stairs didn’t mean death, either. He’d need a place with a lot of stairs and he couldn’t think of anywhere.
Someone was knocking at the front door. Brendan didn’t move from his spot on the floor in front of the TV, legs crossed, composition book resting on his calves. Dad wouldn’t ask him to get the door; it could be a stranger, after all. Dad was protective that way, which was nice. Brendan needed to choose a method. It had to be done today. If he waited another week, Tyler’s problem might be even worse, perhaps deadly.
Dad hurried through the family room saying, “Breakfast is ready—get it while the bacon fat is still hot and tasty” and answered the front door. On the TV, Bobo and Booboo had put down their rifles for large knives, which they used to dice up carrots while they interrogated the now captured thief.
Brendan added to his list: 46—stab person
Should have thought of that a while ago.
He closed the composition book and went into the kitchen. On the front porch, Dad was talking to people he didn’t know, probably salesmen. Depending on Dad’s mood, the conversation could last a few minutes. Waves of heat bloomed from the pile of scrambled eggs, which were spotted brown from the bacon fat, just the way Brendan liked them. His stomach grumbled. His little white pill, what he called, “Pillie Billy,” waited for him on top of an upside down paper cup. That was Dad’s way to remind Brendan to not only take Pillie Billy but to take it with several large gulps of orange juice. Brendan grabbed the pill and swallowed it with only his saliva. He’d drink the orange juice later, in front of Dad.
The Romans would have called Pillie Billy “a talisman.”
He slowly removed a large carving knife from the block holding several of them. He held it up before his face and smiled at his distorted reflection in the blade. Mom and Dad had used this same blade hundreds, maybe thousands, of times to cut up vegetables or slice meat, especially on Thanksgiving, but it had never seemed so large before. The blade could stab right through someone’s face from under the jaw all the way through the top of the head. This image bothered him but he couldn’t shake it. A stab like that would be fatal, no doubt, but would someone die instantly from such an injury or would they bleed for a while? Blood was messy and could be used to catch him, at least according to CSI.
Brendan touched the point of the blade with his thumb. The dimple of his thumb print indented with the fine point of the knife but the blade did not break skin. Even so, the tip was very, very sharp. It would only take a bit more pressure for the skin to break and the blood to flow. Just a bit more pressure …
“Ow.” His thumb added the extra ounce of pressure and the tip of the blade pierced flesh. He hadn’t realized what his thumb was up to; he had been drifting with his thoughts. Pillie Billy hadn’t started working yet.
Delaney was laughing at the front door. He hadn’t heard her get up. Had she walked past him? Had she seen him with the knife? She might tell Dad and he’d be concerned and Brendan would have to concoct some lie (maybe one of his short stories) because Dad wouldn’t understand the pact Brendan had made with the gods or why it was so important to make The Saturday Sacrifice. Maybe one day he could know but not yet. As long as Dad kept making breakfast, he was doing his part to honor the day. The really horrible stuff was left for Brendan to do.
He returned the knife to its slot among the other knives. He wrapped a napkin around his thumb and tucked it beneath his other fingers. When Dad and Delaney came in, Brendan was sitting at the table with a cup full of orange juice, eating his breakfast. They smiled at him and he smiled back—a perfect Saturday ritual.
4
He had not slept well. Sasha had wanted it. She hadn’t fought him. She could have stopped him, if she had really tried. He told that to Paul last night after he got home, hiding inside his closet and talking soft so his folks or his sister wouldn’t overhear him. Brendan was twelve, so even if he did hear he wouldn’t have the faintest idea what was going on. Tyler had almost driven over to Paul’s house but such a late visit would set off alarms (FIRE! FIRE!) to the parents and things would topple from there. Dad had been asleep on the couch while some infomercial blabbered on about the latest gadget designed to make life easier. Eventually, Dad would wake, see that Tyler’s car was in the driveway, and then make his way to the bedroom. Not that Mom cared; she had probably been well in the tank before nightfall. She took several pills a day and those pills were no joke. He had stolen two a while back and he and Paul had watched a Jersey Shore marathon for eight hours in a dreamy daze and then fallen into a fourteen hour stretch of sleep. One pill had nearly killed twenty-four hours.