Interlude

April Chase was always a smart girl. A very smart girl.


She saw the bruises on her mother, bruises the color of an angry sky. She heard the excuses over and over again. "He's just in a bad mood," her mother used to say. "We'll catch him when he's in a better one. We'll talk to him then." But he was never in a better mood.


"I'm just so clumsy," she would tell the neighbors. Yes, April Chase would think. You tripped and hit your face on his fist.


And then one evening he hit her so bad that she broke a rib. She whimpered in her bed, refusing to go to the hospital, knowing that they would ask all those uncomfortable questions. And her father sat on his chair watching the television and finishing his beer.


"I'll get you another beer, Daddy," she said. She was cute and precocious and eight years old.


She went to the fridge and took out a beer and opened it. Then she opened the bottom cabinet, where her mother kept the cleaning supplies, and reached back. She reached and pulled out a box she had seen before when helping her mother. "What's it for?" she asked.


"Rats," her mother told her. "We just have a rat problem, that's all."


And so April Chase, at eight years old, got rid of their rat problem. She handed her father a beer poured into a glass with rat poison mixed in.


She always was a smart girl.