It began when he saw her sleeping face, a pale angelic visage, swaddled in soft blue blankets and her mother’s tight embrace. Of course her mother wasn’t much more than a tight embrace at that point. Blood oozed out of her wounds, dripping slowly down the steps of the cellar. The baby lay in the middle of this scene, a nest of splattered gore.

Broken bones and shining flesh formed layers of indecipherable muck. Teeth were scattered everywhere, more than there should have been, and he couldn’t tell how many were the mother’s, and how many were the monster’s. Claws reached upstream, frozen in their effort to take the child. One snarl clenched the mother’s stomach tight in its canines.

The baby began to scream. Gritting his teeth, he snatched her, pressed her close to his chest, and climbed over the remains of her mother.

Years later, he was coming home. He carried a shovel-- different from that time-- a new and improved model. He also had a bag full of supplies. A map he’d made, a book he’d peeled off its shelf, a mirror he’d pried free from a skeleton (tiny fingers like grains of rice), an axe, food.

He lived in an old house with her on the outskirts of the city. It was bigger than he was comfortable with, with a lot of dark corridors, a lot of dusty rooms to clean. The toddler had helped him roll out a few of the rugs, wash the bloodstains from the floorboards. He’d washed the sheets from the unmade beds. Once, he’d opened a closet and found a cat, starved and dead for years, locked in a sleeping position.

He opened the front door, blowing the porch lantern out.

She greeted him with a little princess bow, and he returned it with his own, before sweeping her into a massive bear hug.

She said, “I watched Cinderella so many times! And I drew this, look, look! You’re not looki-- Okay so here’s you, here’s me, and here’s Cinderella. That’s the sun, that’s the water. That’s a fish. I drew it like you showed me.”

He grinned and complimented her excellent work. One day, her fish would surpass even his. He wasn’t looking forward to this day, of course, because then she would be one step closer to leaving him.

He’d read somewhere, before cell towers fell and magazine printers went out of business, that babies couldn’t distinguish between themselves and the person holding them.

This child, who loomed like a pale phantom in the night, operating in the darkest corners of the house without breaking a sweat, had felt her last heartbeats before her first birthday. Her first words were screams of panic, and so were her last. She’d inherited that terror, too. Pounding heartbeats and screaming and choking fits, spent tightly wound in the corner of the kitchen, because of a loud noise or a certain smell. It didn’t help that she could smell fear better than any beast could.

He made sandwiches and watched a new movie he’d found with her, Tangled. A long-lost princess grows up in a tower, secluded from people, the sky, and the sea her entire life. By leaving, she can finally greet this world on her own terms. She can finally deal with her earliest traumas.

He pulled his baby closer at the end, but she tore away from him, because this movie was the best one she’d ever seen and she needed to draw Rapunzel. He said fine to this, because yeah it was a great movie, and went to make them both a dessert.

Peanut butter brownies. They sat around the table, said a few made up prayers to warm up the cool night air, and began eating.

Except then, in the middle of the meal, he heard a piercing shriek from outside.

She hid under the table. He got his shotgun, and carried his shovel along. She took up her knife, just in case. Just in case.

Just in case? Why was this normal? Why was this their normal? It wasn’t fair to either of them. He deserved peace! He was old-- older than he cared to admit-- and he was so tired. She deserved to breath, and grow, and to sit through one goddamned meal without shit like this!

What must have been a rat, its body distorted by rows of round mushrooms, scurried into the room. He grabbed his shovel and slammed it down over the rat’s head. It bounced backwards, grabbing at the kitchen tile and scrabbling forward, undeterred.

He swung again, but this time his shovel cracked tile. The rat sprinted in her direction. She screamed, her face stretching in horror.

Did she know how horribly he’d failed her mother?

He screamed her name. She shrunk further into the corner, her eyes squeezed tight. The rat ran forward, its mouth foaming.

And just as it came close, she slammed her fist down as hard as she could.

Balled in her hand was the knife.

There was a moment of silence, of her looking down at the demon. Blood cascaded onto the tile-- more than should have been possible. It gasped and screamed desperately, scraping its tiny claws to try and escape, before it fell silent.

Then its stomach started expanding.

The man lurched forward, scooping the child onto his good shoulder and pulling her away just before the rat burst into an explosion of bile and spit. Yellow rocketed everywhere behind them as the man flew out of the room. She sobbed loudly into his shirt.

Hours later, he was brushing her silky golden hair, letting it fall between his fingers, taking in its smoothness. Red stained his hands from scrubbing tile. Red stained her face from tears. Does she feel his fear too?

Don’t worry, he tells her. Be brave. You’ll face bigger monsters yet.

A whine breaks out and she starts crying again.

So he says, “You know, I’ve always thought you look just like your mother when you cry.”

She quiets down, asks him how. He tells her she was beautiful when the rain fell. The water in her hair, the droplets soaking her cheeks, her shining eyes. The little girl grinned at that, and her face lost some of its redness.

It was a lie, of course. In reality, the smell of blood on her was making him sick beyond belief.