The day I was to marry my father arrived. I had not seen him in more than fifteen years, but the consensus seemed to be I was lucky he would have me. I had been trying to escape him for more than fifteen years, but here was my torso bound within a white dress within an ornate room. My girlfriends had sat me and were tapping my face with puffs. They raked back my black hair. Out the window the grounds rolled with ferns, redwood trees, and juvenile grasses. So much money had been spread. The guests clustered around the fountain of champagne, scooping into it for refills and chipping their glasses. They ate Pâté grandmère, iced with bone marrow, on crackers made from seeds. Who was I to ruin it?

A silk garter glided up my leg, and it stopped me. I could not. I couldn't think of his hands slipping it off. Now-now, my friends said and kept clowning my face with color sticks, netting my hair with tacky spray. One friend in the corner on a green velvet chaise, my very best friend in a green velvet dress and a forlorn face, she was watching me like I was a corpse headed for a casket.

I stood up, and they stumbled over. All but my best friend were beetles on their backs. I whorled through them to the staircase and followed the curving banister down to the front door. Outside with the guests someone would explain how this could be happening. Tilted against one of the nearest tall tables was my dad, a neat scotch in his hand, chatting with the family realtor. The skin covering my betrothed's face was that of a glacier melting, and sun had scorched the hair off the summit of his head. His eyes said, Sorry, there's nothing more lethal than the years.

We can't do this, I said to him.

He said, Kara, you remember Mr. Moore?

I said, Yes, hello Sam.

Sam said, You look just beautiful, Kara, stunning really.

My old dad said, We have to do what we have to do.

I hadn't received advice from him in more than fifteen years.

He was right though, so I took the boning knife from our tax accountant who was slicing into the spit pig, and shoved it inside my father's stomach. I twisted it back and forth, unlocking his spine, while his blood spilled forth. Suddenly everyone around us was screaming and running, a world in motion but for the plates and the tables and the raccoon who was hiding beneath one. My dad fell onto his side and drained into the forest floor, and I ran in my layers of white dress down a dirt road, out of the shadows of the trees, along a naked, forever highway, and back at last to the concrete of the city where the men were my age and my mother was dead, thank god. My brother, who was smarter than me, had stabbed her to death years ago.

.