Please Tell Me

by Mike Omer

He didn’t look like a bad man, but sometimes bad men didn’t look like it. Kathy knew that.

Melody’s daughter Amy used to be best friends with Claire’s daughter, Kathy.

Life gave her this child that suddenly was more important than anything else in the world, and then cruelly gave the child a mind of her own.

Men shouldn’t be allowed to go shopping in the supermarket. They should be shot on sight if they walked in. Robin hated everyone.

She’d apparently seen a copious amount of blood, which was impossible to process for a little girl. This was her way of coming to terms with it. Running her hands through the red paint while she was in a safe place. She decided what she did with it, how much she poured, when and how she touched it. And then she washed it off, watching as it disappeared down the drain. The child was intuitively desensitizing herself to the violent memories.

“I don’t know if this is a serial killer or a coincidence. But whatever the case, it’s my professional opinion that Kathy Stone was witness to an actual violent crime. And she’s doing her best to convey that to me, and to process it. So it’s not just a little girl playing with plastic figures. This is not something you can ignore.”

You don’t know my mother. She can make your life hell. Just with words. These aggressive little comments. It can get petty, and vicious, and it was aimed at all of us. My sister and me, and my dad . . . we were all her enemies. And it never stopped. Never.

“It’s awful,” Claire said. “This generation of kids were the ones hurt the most by the pandemic. They’ll be carrying the remnants of it for the rest of their lives.”