Victorian Psycho

by Virginia Feito

It is apparently quite the rage now, not to slap children.

Mr Pounds waves his hand in my direction, tutting, as if his forgetting my name is somehow my blunder.

I open my mouth wide in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the Darkness within me, to spy it peeking out of me,

‘You are rather fat,’ the little master says as I dress him for our walk the following morning. ‘Because I eat rather fat children,’ I reply.

‘The servants are to turn their backs if I am not looking my best.’ This pronouncement leads to them turning on her in the middle of staircases and hallways, whipping around to face the walls, their laden trays trembling as she passes.

I spent the ensuing weeks awaiting with interest for the rabies to take hold. I hoped I would have enough time to bite another,

To this day I can’t help wondering what it is like, fear. Coursing through your blood like poison, eating away at your hopes, your ambitions, your self.

At eight thirty sharp breakfast is removed, as is my will to live.

I wonder what all the fuss with children is about. They’re only people, albeit smaller. Why care about people when they’re small if no one cares about them when they’re grown? Society has decided, in recent years, that children are precious and worthy of being spared the slightest suffering. Are they truly so deserving of mercy?

‘Children,’ I begin. ‘Can we honestly proclaim that they’re any better than their insufferable adult counterparts?’

praising his loud, snot-nosed, imbecilic son instead.

I kneel to receive his embrace, stuffing his towhead between my breasts, wondering for a fleeting instant if he could be smothered this way –

Human expressions are like hides I’ve peeled throughout life, rolled into a ball, and slipped under my skin.

Meanwhile, his three useless sisters, who are standing dully by the drawing-room doorway, look down at themselves as if searching for hitherto undiscovered penises.

BUT THE NURSE, foreseeing the loudness of the group and the irritability of her mistress, has taken the children outside, where they sniff each other’s rumps like dogs,

Alone in the nursery, I deposit the fat, important baby in a cot by the window.

It fascinates me, the fact that humans have the capacity to mortally wound one another at will, but for the most part, choose not to.

‘Good. I won’t tell you again.’ ‘You will not,’ I concur, but she’s not listening, has already left the room, leaving a haze of thyme-scented hair and high standards in her wake.

They all possess the teeth of people who haven’t been underfed and or beaten in the face with Bibles.

Women! Theatrical bitches.

(The women are not allowed to partake in such rigorous activity – the exertion might cause their wombs to drop out.)

Superstitions and portents don’t always reach the privileged, or if they do, the privileged assume the warnings don’t apply to them.

There is a collective bracing in the room, like a buttock compressing to stifle the passing of wind.

(governesses, in contrast to other servants, may expect a wedding ring in exchange for certain favours, and his testicles were in my mouth a lot).

their mouths puckering like little arse-holes

His wig slides off, the few mildewy hairs on his crown as soft and white as the feathers clinging to the eggs that are picked from the coops each morning.