Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

-George Eliot

Sometimes there are stories in the news about little kids who do bad things because they don't know any better. Like playing with loaded guns that go off and kill brothers, or lighting matches that accidentally set fire to a whole house.

It's not the kid's fault.

Except that it is, really, only no one wants to say it. Who else is there to blame? The kid is the one who disobeyed, the one who stole the keys and unlocked all the locks and almost let the bad thing out.

What really happened in the basement of Tana's house wasn't like any of her happy dreams where she and her mother frolicked together. After she'd gone down the stairs, a monster had attacked her, mad with hunger, teeth gnawing with such ferocity that the vein in her arm was severed, gobbets of flesh sliding down its throat.

She had shrieked and shrieked for her mother, but her mother was already there. Her mother was the monster.

When Tana woke up, she found out that it was her father who'd saved her. He'd used a shovel to hack off his wife's head. Then he'd made a tourniquet from a strip of his shirt and taken his disobedient daughter to the hospital, where doctors sewed up her arm.

No one said it was her fault. No one said they hated her. No one said it was because of her that her mother was dead.

No one had to.