What Little Girls Are Made Of

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned

"It was a long time ago. And I wasn't very good at being--"

"I was a kid! Christ, I was—"

"—Old enough to know better!—" I held up my hand when started to protest. "I know, I know..." I took a deep breath. "It's—it's water under the bridge anyhow."

Her eyes sighed. How did we get back to this swamp of a stalemate? they seemed to ask. I let it go.

"Look, that's not what I came here to talk about anyway. Sadly related to it, but..." Veronica looked at me with a combination of hurt, expectation and condescending patience that rankled. "Actually, no. Now's not the best time." I was starting to feel kind of bitchy, and I didn't want to be angry when she found out what I had to say. That wouldn't be fair.

"It's never the right time for you, is it? For me to tell you things? For you to hear me, believe me, say anything to me? Like maybe YOU'RE FUCKING SORRY?!" She was absolutely screeching when she finished. I didn't turn around as I walked away. She was right, after all.

I paused before leaving her unruly garden, reconsidering. Maybe it was the right time after all. "She's gone now, Veronica."

Her silence was filled with confusion. I thought briefly how uncanny it was that I always understood her silences more than her words.

"Toni's dead. She died in McCarton prison's infirmary last night." I paused again, knowing that she didn't understand my own silences at all. "Your mo... She's gone, Ronnie. You're safe now."

I couldn't think of anything else to say, but before I could open the gate to leave, there was a terrific crash that drove me to my knees. I thought the propane for the grill had somehow exploded until I saw drops of blood quickly pooling on the tasteful walking stones. Chunks of thick terra cotta pottery lay all around me.

As I came to the shocked conclusion that Veronica had just cracked one of her heavy flower pots into my head, she kicked me viciously. "That's ALL? That's all I GET?! After all she put me through--all you let her put me through?! All I get is the nickname she gave me?!" Veronic screamed.

I heard, but couldn't focus. The toe of her office shoe had contacted directly with my anus, and an unexplainable pain slowly spread into my bowels and hips. I had time to think it was almost humorous that every man knows what a solid whack in the walnuts feels like, but no one ever tells us what it's like to get shoed directly in the asshole!

"She was my stepmother. She was your wife, but I'm your daughter, Daddy! I told you—I told you what I she had been doing...AND YOU NEVER BELIEVED ME!!"

Her closed hand fell out of the sky like a tiny avenging angel. The last thing I heard before her fist caught me just above the ear: "I wanted to kill her MYSELF!"

She probably broke her hand doing that, I thought. Then darkness.

When I woke up the hospital, I discovered I had a fractured skull, an orbital bone broken in two places, that I had been in a coma for four days, and that my daughter was a national headline and a fugitive.

'RAGIN' RONNIE RANKIN SLAYS SECOND STEPMOM!

If she sees that name in the headline, stepmoms aren't going to be the only ones in danger, I thought before drifting back into the blackness.