Excerpt from Around the Dark Edges

What Will Happen When Mommy Finds Out?
(as children we all had little secrets we didn’t want mommy to know about...but maybe not as horrible as these)

I wonder what will happen when mommy finds out. She'll probably be mad at me like the other times and we'll have to move again. But I couldn't help it. I had to do something! In the lunchroom Bobby squirted ketchup on the new skirt mommy bought me. Then he pulled the barrette out of my hair. Then, on the bus, he kept snapping me in the back of the head with that dumb rubber band and it hurt. He was bad! So I stuck my pencil in his ear. Boy did he scream.

The school bus driver made me get off for being so bad and I had to walk the rest of the way home. A little while later Bobby's mommy called but I told her my mommy wouldn't be home from work for two more hours and my daddy was...well, he couldn't come to the phone right now. She started yelling at me and I hung up on her. Daddy would be mad. He said little girls should not be rude and should always be pleasant and sweet. But he didn't hear how she was yelling at me. The phone started ringing again and I figured it was Bobby's mommy calling back so I got a scissors and cut the phone cord. I pretended I was cutting off her tongue.

I almost forgot to let Scruffy out! (Scruffy is my watch dog. Daddy gave him to me last year when we first came to this town and he married my mommy.) I let him out finally but he took off after a rabbit before I could hook him to his chain. He was bad! He came back in a few minutes but I was so mad at him that I beat him after I chained him up. I used the hammer that daddy kept in the garage and I beat Scruffy in the head for being such a bad dog. I hit him a lot of times but it didn't seem to bother him. He just lay down and went to sleep. Lazy dog!

Maybe I'll trade him in for a cat. My first-daddy liked cats. He had lots of them, but his favorite was Bootsy. She was a gray striped cat with little white patches on her feet that looked like boots. My first-daddy loved her. But I didn't. She always hissed at me and scratched me when I tried to touch her. She was bad! So one day I trapped her in a paper bag. Bootsy loved to explore empty paper grocery sacks. She went in and I closed it up after her. Then I placed the bag in mommy’s microwave oven and turned it on "high" for 5 minutes. Then I took the hot, bloody, smelly bag out and went to throw it away, but first-daddy was standing there staring at me. He screamed and grabbed me and hit me and hit me, over and over again. He was being bad! Then he started crying and dropped to the floor and looked into the bag. He was kneeling down, sobbing, and spreading the bag open on the floor. He didn't see me take the knife out of the dirty dishes in the sink. He didn't hear me as I snuck up behind him and shoved it into the back of his neck. He just gurgled and fell across the bloody cat-bag.