Tipping the Scales

Tipping the Scales, Chapter 14

It was Melanie's shift. As always, she picked up the untouched pitcher, replacing it with a fresh one.

"MELANIE, WHY THE HELL ARE WE HAVING PIZZA FOR THE THIRD NIGHT IN A ROW?" Jackson yelled from the living room.

"I'M SORRY!" she yelled back. "WE'LL GET CHINESE TOMORROW! I PROMISE!"

"He's complaining about the monotony of his diet?" Odelia asked. "And you're apologizing to him for it? Considering what the two of you are doing to me, that's..." She fumbled for a word brutal enough to cover the offense and while she was fumbling, Melanie left.

That Jackson and his wife were inconsiderate and insensitive she had long ago accepted as a given, but since her transformation, every aspect of their treatment of her had gone far beyond their standard level of callous cruelty.

Hell... It was criminal.

For the first time, Odelia wondered if her metamorphosis hadn't also broken them in some fundamental way, maiming them every bit as severely as it had her. On the other hand... it was also possible they had always been capable of outright sadism and this situation simply brought it out.

A long time ago she had read an account of the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda. It was the memoir of a perfectly ordinary man, a man who had never been in trouble with the law, who had never been anything but cordial with his neighbors until the uprising, and that man was describing how easy it had been to kill those same neighbors. The machete he'd used was the one he routinely employed to cut up chickens and even the motion of his arm was the same. Butchering fellow human beings hadn't even felt like a break in routine for that perfectly ordinary, amiable, conventional citizen. According to him, he was the same man before, the same man during, and the same man after.

And he was anything but alone. In the space of a single month, one seventh of Rwanda's population had been murdered, most of them laboriously hacked to death by their hitherto perfectly pleasant neighbors.

And Rwanda itself was anything but alone. History was little more than a numbing recital of proof that a significant portion of humanity, perhaps even the majority, was capable of monstrous inhumanity if given the permission of circumstance.

Seen in this light, Jackson's and Melanie's behavior didn't seem extraordinary at all. They weren't the best of people even in the most ordinary of times, so of course they were being monstrous now.

If anything, she was lucky they weren't treating her much, much worse.

Odelia shivered. However inviolate her soul remained, her body was alien. Would any court of law still consider her a member of the species she'd been born into? Would public opinion? If she could be sure of other people's reactions to her new self, sure of getting help instead of its opposite, like the black-ops agents Melanie never tired of scaring her with, she would poop out a phone and call 911.

But she didn't. In all likelihood, her brother and sister-in-law were no more alone than that Rwandan everyman had been.

Constant hunger often made thought inconveniently difficult. What a pity this wasn't one of those times. Some things she'd be happier not understanding.

'The Bank Dick' starring W.C. Fields was scheduled to be TCM's eight o'clock movie. Something sure to take her out of herself for a while, thank God.

But before it started, she needed to add her secret ingredient to the shake. She produced the kiss, held it out... and found herself hesitating. It took effort to make her fingers unclench and drop it in. A foul little nugget of filth, she reminded herself. Not a delicious dollop of chocolate. Not at all. The entire mixture was now tainted and if she drank it she might as well be devouring a lump of her own ass.