Love Story

"Trying to Tell Me How to Feel"

Of course, it didn't take long for the town to realize what had happened. The sound of gunfire punctuated by Juliet's desperate shrieks would have roused even the most complacent neighbors. When the police arrived to find Mean Old Man Summers dead on his porch with his face turned to bloody soup by his own rifle, and a chunk of his shoulder ripped out, they could have guessed pretty quickly what had happened, even if the infamous "Summers freak" hadn't been crying over him with blood still dripping from her mouth. Juliet, who had no understanding of normal life at all, let alone how to deal with the police, told them everything that had happened with perhaps more truthfulness than she should have: about Romeo, about her father trying to shoot him, about how she had tried to stop him and he had shot himself falling over onto her. The one thing she could not explain was why she had instinctually bitten her father. Why would she? It didn't even make sense to her.

However, the police were able to figure it out soon enough and I'm sorry to say that Juliet was not spared from what they discovered. A quick look at the autopsy for Juliet's dead mother, and a talk with the last carer she'd had at 13, revealed a disturbing pattern.

To begin with, Juliet's mother had not just died in childbirth. The baby, being already unnaturally large, was very nearly strangled to death by her own umbilical cord while leaving the womb. But unlike other babies of whom this was true, Juliet had been blessed with a weapon that enabled her to escape -- gruesomely -- from premature death. She had developed a precocious set of natal teeth, and so had chewed herself free of the cord, her mother's own flesh and blood becoming both her first meal and her last memory of safety. Mrs. Summers had, of course, died of internal bleeding after this, and Juliet had gone home to a father who would never be able to look at his child without his first memory of her being his wife's blood smeared over her deformed infant face.

Similarly, when Juliet was 13, her final carer had discovered to her horror that, as she was chastising the girl, Juliet had grown oddly distracted by the finger her carer was in the process of shaking at her. After only a minute, the young Juliet had seized the finger and put it in her mouth, an act which would have been oddly childlike for a girl of 13 on its own. But then Juliet bit down. Needless to say, after that, Old Man Summers found himself short of someone to look after his daughter (to say nothing of a large sum of money), and the carer had found herself short a finger. In short, though Juliet had likely repressed or forgotten the fact, it was nevertheless true that she had been born a cannibal.

Somehow, in view of this, the police never got around to prosecuting Juliet for anything. Instead, an unofficial plea bargain was struck between the District Attorney and Old Man Summers' surviving lawyer that so long as the poor, malformed creature were put in an asylum where (let's be honest) she belonged, there would be no need to drag the whole affair out and embarrass the Summers name any further. As for Juliet's father's surviving estate, it would be put in a trust in the unlikely event that his daughter was ever sane enough to see the outside world again.

Juliet, of course, was not consulted, and nor did she protest. She was used to enduring what those more powerful than her decreed without complaint. It made no difference to her where she lived, or even if she lived, after the horror of being partially responsible for her father's death. To the outside world, she appeared practically catatonic in the first years following this trauma. She made no sounds, even when an orderly from the asylum forced his way into her room one night and was only barely stopped by his compatriots before forcing his way into her. She took instruction and orders without question, and only occasionally shuffled listlessly about on her precarious braced legs. The men and women charged with caring for her sometimes wondered if she was thinking at all, or merely acting on rote animal instinct. What few doctors who tried to reach her came away frustrated and confused: this abused and twisted wreck of a girl clearly needed help, but how could they give it when her blank affect was such an impenetrable wall?