Slaughter, she thought, is a formal and disciplined word. A processing for victual consumption. The splaying limbs and the horror, the scenes of crimes and battlefields, the flinging of children and catching them on bayonets just out of their mother’s reach, all that is metaphor, simile—the thing, in fact, which is not.

 

Tweezer Painton was a burly ten-year-old with a glower built into his square mug. His name came from his hobby of grabbing individual hairs on his victims’ heads and yanking them out for fun. Mostly he did it with his thick, grubby fingers but sometimes he used tweezers stolen from his mother’s bathroom cabinet.