“I’m gonna cut off your fingers one by one!”

“I’m gonna make you eat them!”

She should’ve started running toward the depot, but in that moment, there in the road not ten meters from her shack, she stopped walking. As the rocks continued to belt her back, she lifted her arms to protect her head. But it was of no use. Someone had thrown one high in the air, and as it fell from above it landed squarely upon the top of her skull. Her body went limp and collapsed to the ground, and the children around her cried out joyfully, hatefully, their disgust seething in their veins. They had gotten the butcher’s daughter, maimed her as their parents had been. An eye for an eye, just as the Deputies preached.

“Scum!”

“You ain’t wanted!”

The children crowded around her in a circle. They shouted at her, kicked rocks and dirt into her face. They pulled her long curls out from under her bonnet and stomped on her back. They thought they had won—the butcher’s daughter lay prostrate on the ground—but as their taunting let up, as they turned to walk away, Lady Mae dragged herself up out of the dust. She crawled first to her hands and knees and spat. She put her hand to her skull, the warm blood stuck between strands of hair. The children stared at her, nudged each other with their elbows and walked back, silent and wondering, toward Lady Mae.

“I ain’t afraid. You ain’t nothing to me.”

Her lips moved, and she heard her own voice as the words drifted in the still summer air. The children stopped moving and stood, hands hanging from their sides, their tiny fists clutching stones. They watched Lady Mae stand up and take a step forward, slowly, purposefully, dragging her back foot to meet her front. She took another step, and then another and another still. Closer and closer she got to the beasts, their eyes, their little bodies, their heads shifting toward one another, unsure of what to do, as though scared that they weren’t as strong as they thought. She was Lady Mae, the butcher’s daughter, after all. But what they couldn’t know is that something had unmoored inside of her, and as the hot wind blew the dust up around her, she wiped the blood from her mouth, leaving a grotesque smear that went down the edge of her chin. The children, who thought themselves safe from any punishments—safe because Lady Mae had never told the Deputies of the treatment she endured—saw a flicker in her eyes, as if a wave of electricity had suddenly swelled up from deep down. She’d felt the rush before, many times in fact, but always it seemed too dangerous to embrace. When it bubbled up, she tried to push it back down for it went against her mother’s words instilled in her so long ago. It ain’t going to change nothing, her mother had said. You’re better than that, Lady Mae, she’d said, those kids need forgiveness just like everyone else. But in that moment, Lady Mae wondered if she was any better than the savages and how hard she could throw a fist-sized rock and how much blood would pour from their small heads. They didn’t deserve forgiveness, and Lady Mae was tired of blaming her injuries on chores, the woodpile, her own clumsiness. Her mother never believed her anyway. She was tired of running, and so as she squared her body toward the small group of children, she felt her fear unravel and make its way out of her.