Because it lands in her daddy’s leg.

The room suffocates in silence. Her hands are wrapped around his, the dog still gripped between his five fingers, trapped in a cage of flesh. She is frozen, staring directly into his eyes. She tries not to look at the needle, afraid that if she does, her insides will jump out of her throat.

Nothing in his facial expression changes. Neither before nor after being pierced—as if only a slight breeze passed between them. Without taking his eyes off her, without even a twitch beneath his skin, he grasps his other hand around the syringe and slowly pulls, creating the illusory sound of friction between steel and flesh. The silver is now blanketed in dark red. A drop slips from the steel and lands somewhere below her periphery.

Her eyes cautiously migrate and she sees only the slightest hole where the needle fell—no darkened fabric around it like the bloodied, darkened fabric surrounding the puncture wound on the stuffed blue dog. His pants look dry apart from a solitary dot a few inches up his thigh where the drop from the needle presumably landed.

She returns her stare to him, afraid that if she does not maintain eye contact, she’ll be defenseless.

Against what? She isn’t sure.

His expression is flat and lifeless, like the expression on the dog even after being repeatedly stabbed. Nothing. He opens his fist, releasing each finger in mechanical succession. The dog falls into her hands and she brings it back to her lap. It feels light and weak laid across her thighs, almost nonexistent, like its previous weight evaporated from fear. She tries to sit up straight but feels too weak. So she watches and waits.

Moments pass and he grins. His fangs shine beneath his pale lips. A dark lullaby of a voice leaks from his mouth. “I think you need a new syringe, my sweet. This one is old and”—he looks inside the glass barrel, eyeing the blood and spit—“filthy.”

She swallows but is unable to quench her throat enough to speak.

He places the syringe down on the floor and stands. She watches helplessly as he turns, snaps the lock, and leaves, the door left gaping as he does.

Left open . . .

The hairs on the back of her neck shoot up as though a thousand volts surged through her blood. Seeing the door wide, a dark tunnel leading to more darkness, and not hearing that second snap of the lock after his departure, makes her skin crawl. She is too frightened to move, paralyzed by discomfort like sludge weighing down on her skin.

If circumstances were different, she would have at least walked to the entrance, maybe even taken a few steps too close to peer into the Outside. To take a gander at the never-before-seen. Maybe seeing would put to rest her nightmares of the Outside and the creatures and their big fists and their hungry mouths . . . Maybe she wouldn’t fear the petrifying clamp of their thieving touch any longer. But she fears that if she moves, her daddy will charge back into the room, his rage trailing behind him like spikes of cold steel.