Chapter One--Violet

            I’m just one letter short of violent. My name is Violet, and somewhere between the “e” and “t” at the end of my name, there’s silent, invisible “n.” One tiny letter. Yep. I’m one harmless letter shy of scalping a baby or giving a granny a decisive stab with a rusting Exacto knife. I’ve opted for anger that’s a little less gruesome, but dangerous, nonetheless.

            My smile is deadly—stretched from cheek to cheek until my jolly face aches. The shard of glass in my eye passes for a sparkle, but don’t be fooled. I’ve developed fangs that are funny and clownish claws. My antics are larger than my life. My laughs border on maniacal. They are frantic, forced and foolish. But I’m shrinking. I’m a shrinking Violet and I started my descent into the life of an angry court jester one rainy afternoon when I was thirteen.

            Can’t say much more than that. There are jokes to be old, pranks to pull, cuts to be made. Ta ta for now.

            Chapter Two—Gloria, Violet’s mother

            My sister Ruthie used to believe everything I told her. Once I had her convinced that she was adopted. The task wasn’t all that hard to accomplish. She didn’t look like any of us—freckling, carrot-topped Ruth. And she was a gullible seven to my mature eleven. She sobbed and sobbed until her face was puffy and red, but I wasn’t moved enough to tell her I was just funning her. Our mother couldn’t believe I would do such an awful thing to her sweet , freckled baby, and she made sure I’d think twice before I decided to do something that cruel to Ruth again.

            “You don’t know when to quit, do you, Gloria?” she asked me. “You just don’t know when to quit.”

            Then she motioned for me to assume the position across the back of the couch, so Dads could restore order with several rapid-fire cracks to my big sister butt while little sister watched. It hurt, but not enough to stop me from torturing my ugly little sister whenever I could.

 Sometimes, just looking at her made me mad. She was uglier with each day that passed, but managed to elicit comments of adoration wherever she went. Ruthie was “carrot top” and “Campbell Soup Kid.” And Dads called her “Red,” which made me want to pinch her. How could someone so damned homely get the kind of devotion that brat enjoyed?

            I was cruel to her, and Mother and Dads punished me each and every time I was caught. Once, before the adoption incident, when Ruthie was only five, I talked her into sticking a dried kidney bean up her right nostril.

            “Ruthie, I’m telling you, it will come right out your ear,” I said. “It will. There’s a little tunnel that runs from the back of your nose to your ear. Do it, Ruth. Try it.”

            She crammed the bean up as far into her nose as she could before panic set in. She started crying and Dads stopped the car, prepared take off his belt and whack me at the side of the road. We were on our way to a picnic with Auntie Maude and Uncle Fox and we were late as it was.

            “Jesus Christ!” Dads bellowed. “What have you done, now, Gloria Jean?”

            Naturally, Dads and Mother assumed I was behind each and every tear my sister shed. He pulled the car to the side of the road. Mother had yanked little Ruthie into the front seat while Dads glared at me. Ruthie was howling and screeching and blubbering.

            “Bean…sister…in my nose!”

            In no time at all, Mother had her forefinger buried up to the knuckle into Ruthie’s tiny nose, in search of the wayward bean. Dads held Ruthie’s feet as Mother performed the ad hoc procedure. Ruthie’s little black and white saddle shoes flailed in the air, and in her frantic attempt to escape Mother’s sharp, manicured nails, she kicked Dads right in the jaw.

            “Holy shit!” howled Dads. He was turning red, then white.

            Thirty minutes later, we were at Dr. Fisk’s front door. He’d just sat down with his family to what smelled like roast pork and gravy, when we were ushered into his parlor, where he used a long, threatening-looking metal device to remove the offending bean from my sister’s nose. Then he stitched up Dads’ lip. Mother drove us home while Ruthie cried and hollered the whole way because we’d missed the picnic.

            “Well, stupid,” I hissed. “Next time, don’t shove a bean up your nose!”

            She wailed even louder. Mother took a sniffling Ruthie upstairs for a nap, and Dads escorted me straight to the sofa for a refresher course on how big sisters should behave.

            If I’d been a better sister to her, my ugly little Ruthie would have believed me years later, when I came to her with a truth she really did need to hear and believe: her darling son, her golden boy, violated my Violet. She was thirteen to his seventeen. I didn’t figure the whole thing out until a few years later, when my husband, Skip, came bounding into our bedroom demanding to know why our daughter had a skull and cross bones tattooed directly between her hips, right above her bikini line.

            As if seated on her panty line, a bikini perch, a sinister head leered out with a stretching and mocking grin at us. He kept sentry upon the flattest part of her underbelly.