Lancing the Tail

Lancing the Tail is the pivotal scene in which Nightbitch, a stay-at-home mother, discovers a swollen lump at the base of her spine, lances it with an X-Acto knife, and reveals a tuft of hair that she can only describe as a tail—the first physical confirmation of her transformation into a dog. This act of self-surgery transforms her from a woman who joked about being a 'night bitch' into a creature whose body is literally rewriting itself, marking the moment her latent mother-rage and artistic longing become flesh.

The Discovery of the Lump

The scene unfolds in the quiet of a rare moment of peace. The house is silent and clean, the paint smudges of the day a distant memory. The boy, bathed not once but twice—a midday bath and a night-night bath, both attempts to calm him into sleep—is finally, gloriously asleep. Nightbitch inches from bed, descends the stairs, and enters the bathroom. She has bruised her tailbone in an earlier fall, or else the tag in her pants has been irritating her back. In indistinct yet nagging discomfort, she reaches toward the base of her spine. Her finger finds a swollen lump, and when she checks it in the mirror, she sees a raised mound, hot to the touch.

She presses the spot with two fingers and flinches at the pain, then twists around to examine it in the mirror. Unable to get a close enough look, she retrieves a hand mirror, which provides little enlightenment, then opts to take a picture with her phone, only to find a blurry red mass on the screen after repeated tries. She thinks she feels a hair protruding from the bump and decides tweezing it will relieve her discomfort, so she picks at it blindly for a time, only exacerbating the pain and causing the thing to begin to seep.

The Self-Surgery

Frustrated, she says "Fuck it" to no one and stomps to the closet in the guest room to retrieve a box of her old art tools. As she opens the lid, the pungent smell of paints and putties and the noxious tang of old glues calms her and immediately transports her to those long hours alone, fingers dirty and sore, every manner of clay and paint and glue splatter on her clothes. She inhales deeply, intoxicated, before steeling herself against the tears welling from a place of profound and desperate longing to return to her projects—any project—and the complete inability to do such a thing. She quickly sorts through a shallow tray to find a sharp X-Acto knife—what she has been looking for all along—then washes it at the kitchen sink and holds it above a flame on the stove. In the bathroom, she traces the tip down the red lump and feels instant relief as it oozes open. She holds a hot washcloth to the lump, pushing to drain the fluid, then dabs it with a hand towel. When she looks again, it has deflated. A flurry of hair pokes from the incision she has made. The only word she can think to describe it is tail.

The Context of Transformation

The discovery does not come out of nowhere. Days earlier, when she had referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke—because that's the sort of lady she was, a good sport, able to poke fun at herself, definitely not uptight, not wound really tight, not so freakishly tight that she couldn't see the humor in a lighthearted not-meant-as-an-insult situation—but in the days following this new naming, she found the patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck and was, like, What the fuck. She had told her husband, "I think I'm turning into a dog," when he arrived home after a week away for work. He laughed, and she didn't. She had hoped he wouldn't laugh, had hoped that when she said those words, he would tip his head to one side and ask for clarification, would take her concerns seriously. But as soon as she said the words, she saw this was impossible.

The transformation is also rooted in her rage. She had inflated with mother-rage and composed elaborate, emotional arguments against the system and capitalism and the patriarchy and then religion and gender roles and biology. Her sense that society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood—all these things—were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there had begun to weigh on her. It had crossed her mind before, but after her son arrived it took on a new shape, an unwieldy heft, and then even more after she quit her job, as her body struggled to regain its equilibrium. Once she was stripped of all she had been—her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones—an anti-feminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable.

The Meaning of the Tail

The tail is not just a physical anomaly; it is the embodiment of her suppressed self. She had made a boy with her own body, nurtured his multiplying cells for months and months to her own detriment, to her own fatness, to the decline of her youthful sex appeal, which wasn't supposed to matter. A real feminist wouldn't care about such things as the shape of one's body or being thin or appealing to heteronormative cis men, and actually she did not care about this, but she did care about being hot in her own eyes. It's just that a person has ideas about herself, has a vision for herself, and her vision for herself had not been of a mother, but now that she was one, she felt strongly that she needed to be a hot one. The tail, emerging from the base of her spine, is the opposite of that vision—it is animal, unkempt, and defiantly un-hot. Yet it is also a release, a physical manifestation of the rage and longing she has been suppressing.

The act of lancing the tail is itself a form of self-care, a return to the artistic tools she has abandoned. The X-Acto knife, the flame, the washcloth—these are the instruments of her former life as an artist, repurposed for a grotesque surgery. The smell of paints and putties and old glues calms her, intoxicates her, and the tears she steels herself against are not from pain but from a profound and desperate longing to return to her projects—any project—and the complete inability to do such a thing. In lancing the tail, she is both destroying and revealing the thing that has been growing inside her, the thing that will eventually lead her to embrace her identity as Nightbitch.

Aftermath and Significance

The immediate aftermath is anticlimactic. Her husband, upon learning of the incident, says kindly, "You need to consult with a medical professional. I can't believe you cut into the cyst. It's unsafe." His response is practical, concerned, and utterly missing the point. He sees a cyst; she sees a tail. This divergence encapsulates the chasm between them—he lives in a world of electronics and engineering, where a lump is a medical problem to be fixed, while she is beginning to live in a world where her body is speaking a language he cannot hear.

The lancing of the tail is a turning point in Nightbitch's arc. It is the first concrete, undeniable evidence that her transformation is real, not a joke or a paranoid fantasy. It connects her to a lineage of women—her own mother, who was good and responsible and holy and always somewhere far away in her own head, and her grammy, who knew how to keep bees, dip candles, brush wool, use a spinning wheel and make yarn, dry onions and garlic, develop photographs with vegetable juices, bake absolutely anything, make every single sort of braid, sing every single sort of song, track an animal through the woods. Nightbitch knows she could make a world, and then, too, make a person to live in that world, yet her husband—with his electronics skills, his engineering—is the one who makes all the money. The tail is the first step toward reclaiming that world, toward becoming the monster she wants to be.