The Creek Rampage

The Creek Rampage stands as the first fully unprovoked, self-directed eruption of Nightbitch's predatory nature, a night when the violence that had been building inside her broke free of all restraint and found its natural theater in the dark woods along a cold creek. It is the moment her transformation ceases to be a matter of strange urges and becomes a deliberate, almost ritualistic embrace of the kill, the night she stops being a mother and wife who happens to feel like a dog and becomes, without reservation, a creature of blood and instinct. The rampage is the clearest proof that what she needed was not medical attention, psychotherapy, or a change in attitude, but the visceral act of sinking her teeth into something living and bloody and feeling its essence drain away until it was simply a rotting and unmoving thing.

The Setting and the Approach

The rampage unfolds in the small park that runs along a small stream, a place Nightbitch usually avoids out of fear of what might happen to her there, having once happened upon a group of young men passing around a pipe and knowing that homeless men sleep on the benches. But on this night, it is the only place she wants to be. Her heart thuds as she smells all the animals and the pungent men asleep on the benches, and a giddy power surges through her as she thinks she could rip out their throats while they sleep. Overwhelmed by her strength and awash in her own violence, she wants to howl but instead creeps down the path that cuts through the woods, stepping gingerly so as not to make a sound. The cold woodland creek moves in the periphery of her consciousness, and she thinks toward its midnight chill and furtive, relentless flow, recognizing it as her kin.

The Killing of the Raccoon

The rampage proper begins when Nightbitch pushes a sound from herself she has not heard before, a long raspy growl made up of rage and breath, yearning and sorrow, a blind animal-cry toward something else and an expulsion of all that had been inside her. Beside her, from its hidden den, a raccoon answers her with its own ungodly talk, and without thought she dives headlong into the darkness at the bank, for she sees its two gleaming eyes. It has startled her, and she is furious. How dare it. She takes it in her hands and snaps its neck efficiently before it can bite her, then throws its body with a splash into the creek. She tips her head back and fills the sky with a howl as big as her entire life, and with that, is hell-bent on getting home, weeping now, as her adrenaline surges and her muscles overflow with blood and she crashes through the night.

The Slaughter on the Way Home

The killing does not end with the raccoon. By the time she reaches the place where she and the boy throw rocks into the water on sunny afternoons, the place just beyond the train tracks, and then, soon after, her very own backyard, she has slaughtered three small rodents and one helpless bunny that unluckily found themselves in her path. The rampage is thus not a single act but a sustained spree, a trail of death marking her passage through the night. In her backyard, she stretches out in the grass on her belly and smells the earth and wipes her face against the soft green fronds, her legs scratched, her arms scratched, her hands filthy and bloody. She crashes into the house and does not yell a friendly hello to alert her husband she is home, as she usually does, but instead goes straight to the bathroom and locks the door, where she strips off her sullied clothing, pulls twigs from her matted hair, and stands beneath the hottest shower she can manage, to calm herself and wash the night away.

The Meaning of the Violence

The Creek Rampage is the night that reveals what Nightbitch could not have known she needed all along: more than medical attention or psychotherapy, more than choosing happiness or adjusting her attitude, she needed to sink her sharp teeth into something living and bloody and feel its essence drain away until it was simply a rotting and unmoving thing. It is not iron deficiency or an episode, nothing wrong with her. Just one night. One night of violence was what she needed. One night to not care what anyone thought, to shit where she pleased, to not be needed by any living thing, and to be only a body in motion in the dark, a shadow, a ghost of herself, who listened only to the mandates of her body. Exhausted, she curls in the grass to sleep, the rampage complete and her need satisfied.

The Rampage as Prologue

The Creek Rampage is the first full expression of the predatory violence that will come to define Nightbitch's later performances, establishing the pattern of killing that recurs throughout the novel. The same ecstatic shaking of a creature until it hangs limp, the same blood smeared across her face, the same animal curiosity in examining the dead body, all appear again in the killing of the cat in the kitchen, where she plunges a knife into the cat's chest, jerks it through the soft girth of its belly, and shakes the body back and forth until a sharp snap and the body relaxes into ultimate resignation. The rampage also foreshadows the staged performances of her final act, where she stalks bunnies on a wooden stage, takes a creature in her mouth and shakes and shakes it until it hangs limp, and where the audience, transfixed and horrified, watches her devour a steak laid out for her with blood smeared over her face. The Creek Rampage is thus the raw, unmediated origin of the violence that will later be refined into art, the night when Nightbitch first discovers that the kill is not a loss of herself but the fullest expression of who she truly is.