The First Kill

The First Kill is the pivotal nocturnal scene in which Nightbitch, having fully surrendered to her canine transformation, hunts and kills a rabbit with her bare teeth, burying the carcass in the backyard as a treasured prize. It marks the moment her self-deprecating joke about being a "night bitch" becomes literal reality, and the moment she discovers that what she needed all along was not therapy or positive thinking but the visceral act of sinking her teeth into something living and bloody. The kill transforms her from a mother who merely plays at being a dog into a predator who has crossed an irrevocable threshold, and it establishes the pattern of violence, burial, and animal satisfaction that will define her subsequent actions.

The Road to the Hunt

The First Kill does not emerge from nowhere; it is the culmination of a slow, inexorable transformation that began with a joke. When she had first referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke, the sort of lighthearted self-mockery expected of a good sport, a lady who could poke fun at herself and was definitely not uptight. But in the days following that naming, she found a patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck and was, like, What the fuck. She told her husband when he arrived home after a week away for work that she thought she was turning into a dog; he laughed, and she did not. She had hoped he would tip his head to one side and ask for clarification, that he would take her concerns seriously, but as soon as she said the words she saw this was impossible.

The transformation was not merely physical but psychological, rooted in a profound disillusionment with the structures of her life. Her sense that society, adulthood, marriage, and motherhood were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there had begun to weigh on her, taking on a new and unwieldy heft after her son arrived and growing even heavier after she quit her job, as her body struggled to regain its equilibrium. Stripped of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, and her familiar hormones, an anti-feminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable. She 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. The whole fucking thing was a sham, the working and pumping and hurrying and not holding her baby.

The Stalk and the Kill

That night, she charted her path by keeping to the shadows, moving through back lawns and along fence lines, avoiding the pools of light cast by streetlamps. She trampled the carefully planted petunias along the house of her across-the-street neighbor, a man named Stanley who voted Republican and would never loan out a tool from his sizable collection, would barely say hello when she passed, and would not abide for even a moment her son walking on his grass. His fucking grass, she thought as she crouched by the side of his house and took a monstrous shit, clawing at the grass beside the pile and ripping up clods of turf, then kicking fresh grass seed onto the sidewalk. She made her way to the tunnel that passed beneath the train tracks, and then the small park that ran along a small stream, a place she usually avoided because she was afraid of what might happen to her there, but tonight it was the only place she wanted to be. Her heart thudded as she smelled all the animals, smelled the pungent men asleep on the benches, and a giddy power surged through her as she thought she could rip out their throats while they sleep.

Within the moonlight, she could see the life of the night not normally available to her senses: bugs crawling on leaves, a bird startling high up in a tree, a snake pushing its way toward a mouse beneath the grasses and old leaves. The whole of the night clicked and purred about her, the moonlight itself seeming to vibrate and bring to life each and every thing. She froze beyond stillness when she glimpsed the rabbit by a cottonwood tree. The hair on the back of her neck rose, and she bared her teeth. She lifted one arm and set it down, then raised the other, her movements becoming almost mechanical, slow and measured, meaning to be a shadow that folded and fluttered through tricks of light. The rabbit twitched its nose, an ear, then sprang toward the darkness. Each muscle in her body tightened and then exploded with movement. She surged after the animal, crashed into the bushes and ripped through weeds, to trap its hind leg before it could disappear into a copse of briars.

She clamped her teeth around its neck, and the small animal breathed inside her mouth. She slung it violently back and forth, her eyes blazing, and threw it to the ground to see if it would move, then picked it back up and shook it again. The musk of its fear, the warmth of its blood, the give of its skull as she crushed it between her teeth. She carried the dead animal in her mouth back through the night, through the neighborhood, until she was behind her house, in the farthest corner of the lawn, digging a shallow hole in which to bury the creature, her treasure, her prize.

The Aftermath and the Revelation

Afterward, she paced the lawn, her senses fully animal. She smelled the spot where her son had lain in the grass earlier that day, and the path he had walked from door to lawn, the places where his hands had touched the blue ball still at the side of the driveway. She smelled the dirt and the car tires, the back steps where the cat liked to sit in the sun, and then the path the cat took to the patio and through the lawn, following the smell to her spot beneath the crab-apple tree. Beneath the tree she smelled the crab apples and all the phantom scents of chipmunks and squirrels and birds. She lay down and rolled in the grass to collect the smells in her fur and moaned with the joy of it, then proceeded to the compost bin and the little rock garden where she liked to plant spring flowers, and there was her smell, her human smell, which she knew immediately. Exhausted, she curled in the grass to sleep.

The kill brought with it a devastating clarity. She could not have known that what she had needed all along, more than medical attention or psychotherapy, more than choosing happiness or adjusting her attitude, was 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. Not iron deficiency or episode, nothing wrong with her. Just 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.

The Kill as Transformation

The First Kill is the moment Nightbitch fully becomes what she has been becoming. Earlier, she had liked the idea of being a dog because she could bark and snarl and not have to justify it, could run free if she wanted, could be a body and instinct and urge, hunger and rage, thirst and fear, nothing more, reverting to a pure, throbbing state. She had had that freedom when she gave birth, had screamed and shat and sworn and would have killed had she needed to, her husband nearly passing out from the noises coming from her mouth, which he called noises. But the rabbit hunt is the first time she actually kills, the first time the fantasy of pure animal being becomes a bloody reality. The kill is also a kind of homecoming to skills she had forgotten she possessed, skills gathered during her quiet Appalachian upbringing, where she had learned to track an animal through the woods, to know her cardinal directions, to tell a fast pony from a slow one just from the look of its face. She knew enough to live inside an entire life all on her own, and yet her husband, with his electronics skills and his engineering, was the one who made all the money, even though she could make a world, and then, too, make a person to live in that world.

The kill also prefigures the violence to come. The same animal instinct that drove her to crush the rabbit's skull will later drive her to plunge a knife into the cat's chest, to jerk the blade through the soft girth of its belly, to wrap her teeth around the nape of its neck and shake the body back and forth until a sharp snap and the body relaxed into ultimate resignation. The First Kill establishes the pattern: the stalk, the surge, the kill, the burial, the satisfaction. It is the first proof that the transformation is not a metaphor or a phase but a fundamental reordering of her being, and that the answer to her rage was never to be found in the world of ambition and money and careers, but in the wildness of her deepest dreams, of her corporeal yearning. The rabbit buried in the farthest corner of the lawn is her first treasure, her first prize, the first offering to the animal she has become.