“I can’t,” Butch whispered. Vladim’s shadow fell over him.
“Can’t is for worms. Are you a worm?”
“No.”
“Then stand.”
Butch stood.
From the kitchen window, Helen watched. They were both eight, but she was small and sharp-eyed, with a braid that reached the middle of her back. She pressed her palms to the glass and counted the repetitions under her breath.
Their father did not shout all the time. Sometimes he spoke in a tone so controlled it felt more dangerous than screaming.
“You are mine,” he would tell them at the dinner table. “And I will not have mediocrity in my blood.”
There were no family photos in the house. The walls were lined instead with newspaper clippings—other people’s children, grinning with medals around their necks.
“Failures,” Vladim would mutter, stabbing at their faces. “They could have been greater.”
When Butch turned ten, Vladim brought home a locked metal case. He set it on the kitchen counter as if it were a sacred object.
“This,” he said, “is the future.”
Helen hovered near the doorway.
Vladim snapped open the latches. Inside lay rows of small vials filled with amber liquid, each labeled in his precise handwriting.
“I have perfected what others only copy,” he said. “They poison their athletes. I refine mine.” Butch swallowed.
“What is it?”
“Strength,” Vladim replied. “Obedience in liquid form.”
The injections began that night.
Vladim did not allow tears. He called tears weakness leaking from the body.
Butch bit his tongue so hard he tasted iron. Helen stared at the ceiling while the needle slid into her thigh.
“You will thank me,” Vladim said.
They did not thank him.
School became an afterthought. They attended, but only to dominate. In autumn, Butch played football and cross-country simultaneously. In winter, wrestling and swimming. In spring, baseball and track.
Helen rotated through gymnastics, tennis, basketball, volleyball—whatever the season demanded.
Vladim attended every game. He did not cheer.
When Butch scored three touchdowns in a single afternoon, Vladim leaned over the bleachers and said, “Why not four?”
When Helen stuck a flawless dismount at a gymnastics meet, he waited until they were alone to whisper, “Your toes were soft.”
He never called them by their names during training. Names were sentimental. Instead:
“Move.”
“Faster.”