His boy seemed to have an aversion to dog’s blood. He sipped a little of cow’s or pig’s blood before spitting it out. He drank up to two gulps of chicken blood, but after that he turned his head away and would take no more.
At every feeding, the man made a wound somewhere on the boy’s body where no one would see. The boy’s blood was crimson like any other child's. And he would cry, like any other child.
But the man was sure of what he had seen. When his wife had scratched the boy’s forehead, trying to pry him away from his sister, what had flowed from the wound had definitely been gold.
The man fed his son his own blood.
This time, his son lapped it up. But even then, the blood that he shed from the wound his father made on him was red. The boy cried even louder.
The man was lost in thought.
His kids were growing but business was getting worse. Ever since the fox died, he hadn’t been selling as much as he used to. The hoard he had thought would be everlasting was gone, and the man lost the ability to make measured decisions. He became anxious and would make impulsive choices, regretting his misjudgments later on, and the regret pushed him into making even more rash decisions—it was a never-ending vicious cycle.
For the sake of his household, and for the children’s future, he needed money. And since the father was working so hard, he thought, the children ought to shoulder some of the burden for the family.
When his wife wasn’t home, the man began sneaking into his children’s room whenever he could. But his wife was an attentive mother and a hardworking homemaker—there was hardly a day when she wasn’t in the house and going into the children’s rooms to take care of their needs. Especially since the two attacks by the brother on the sister, the man’s wife tried to keep the children in separate rooms, never taking her wary eyes off the daughter.
In the end, he had to sneak them to the warehouse in the dead of night when his wife was asleep. There, deep in a corner of that darkness where the fox had once been held captive, the man covered his daughter’s mouth so no one could hear her scream and offered her up to his son. Once his son had his fill, he then covered his son’s mouth so he wouldn’t scream, and he wounded his son where no one would see.
Gathering, drop by drop, the golden liquid flowing from his son’s body, the man felt peace in his heart and his hope for the future was restored.
His wife fretted over the numerous strange wounds on her children’s bodies. The man brushed off her concerns, saying that children got hurt all the time while playing. The wife said, “But still …” and glanced fearfully at the two children. The daughter always had a terrified expression on her face and trembled in the presence of others, screaming and crying whenever her father came close to her. The son had bags under his eyes, which were open wide like an animal’s, and his pupils darted this way and that as he smacked his lips.
Then one day, the wife woke up in the middle of the night to find her husband not sleeping by her side. She looked around the house for him, and when she got to the children’s room, she found that they were also gone. Frightened and half-mad, she shouted her children’s names and ran in and out of the house before hearing her daughter’s muffled screams coming from the warehouse.
The first thing she saw there was a sight beyond her immediate comprehension. On the floor of the warehouse lay her violently shaking daughter with her son gnawing and licking at the daughter’s leg. Crouching behind the son, her husband held a small plate up to the son’s body. Shocked, the wife stood paralyzed for a moment before her daughter’s frail “Mommy …” snapped her back to life.
The wife swiftly gathered her daughter in her arms. She shook off her son, who was still clinging to his sister’s leg trying to drink her blood, and made a dash for the door. She was blocked by her husband. He needed his daughter’s body if he were to get more blood from his son’s. He couldn’t let her leave with the source of his gold.
The mother of the child resisted to the best of her ability, protecting her daughter as the man lunged at her. The daughter, caught in the middle of her father and mother as they fought over her, screamed.
Tearing his daughter out of his wife’s arms, he shoved his wife away, who then lost her balance and fell backwards. The back of her head landed on the snare that years ago had held the fox captive.
The snare had jagged teeth of steel to prevent even the wildest of animals from escaping it once caught. These teeth dug into the wife’s head and neck. The blood that flowed from her pooled on the floor of the warehouse. The man’s son quickly crawled over and began hungrily guzzling up his mother’s blood.