bit5-Venom

I could hear the sobbing, like a dark, pulsing undertone to the brilliant flashing red of the screaming.  It still shocked me, made my stomach turn, despite the fact that I head this cacophony almost every day.  My god, how that woman could scream!  The noise seemed to grow hideous claws that ripped fiendishly into my eardrums.  It sounded like some fool had released an angry mountain lion in the house, but I knew it wasn't the sheer ear-rending volume (however impressive) that racked her daughter's fragile body with deep, heart-wrenching sobs; It was the tone of the false (and true) accusations, fairly oozing with malice and dripping with sarcasm, a verbal venom that I could picture as a violent radiation-green liquid, flying from her lips as she spit her carefully honed words of hurt at her own child.  I even cringed from where I was curled up across the house, biting my knees and wishing for dark, calming silence to take over.