Hex Life

by Rachel Deering

  Which, let’s be real honest …

  Pammy collapsed into a squat, her fingers plunging into her hair and knocking the Stetson aside. She shredded her perfect coif, the locks coiling around her in a halo of weird, twisted corkscrews that jutted out at all angles. When she drew blood, and that’s what was going to happen with those Freddy Krueger nails of hers, it was along her brow. The skin split wide and a stream of viscous blood flowed, coursing over her lashes to drip down her nose and onto her t-shirt.

  Took Audrey a few seconds to realize the blood was lumpy, and that the lumps were moving. Didn’t take long for the new flies to shake off their li’l wings and join their less sanguinated brethren circling Pammy’s head.

  Oh, that’s nasty.

  The other parents scampered outside with terrified yelps. Donna Charlotte held out an arm near the door to keep as many folks back as she could. Some poor emergency operator had to listen to her squawking that Pamela Washington had flies busting out of her face and could they get out there lickety split? Three times she had to repeat herself, finally ending on, “Yes, I’m serious. There are flies. Coming. From. Her. Face. Holes. Take the cotton out of your ears and listen to me!”

  The thing inside Audrey purred like a big, satisfied cat. It liked the hell it was raising. It wanted more. It took all of Audrey’s composure not to let it loose to claw its way through Pammy and anyone else stupid enough to stick close. They thought they were fine twenty feet back? They needed miles, at least, and even then, that wasn’t a guarantee.

  It was big, it was powerful, and it was mean.

  Run. Run little flies. Run.

  Audrey abandoned her back-row seat to approach the bloody, terrified woman swinging her miniature gavel at the dozen or so flies buzzing around her head. Every few seconds another crawled its way out of the wound, stretching the ragged edges of her cut so they flayed open just a bit wider.

  She crouched in front of her and kept her voice real low. “I want to talk about Tuck and Colton, Pammy.”

  Pammy looked incredulous. “Right now? You’re serious?”

  “Tuck’s waited long enough and you know it.”

  Pammy’s enraged shriek could have busted ears. She brought the gavel around, aiming for Audrey’s head to give her a thwack. Audrey couldn’t tell if it was fury at Audrey’s audacious timing, or if she’d figured out that Audrey had witched her good. No matter either way. Audrey caught her wrist easy enough and held it, peering at her a long while. Tiny shapes ran all over Pammy’s face beneath the skin, skittering around in a frenzy as they searched for the nearest exit.

  The widening forehead cut. The ear. The nostrils. The corner of her mouth.

  “It’s gotta stop,” Audrey said, her voice low. “If Colton touches him again, that’s it. You hear me? That’s it.”

  Pammy looked like she was working herself up into a fine bellow, but then her eye pulsed. She froze, blinking fast over and over and letting loose with a low, animalistic groan. A tiny shape worked its way up under her cheek. It skittered along the bone before dashing toward the finely carved line of her plastic nose. The tiny space between her socket and eyeball widened. Another fly wriggled its way out, presenting to the world with a rude splash of tears and blood.

  “N-no. Nooooo,” she whimpered, whipping her head back and forth. The flies scattered only until she stilled, descending once again to their rightful place. They were the buzzing, carapaced crown for the queen of the PTO.

  “It’s gotta stop. Now.” Audrey squeezed Pammy’s wrist to punctuate it. “Stop and I’ll never bother you again. Your peace is my peace. You hear?”

  Pammy shook so hard she couldn’t talk, but she managed a nod, as desperate and scared and frustrated as Audrey was every time Tuck bled. Audrey’s free hand cupped Pammy’s chin. She forced her to look up, so they were nose to nose. Seeing all the bad Audrey sank into those squares looking back at her, seeing the pain and terror there, the thing inside Audrey quieted. It was still there, still ready if she needed it, but it was sated, too.

  It seemed a beast born in fear only knew how to gorge on fear.

  “You’ll end it?” Audrey demanded.

  Pammy swallowed hard, coughing again and spitting out yet another fly. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll end it.”

  “I got your word?”

  “You do. My word. Colton’ll leave off. Promise.”

  Audrey didn’t know if she meant it. She could hope she did, but only time would tell. At least she had what she needed, for now. She leaned in to press a soft kiss to Pammy’s forehead, right above the cut bubbling with blood and flies. “Alright. I’ll be watching. Don’t let me down, y’hear?”

  “I won’t,” Pammy croaked.

  Audrey grinned as Pammy’s halo of flies scattered to library parts unknown. “Bless your heart, Pammy Washington. Bless your damned heart.”

  THE DEBT

  Ania Ahlborn

  The earth was soft; lush with a blanket of moss so verdant, Karolin had never before set eyes on green so fresh and alive. The color was the first thing to stand out among the features of the forest. It didn’t matter that the sky was overcast. Even without sunshine, that green was electric, almost glowing of its own accord. But the way the ground gave beneath her feet was what surprised her the most.

  It feels as though I could sink, she thought, sink through the ground and into the deep below.

  The forest smelled of soil and that morning’s rain. She’d been woken only an hour before by a hand upon her shoulder, her father standing above a bed that wasn’t hers in a house she’d never visited before. Karolin found it strange that the house had been empty when they arrived, nothing but old furniture and the scent of mothballs. Two layovers, an international flight, and an additional three hours of driving toward the border of Belarus, and somehow it hadn’t been enough of an effort for her grandmother Sylvia to be home when they had finally pulled up to her dad’s childhood home. But her father, Greg, had never spoken much about his mother, and this was Karolin’s first visit to Poland. She was only eleven, but she was smart enough to know that the relationship between her dad and grandma was complicated; complicated like the relationships on all of those Lifetime TV specials Karolin’s mother had once liked so much.

  The dewy forest floor invited sterling-colored worms to wriggle their fat bodies across moss and dirt. Perhaps, had Karolin been a year or two older and only slightly less averse to all things girlie, she would have been disgusted by those slithery invertebrates. But she was still a kid, as her mom had reminded her on the eve of her most recent birthday, and had anyone asked Karolin to name her top three annoyances, they would have been (in no particular order): the color pink, Disney princesses, and anything that didn’t involve her red Converse All Stars—a gift she’d received from her father; a little inside joke just between them. As a matter of fact, Karolin had only worn a dress once in her relatively short life. She’d put it on so that her mom could finally see just how pretty she looked in it. Having dragged the ill-fitting thing out of her closet, she’d pulled it over her head in a fit of tears. But her effort had been in vain, because when Karolin leaned over her mother’s casket, Mama hadn’t opened her eyes. She had simply lain there, a waxen cadaver.

  Everyone remembered the day their mother died, but Karolin’s recollection would always be extra vivid. Because, just hours before the accident, a room full of friends had sung Happy Birthday over a cake Mom had made herself—a semi-lopsided astronomy-themed confection covered in icing so dark it had stained everyone’s mouths a deep, zombie blue. That afternoon, Karolin and her parents had gone to the nature preserve, where she had put her new binoculars to the test and spotted a red-footed falcon—one of the rarest birds in her home state of Massachusetts. And that evening, just before sitting down to watch Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—a movie Karolin had been asking for since it had come out in theaters and had finally received as one of her birthday gifts—Mom had realized they were out of ice cream. When asked
what flavor she wanted, Karolin had replied rocky road without so much as a beat of hesitation. But now, nearly a year after the accident, she had spent hours thinking about what could have been had she decided that ice cream hadn’t been necessary. She hadn’t eaten ice cream, let alone rocky road, since. And she wasn’t the only one who had changed. Almost a whole year without Mom, and Dad had gotten weirder with each passing day.

  Stepping onto a mossy patch of ground, Karolin’s foot dipped down into the earth. She crouched and pulled the moss away, and it came up like an old shag rug. If one had the time, Karolin bet you could roll up the entire forest floor like a giant carpet. And there, beneath the moss at the base of an old oak, were what she and her father were pursuing. Beautiful, golden, fluted chanterelles; like drops of sunshine hidden underground. Chanterelles for Grandma, despite her absence; despite the fact she hadn’t greeted them hello.

  But why didn’t she come home last night? Karolin had asked her father as they had driven a tiny Fiat toward their destination that morning. Isn’t she excited to see us? Dad hadn’t responded to Karolin’s inquiry. Not surprising, since her father had been less talkative as the days had gone by. The man who had once been charming and funny and had taken every opportunity to make his only child laugh, was now a distant shell of who he’d once been. And while Karolin understood that he was hurting after Mom died, it still hurt her to be treated like a stranger; like a burden he had to deal with because he was obligated, not because he wanted to.

  But Karolin was trying to put those hurts behind her, hopeful that the reason her dad had suddenly been so eager to take her to the country of his birth was because he wanted to rekindle the warmth they had lost. After Dad had told her about their upcoming trip, she’d spent weeks Googling random facts and trivia about a country she’d only vaguely heard about while growing up.

  Did you know, she had asked during their flight from New York City to Warsaw, that Poland is home to the largest castle in the world? Did you know, Dad, that the forest outside Grandma’s town is the last place European bison live?

  That town was Hajnówka, and the primeval Białowieża Forest was where Karolin stood now, with moss pulled up and an outcropping of bright yellow mushrooms smiling up at her from their emerald home.

  “Dad!” Karolin looked up from where she was crouched, the old wicker basket her father had pulled from a random closet set next to her dirty sneakers. That basket was mostly empty, nothing but a small paring knife resting at its bottom. But when she pulled her gaze away from the ground to look around her, her dad was nowhere to be seen.

  The spike of adrenaline was immediate. It zipped through her veins, and within what felt like a nanosecond, Karolin’s heart pounded hard against her ribs. Ba-dum, like a mallet hitting a bass drum. She shot upward from her crouch despite feeling weak in the knees.

  “Dad?!” She spun around, seeking out her father, suddenly face to face with the reality of where she was. Deep in the forest of her father’s youth, a place she had visited hundreds of times through a single, dark fairy tale. It was a story about a boy and a witch and a house perched atop impossibly tall, crooked stilts.

  That tale had been good fun when it had been told in the comfort and safety of Karolin’s bedroom, especially since the protagonist had always been a boy, not a girl like her. But now, as she stood there, pivoting upon the soles of her sneakers like a music-box ballerina, one detail washed over her in a rush, a detail that had been nothing but a joke until now. She was wearing the shoes her father had given her as a gift—red All Stars; a wink to the dark story that had bonded them together. Back then, Karolin had laughed as she had pulled the sneakers onto her feet, imagining that they were the same shoes the boy had worn while running as fast as he could over fallen logs and snarled roots. But now, the sight of them made her want to vomit. What had once been a comforting gift suddenly felt downright ominous. But it wasn’t just the shoes. It was everything. Especially those mushrooms. Especially those.

  Karolin knew a little about a lot of different things—some common, some far more niche. She knew how to build a fire out of wet wood, how to build a shelter out of branches she found on the ground, and what foraged items could be consumed. Her father had taught her all those things, determined to teach her how to survive out on her own, as though he knew it would come to this. As though he’d foreseen this very moment—his daughter lost in the woods. And Karolin had never minded the lessons. Rather than resisting her dad’s teachings, she eagerly absorbed the information. It was why she knew about moss and berries and the fact that most insects were safe to eat, or how to make a tea from spruce needles and bark. But one lesson stood out in her mind as she stared at the chanterelles next to her feet.

  If you didn’t bury the dead deep enough, they’d sprout mushrooms called corpse finders. Those once sunny-looking chanterelles now struck her as well-disguised harbingers; the Grim Reaper trading in his black robe for a brightly colored three-piece suit.

  There are bodies out here, she thought. In these woods, dead girls feed the trees.

  The thought of it turned her stomach, turned it just as she was turning now, round and round until she stopped mid-spin.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered, her eyes growing wide as realization dawned. Because she’d just broken her father’s first two cardinal rules of wilderness survival.

  One: Keep your head on, don’t panic.

  And two: Whatever you do, do not lose track of the direction you came from. It’s the direction you need to find your way back.

  “Oh, no!” The forest went watercolor wavy from behind her tears. “Dad!” She just about screamed it. Surely, he couldn’t have gone far. They had ventured out in different directions, sure, but had always stayed within visual range, and most certainly within earshot. Karolin had seen him only minutes before. He’d been standing there, motionless, looking into the trees with a strange expression pulled taut across his face, as though he was considering something. Or perhaps he was simply remembering. Maybe, Karolin had thought, it’s like déjà vu. He used to come here by himself, and now he’s here with me.

  But there was no response to her yelling. No, he was gone. And Karolin stood alone among the trees, her breath hitching in her throat, tears streaming down her face. Her dad would be angry that she’d lost her cool. Heck, this might be a test. She wouldn’t put it past him, the survival expert that he was.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think. “The rules,” she hissed between her teeth. “Remember the rules, stupid. Think, think, think!”

  She took a deep breath and let her eyes open. Her gaze traveled across ancient trees and branches that had been downed for decades, maybe even centuries. Trying to pinpoint some clue as to which direction she’d come from, she stared at her basket at the foot of the oak. The moss she’d pulled was resting dirt-side up next to where her foot had sunk into the ground. Had she been traveling north? She hadn’t bothered to check. Not that it would have mattered. The moss was so thick it grew around an entire half of the trees’ trunks, and she and her father had meandered, not walked in a straight line.

  It was only then that that particular detail struck her as odd. Always walk in a straight line, he had instructed. And yet, here she was, not knowing where they had come from because of what he had done.

  She felt another wave of panic creep over her but managed to push it down to the pit of her stomach. The worst thing she could do was waste daylight by freaking out. If it was still light out, she had a decent chance. But if night fell…

  No, don’t think like that.

  She grabbed the wicker basket by its handle and palmed the paring knife. It was still morning. She had plenty of time to figure this out. But if she was going to try to get out of here, she had to do it carefully. One of her father’s rules had been to always mark her trail. Karolin stepped up to the closest tree and used the knife to carve a crooked ‘K’ into its mossy bark. That way, if she got turned around again, she’d know where she’d be
en, at least up until this point.

  “Dad?”

  It was hard to believe he couldn’t hear her. The forest was deathly quiet. Her yelling should have been audible for miles. Not like the time she’d gotten lost at Fenway Park during a Boston daytrip to watch the Red Sox play. There, the crowd had been made up of a million blank faces, none of them either realizing or caring that she was in the throes of an anxiety attack. Her, just a seven-year-old kid, convinced that she’d die in front of a hot-dog cart without ever seeing her parents again. Here, that crowd was made up of trees rather than people—nobody to ask, not even a blank and uncaring pair of eyes to plead with. Just Karolin, an eleven-year-old girl convinced that she’d die in the Polish woods miles outside of her grandmother’s town, just like the boy in her father’s stories had.

  In those stories, the boy had yelled, too, but his screams had been swallowed by air that had gone thick with electricity. He’d yelled until he started to choke on a stench that wrapped itself around him like a shroud. It smelled like a dank old root cellar. Like mold and overturned earth.

  Suddenly, Karolin could smell the very scent her father had described. Stupid, really. She knew the stench wasn’t there. It was just her fear manifesting as she spiraled into another bout of hysterics. She began to cry at the thought of that boy, regardless of whether he only existed in some spooky folktale her father embellished every time he told it. She wept as she wandered up to a second tree and carved a ‘K’ into its bark, then took a rough swipe at her eyes with a dirty palm.

  No matter how often her dad changed the details of that story, the boy never found his way out of the woods. Not once in the hundreds of times her father had relayed the tale did that kid escape a grim and terrible fate. Back then, that had been okay. Heck, it had been one of the reasons Karolin had loved the story so much. She had always hated clichéd happy endings. And yet, at that very moment, she wished that the boy had found his way to safety, if only once. She longed for him to never have met that terrible, crooked-spined woman—the one that lived in a house perched upon tree-branch stilts. She wanted to have never heard that awful story at all; the story of the boy who had gone for a walk in the woods only to find himself face to face with a pitiless Baba Yaga, the witch of the woods.