A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre

by DeAnna Knippling

  He saw me.

  “Deanna? What are you doing out here? Did you let all those pigs out? Chuck is going to skin your hide if you’re messing around out here.”

  I ran.

  I almost tripped on the two cement steps up to the people-door on the pig barn, but I made it in and ran down the ramp to the pig area. The smell hit me again, about at the same time that remembering hit me, and I couldn’t see for a second, just blurs. I blinked it all back. I couldn’t cry then. Most of the pigs were gone. The little one was gone, even though I hadn’t seen him go by. Good. But the one who had let me in, the big mamma, and a few more were still there.

  “He’s coming with a gun. You have to go, you have to go…”

  But they didn’t seem to see me anymore. I wasn’t a person, I was just a human. Their eyes were flat beads, dead. Stupid.

  Exactly the kind of crazy animals that would chew up a dead guy.

  I backed up slowly.

  I wasn’t exactly afraid that they would hurt me.

  I knew they would, but only if I pushed my luck. I wasn’t a part of it anymore. What was happening, I didn’t know what it meant, I didn’t know why they were doing it. I only knew that they would do it, no matter what I did.

  Grandpa appeared in the people doorway. “Deanna! Get back out of—”

  He gasped.

  I would have, too.

  The big, fat sow got to her feet, her flesh shaking like a fat lady’s. She walked over to Uncle Chuck, bit into him, gripped down, and pulled backward against him, shaking her head back and forth. The skin on his arm bulged out like a tent. The place where one of the other pigs had bitten before started to tear, and then…a big hunk of his skin ripped off, leaving…stuff behind.

  Grandpa lowered the shotgun at her, and I pressed back against the wall.

  The pig who had let me in squealed a crazy squeal, jumped in the air, and ran around in circles around the body, thumping into the cages, running over the top of Uncle Chuck’s body, digging gouges into his skin. The big fat-lady pig dropped Uncle Chuck’s skin onto his arm, then started stalking toward us.

  “Come here, Deanna.”

  I edged along the wall. Grandpa stepped forward, expecting me to go out the door behind him, but I grabbed his arm, making the front of the shotgun go up and down.

  “Stop it,” he said.

  “Don’t shoot Uncle Chuck!” I cried.

  “He’s—” He shook my arm off, but I grabbed it again.

  “Don’t shoot them! They’re just pigs! They don’t know you’re not supposed to eat people!”

  Grandpa lowered his shotgun again. The big fat-lady pig was coming up the ramp toward us, one heavy leg after another. I could hear her breath wheezing. The more she walked, the harder it was for her to keep walking.

  “Please run,” I begged. “Please run away.”

  She shook her head just like she understood me, her ears flapping back and forth on her neck. She stopped, tried to turn around a little and grunted.

  The other pig stopped running across Uncle Chuck and watched her.

  She grunted again. She had blood on her snout and all the way across one cheek. On her teeth. I wanted to tell her, so she could wipe it off.

  She grunted again.

  Grandpa fired the shotgun at her, and she screamed.

  Somewhere in there, I closed my eyes and prayed that I wouldn’t have to look. Grandpa fired again. Instead of screaming, she made this sucking noise that was probably worse than anything I could have seen, but then I couldn’t open my eyes anymore. I couldn’t look. I was kneeling on the cement, and it was cold on my knees, and it hurt, because it wasn’t smooth. Something was digging into my knees, but that was all right, I always had at least a scab on one or the other of them. I was dizzy, so I put my hands on the cement, too. I felt tiny rocks that had been mixed up in the cement, that felt like Braille, like I was blind and trying to read a book made of gravel. You know. But I could feel mud and shit, too, both dry and wet. Mostly dry, flaky. The shit was flakier than the mud, that’s how you knew what it was, when you couldn’t see. I was crying. I might have been crying out loud. I was shut up inside my own head, and I wasn’t coming out. My lips were sealed together, I could feel them stuck together. If anyone was going to open them, it wasn’t going to be me.

  That was the fourth miracle. And if it wasn’t much of a miracle, it was what I needed for those few seconds, until I smelled the blood.

  I smelled it, and then I had to look.

  The fat-lady pig wasn’t dead yet. She had…she had a hole in her throat, the edges were moving as she breathed, blood was squishing out of her like a hose that was almost turned off and your mom was about to yell at you, and when she breathed out, the blood sprayed out and splattered the concrete and it splattered my nightgown.

  I was already on my hands and knees, so it wasn’t hard to crawl towards her.

  I think Grandpa said, “Stay back,” but I didn’t understand what he’d said until later, after it was too late.

  Those rows and rows of nipples were shaking. The bottom ones were covered with blood, that made a miniature swimming pool all along one side before streaming out from under her bottom leg and running the rest of the way down the ramp.

  The other pig was still there, frozen.

  “Run,” I said. “Go away. Shoo pig, shoo.” I flapped one hand at it, then finished crawling toward the fat-lady pig.

  Her side was hot. Her blood was hot on my knees. She flinched when I accidentally rubbed one of the places that the shotgun pellets had punched into her. I found a good place and laid my hand on it. She went up to my chest, she was so big. Her legs were bent out of the way. I laid my head on her shoulder, on a good place, as gently as I could.

  She couldn’t make grunting noises anymore, but her side was quivering, up and down, like she was crying.

  I think she was in love with Uncle Chuck. I don’t mean—well. As a kid, I didn’t think about things like that, and I think less of myself for it even crossing my mind. I think—she was willing to die for him. It was either that, or she was willing to die so the rest of the pigs could get away, or at least try to get away. It was love, either way.

  I heard the click of metal on metal, and then Grandpa tried to lift me away, but I wouldn’t let go, and I cried “no, no, no,” and maybe he had a change of heart, but anyway, he left me there.

  The fat-lady pig’s feet tried to run, but they were only twitching. I felt her head move and looked: her mouth was opening and closing.

  The sucking noise stopped.

  Her eye looked at me.

  And then it didn’t move at all, and it wasn’t looking at me at all. It wasn’t until after that that, that her feet and mouth stopped moving. By then her eye was drier, and it didn’t sparkle.

  I looked up.

  The other pig was gone, and Grandpa had gotten down on the ground next to Uncle Chuck somehow, and was talking to him, but not out loud, just under his breath, like he was cussing him out or something.

  I heard the geese honking outside, and Grandma yelling, and then my dad showed up in the door, and then I really did get picked up and carried back to the house, the big boots dropping off my feet into the grass as I hugged my dad. They made me take a bath in cold water for some reason.

  And it still wasn’t morning after all that, so they told me to go lie down on my bed of blankets again, dressed in a shirt and underwear was all. My brother was awake, but there was nobody saying he should go back to sleep; it was pointless. So they put me alone, in that room, in the dark.

  I could have lay on the bed, but I didn’t.

  I lay on the floor tucked between two sheets and sandwiched between piles of blankets. It was cold again; I’d been gone long enough for the blankets to get as cold as though I’d never been in them.

  An ambulance came.

  I heard someone shouting at the pigs, and one gunshot, but I didn’t think they got anybody.

  I heard a tractor star
t up, and the water run through the pipes, and the sound of coffee bubbling in the pot, sounding wheezy and sucky, like the fat-lady pig.

  I heard footsteps everywhere, and the voices of strangers.

  The light got brighter and brighter, until finally I could see under the bed, where my arm was getting cold from being out from under the blankets for so long, reaching out for something.

  I closed my eyes. There was nothing under there. I was finally ready to go to sleep.

  I felt a touch on my hand, a sniffing, the edges of a snout curling against my palm, and then it was gone.

  I hope that Uncle Chuck went to pig heaven. “Hog heaven.” For years, every time I heard that phrase, I thought of him. Even as my need for the story of it faded, I still held the idea of it close.

  They caught some of the pigs, but not the one who had let me in. I think. That’s another story that I want to believe: that there will always be wild pigs running around in that country, getting into crops, chasing off dogs and coyotes, making mischief.

  * * * * *

  “That was not a short story, not at all,” the girl said. “Why did you tell it to me?”

  Facunde shrugged, ruffling the feathers on her shoulders as though it were as warm as a summer’s day instead of nearly a blizzard. “To pass the time, that was all.”

  “You never tell stories just to pass the time. None of you. Except that young crow guy. He might just want someone to listen to him. The rest of you are all telling stories to get me to do something.”

  Facunde stretched her neck and riffled through her feathers. “How vain,” she said. “To think that every story has to do with you.” But she wasn’t fooling anybody, least of all the girl.

  Enough time had passed that the sky had begun to think about turning into morning, and our bellies had begun to think about turning into begging chicks fresh from the egg. “Well, no matter what you say, I’m going to take the bead to Mother’s house,” the girl said. “I’m going to take it there and let it eat her up.”

  “It’s you that’ll be eaten up,” Facunde said. “And you shouldn’t be murdering your mother.”

  “Oh?” the girl asked. “Then who should be? She’s killing my baby brother and used a spell on Papa that ran him off the road and killed him, too, and she’s killed my dog, and she’d kill all of you in a heartbeat if she weren’t busy with my brother.”

  I felt the sky calling to me. The girl’s house—your house—wasn’t far away. I danced from foot to foot, I hopped up, fluttered once, and landed. Almost too late, almost too late, whispered a voice in my head. Go now. Now!

  I cawed and leapt up into the blowing snow. I flapped desperately to get my bearings in the ground storm, rose above the worst of the wind, and flew quickly toward your house, tall and white in the darkness, a kind of fortress against the snow.

  Quickly, quickly!

  By the time I had reached the house, dawn was breaking. I hopped to the place on the roof where the air from the kitchen sometimes pours out, to see if I could smell anything foul, but there was nothing. Not then. I peered through the windows at you, and you were sleeping with almost the stillness of the dead.

  The babe’s crib was filled with shadows.

  At first I called myself a foolish chick, to have panicked: simply because a girl issues vague warnings does not mean that all crowdom was about to be attacked!

  But I found myself affixed to the window outside the babe’s room, staring within, unable to look away: the room had been painted pale orange, and there was a quilt on the wall, which was made of blocks with pictures of angels on it, childlike angels with fat, baby faces. The crib was under the quilt and against the wall; a changing table stood nearby, stacked with cloths on its shelves. The floor was wood, the lights were darkened. Within the crib was only shadow, a small dangling toy hanging over the pit, as though waiting to be looked at, played with. Perhaps, I thought, the girl was wrong, and the babe was untouched. But I had watched you a great deal through your dusty windows, and I knew that it was a lie that I was telling to myself.

  And yet I could not fly away.

  Instead, I found myself telling a tale under my breath…

  13. The Edge of the World

  There’s not much difference between the real world and the land of fairies. Just take the number of assholes times ten. Bang! You’re in fairyland.

  When I said “no,” Felix bound and gagged me, tied me onto the back of a prairie dragon, and flew me back to the Edge of the World anyway.

  I watched the Edge coming up to meet me, the cottonwoods rustling louder than the dragon’s feathers in the heavy wind. The dragon landed right on the Edge, about a thousand feet above the prairie below.

  About a thousand fairies had come to see Roberto burnt to ashes. Some were dressed in feathers and quills, as if it were a powwow; others wore Air Force uniforms or business suits with bare feet. The only ways to tell that they weren’t human were their ice-blue eyes, and they didn’t scream in terror at the dragon. Only mortals scream in terror. It’s a selfless act, a way of warning people to stay away or get their guns or whatever. Fairies are too self-involved for that.

  I was still wearing my football jersey from practice. Felix cut the rope, and I rolled down the dragon’s side and the ground knocked the wind out of me. Felix jumped down and cut my ropes; I had to tear the gag off myself. I couldn’t believe they’d sent Felix. Then again, he’d been able to trick me long enough to cast the knockout spell on me when nobody else could have.

  They’d laid Roberto’s body on a platform made of rough, green pine branches they’d dragged in from Hermit Mountain, rising above the last hills of the Edge. Rick Chamberlain held a bough burning with blue fire, which he tossed onto the base of the platform. Yeah, they’d just been waiting for my feet to touch the ground before they torched him, to make it official.

  As soon as I could stand up, I ran over to the man who had abducted me, eighteen human years ago, and spit on his face. I screamed obscenities at him, and, “Why did you do it? Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” The man who had abducted me as a baby and held me prisoner in a razor-grass cage when I disobeyed him was dead, and the rest of them wanted me to take over his job.

  Stealing kids.

  The fire spread quick and hot, until the whole bier was black with smoke and sent sparks over the Edge. My last sight of Roberto was my spit running down his face, like a tear. And turning to steam.

  Fucker.

  —

  “I won’t do it,” I said. “I’m a human now. I’m done playing fairy games. I’m done being a changeling. Done.”

  But they didn’t understand, of course. Fairies don’t have souls. It was like trying to talk to someone at the DMV.

  Chamberlain stood with me beside the fire. Roberto’s body collapsed, tipping and sliding between the larger branches, which fell onto the red-hot bones. Bodies burned quick once the heart was cut out, and they’d cast spells to keep the fire twice as hot as a glass-blowing oven, so it’d only taken a few hours, and spells to keep the fire from spreading. I couldn’t leave; I wasn’t about to walk back to Oregon, and I didn’t have money or an ID with me.

  Chamberlain was a big, dark-skinned guy who passed for as much as of a king out here as the fairies ever had. “A changeling picked you; you pick the next changeling. More than one, if you want. Pick one and we’ll let you go.”

  “I won’t,” I said. We both had our arms crossed over our chests. Me, because I was cold, and Chamberlain because he was copying me, trying to make me feel more at ease. I’d heard he was working for a company’s HR department, which, come on. Or maybe he was perfect for the job, I don’t know.

  “I know that you had difficulties with Roberto,” Chamberlain said. “But that does not invalidate the tradition.”

  “Difficulties?!” I shouted. “Difficulties? The man raped me when I was eleven. As a birthday present. He deserved what he got.”

  Chamberlain rolled his long black hair into a knot
to keep it out of his face. “He said it was a human custom.”

  “I’m not doing shit for you fuckers. You swore you’d leave me alone. Or doesn’t it mean anything to the fairies if they don’t keep their words anymore?”

  “You should have died first,” Chamberlain said. “You would have died a mortal death by the time Robert passed out of fairyland, but the girl killed him. I told you, ‘I swear that as long as Roberto lives, you will never return to fairyland.’ Roberto is dead. He picked no more changelings.”

  I shoved him. “Fuck Roberto! Let me go!”

  Chamberlain stumbled backward toward the Edge of the World. I took another step forward and shoved him again, until he slid off. He stepped into the air, his suit jacket flapping in the breeze and exposing his naked chest.

  I shook my fist at him. “Keep away from me!”

  From behind me, Felix said, “You shouldn’t get into fights at funerals.”

  I nearly jumped out of my skin, but I wasn’t about to let him see that. “Fuck off, Felix,” I said.

  “Hey, boss?” Felix asked. He was wearing jeans and the t-shirt of a band that had never existed, chewing on a lollypop stick and peeling off the paper with his teeth. “You know that thing you said I should do if he said no again? I did it.”

  “Did what?” I said.

  “Killed your parents,” Felix said.

  There I was, standing in fairy, where the sound of semis rushing by was replaced by the wails of ground lizards that burst out of the prairie to mate in the long grass. The prairie dragon was digging around, trying to find them. Its head lurched into the dirt, and it pulled a squirming lizard out of its tunnel tail-first.

  Maybe it should have hit harder than it did, but I’d never known them. The only parent I’d known was Roberto, and he’d been one of them.

  “I’m sorry,” Chamberlain said. His hair came unbound and blew into his eyes again. “We didn’t want you to come back, either. He died trying to collect another baby, so we’d never have to see you again.”

  “How did he even die?” I asked.