Happily Ever Afterlife

by J A Campbell

  And so it was that she gathered things from that other world in which she could not live safely because of her size, and she hoarded the items in her hole of a home. You see, there was no real explanation, no tangible reason, nor scientific diagnosis for why Clara was the size that she was. No one had ever seen a human out-of-womb the height of a quarter. It was altogether unnatural, so off-putting, that there were many in the town that she was born in who believed she was from the underworld and not in fact human at all. The townspeople agreed there was something sinister about Clara's birth and stature−something so bizarre that it shouldn't, and therefore couldn't, be trusted.

  She had been born to two normal-sized parents on a Sunday in April when everyone−except Clara's parents−was resting and ruminating on the notion of God, and how even gods deserved a rest. Out she fell into the hammock of her mother's underwear while her mother was washing clothes in lye. She might have died, smothered in that cocoon, if she hadn't been able to scream so very loudly despite her tiny person and lungs the size of lentils.

  Perhaps an unlucky start, she was born to a mother who was an outsider. The townspeople called her mother Maya because she came from a town called Maya. For the people of Fankfret, it seemed easier, perhaps more natural, to remember an outsider by the distinction of where she'd come. These specifics were very important to a community that numbered thirty-three.

  It was on that strange Sunday in April that Maya was terrified by the noise that came from her panties. It resembled that of an angry fly, and everyone knows that flies only gather around things which are dead or dying. Since she was expecting to give birth any day, she feared for the life of her child. Maya called to her husband, Turnik, who was plowing the fields. But Turnik did not hear his wife, because he was singing gospel so forcefully that he might compensate for working on a day of rumination and rest.

  Sick with fright and gripping the sides of her layered dress in fistfuls, Maya waddled to the fields to meet Turnik. "I have heard an ominous noise from my panties and fear for our child! Check to see if our first-born is yet alive."

  And so on the black earth, fresh from plowing by her husband's steady hands, Maya lay down on her back and lifted her skirt for Turnik to survey the situation. With black hands, he examined his wife, feeling that Maya's fear was unwarranted and quite possibly natural for a woman who'd never given birth.

  His wife tossed her head side to side in the dirt as if it were a great gourd turning on its belly to catch sunlight. Maya cried. "Our child has died because we are working yet again on Sunday. We are fools not to have heeded the warning of the townspeople."

  In their field she wept, heaving so hard that Clara fell from the gusset of her panties. Turnik stuck his filthy hand into his mouth to suppress a scream at the sight of the poor child. Although extraordinarily tiny, Clara had grown features of a young girl and not that of a newborn. She didn't drool or have eyes that wobbled in the back of her head. In fact, she stood upright and had black hair down to the small of her back.

  At first, the couple imagined that Clara might grow larger than the stature of her birth, but years passed and the child did not grow. They tried to fix the miniature Clara with unctuous preparations−syrups made of snake belly and hyacinth oil, peach skins and cow placenta. The townspeople brought these concoctions to the collapsed couple in various shaped bottles with ingredients that varied only slightly−sometimes cabbage was substituted for the placenta since cows were not giving birth in all seasons. Cabbage was not nearly as potent as placenta, yet when cooked, was deemed an effective substitute.

  They also tried to hang Clara upside down at mealtimes, just above her food, so that she would reach forcefully−driven by hunger−and naturally stretch her body to a normal length. Alas, this did not work either.

  But this did not deter the people of Fankfret. They held vigils, lighting candles and setting them in motion on the river Leading Out. They prayed to God with songs and chants and cries, fearing for the fate of the cursed child but mostly for the destiny of the town. Could this be the forbearance of doom? Would their own children be born as such or begin to shrink in the passing years? It must be retribution for something. They didn't ruminate long enough. They didn't pray hard enough. They should have made offerings of gold instead of fruit. They should have burned color paper instead of grass. And they should have never, never allowed an outsider into town.

  "What do we know of a place called Maya?" They whispered amongst themselves, "There must be a darkness there that the sun can't lift."

  Despite the efforts of Maya and Turnik, and the town, Clara did not grow. She might have been the height of a quarter, but she functioned normally. She could communicate like any other, and you didn't need to careen to hear her voice, for as you know, she had mighty vocals. She could also dance and run, even though she was likened to a beetle moving across countertops. She could do just about anything a normal girl could do.

  Despite the sameness Clara shared with other people, she was terribly alone. Even after many years, people believed there was something unholy about her existence and therefore it was forbidden to keep her acquaintance. Maya and Turnik wanted her to go to school and make friends with the other children of their town, but they were unable to convince others, including themselves, that it was safe for her to do so. The one day she'd attended school, proved almost fatal.

  As that story goes, she was placed on a peach on the teacher's desk for protection from the other students. Clara was so absorbed about what she was learning of that other world and a bit terrified to be out of the home she had never left, that she was deadly quiet on the peach. She was so quiet that the teacher forgot that she was there at all. When the other children left for recess, the teacher, in her relief to have finished the lesson and in a state of such relaxation, picked up the peach to eat (as was her habit).

  At that moment Clara screamed, and as before it was the very big voice for a very small girl that saved her life. As you can imagine, the event terrified the teacher. To have thought she could have eaten one of her own students was so traumatizing that the teacher never returned to the school and classes were delayed for two weeks in order to find a replacement. Clara was not welcomed back.

  The people of the town believed she caused nothing but harm to them. There was no convincing otherwise. They began to blame Clara for things that were altogether unrelated. They blamed her when the crops died, if the summer was too dry, or the spring too wet, if the sheep did not return after grazing, if a loaf of bread did not rise, or if a chicken did not lay an egg. This became so embedded in the soft minds of the people of Fankfret that a familiar phrase was formed to capture general misconduct or disaster. It was a Claradid when harm unexpectedly came their way. "A Claradid befell me last week," or "If it wasn't for that Claradid, I'd have made the party."

  With each passing year, Maya and Turnik grew sadder, knowing their daughter would never be able to live in their world and take over their farm or take care of them in their elderly years. Their sadness permeated their bodies, causing their features to droop to extraordinary depths. At first, it was just the corners of their mouths that downturned–their fat lips resembled yielding sea cucumbers. But then later, their eyebrows fell as well, making it difficult to see. Their noses dropped, too, and rested on the lump of a hopeless lip, making it difficult to produce a sigh. Their ears and frame hung closer to the black earth and they shuffled in their home from kitchen to couch, no longer able to work because they were blinded by the misfortune of having a child the size of a quarter.

  On Clara's twenty-first birthday, Maya and Turnik decided their daughter had plagued their lives long enough, so they crawled out into the afternoon light, finding the untamed earth with their long fingers. They continued to crawl with Clara riding in Turnik's ear. Into dusk they went, until their knees were bleeding and their hands blistered. When they were far enough away from the town, they dug a hole the size of a teapot. Turnik plucked his daughter from his ear and
placed her in the black womb of earth crawling with insects the size of their offspring.

  Maya cried a single tear to bathe Clara in, showing her daughter she was indeed sorry for abandoning her in what was assuredly a grave. When the couple returned home, they were relieved and the features of their faces began to slowly tighten. Their sea cucumber lips trembled with what might have been considered a smile even.

  Since it was decided Maya's womb was undoubtedly rotten, the couple did not produce another child. Instead, they adopted a dog that grew to the size of a donkey. A dog would never disappoint them as a child would, they said, and they were right. It was named Beloved and gave them much joy with its enormous appetite and ability to crush their bodies when it jumped on top of them to show unfailing, stupid affection.

  And as the story goes, no one heard of Clara for many years. The people believed she had died in the hole where her parents had placed her. Believing this, and thus knowing it, gave the townspeople such relief that they released a communal sigh−so great was the sigh that it blew down trees and laundry off clothes lines. For a week, children picked gum from their hair that the wind had entangled there, and women collected their undergarments from neighbor's porches. The people were so overjoyed by the riddance of Clara that they could do nothing but laugh at the chaos the enormous sigh had produced.

  Knowing only that Clara was a mishap of a girl, the people of Fankfret did not know that she was in fact very resourceful. At first devastated in her state of abandonment, Clara spent days as still as the pebbles on which she sat, but soon she sighed to herself, feeling for the first time free of shame and constant disappointment. No longer did she have to watch her parents' faces fall in her presence. No longer did she gaze through glass at other children playing, knowing that to join them would risk her life. No longer did she pray to be something that she wasn't. In fact, she was thrilled to be away from the Monsters, as she now called them. Her hole, once a grave, became a sanctuary. She had returned to the earth from which she seemed to have sprung.

  Clara developed a sense of safety she had never known when living in the town. She made a shelter from things she collected from the world that did not want any part of her, nor she any part of it. As the years passed, Clara snuck out often under the cover of night to find the discarded items of the town and drag them back to her home for alterations and ingenious implementations.

  It seemed to her that this contentment on the outside of the town would continue like the growth of her hair−the only thing that did grow on her−but she was wrong. As the townspeople might have said, a Claradid befell her on a very cold summer evening when she was attempting to drag a chunk of cheese to the mouth of her home. It would've lasted her the month had not an abnormally large raccoon smelt the cheese and plowed full-force toward the coveted scrap. The coon was fierce and clacked its fangs and flashed its claws as it scuffled with her for the cheese.

  The girl the size of a quarter didn't stand a chance against the gnarly animal.

  Her fate was to be eaten.

  The black and white creature swallowed cheese and Clara whole. Into the belly of the beast she went with the cheese, screaming all the way, but this time her call could not save her. Everyone in the town was fast asleep and thought she was dead. Even if they'd known she was being eaten, they wouldn't have opted to save her.

  Poor Clara tried to climb the soft wall of the dark red belly as a sea of acid melted the cheese below her into an oily puddle of death. Up she crawled with a terrible will to live. She clawed at the raccoon's inner tissue, puncturing a stairwell into its flesh. In a fury, she scrambled through the animal, cursing her fate and smallness and all the cruelty she had endured in her short existence. So angry was Clara at all that had befallen her that she continued to crawl until she had burrowed into the soft brains of the animal, who felt little more than a tickle and had no idea that a Claradid had changed his life forever.

  The raccoon, in this body, would never think a thought that was its own again. On the other hand, Clara knew immediately where she was. She saw the lightning pulses of neuron activity bounce and snap through the pink flesh of the coon's brain. Next, she squished her miniature arms through the organ folds like an insect walking over a gelatin so that she could grab onto those neuron threads and gain some control.

  In little time, Clara had the raccoon once again walking and smelling, turning its head and soon even running through the field. Within a day, she learned to make the raccoon chew and swallow and within a week, she could make the animal jump and dig, spring and attack. She was so thrilled by this newfound manipulation that she soon forgot the hole of a home she'd made for herself and entered the town with a boldness she'd never known.

  At first it was just to get a feel for what the place would be like in her new size, but then she began to enjoy inhabiting the town at night in the protection of the body, feeding on the trash of old neighbors and scratching up their walls to startle them out of sleep. As the months passed, Clara became more daring and then more wicked, thinking of things she could do to the townspeople for revenge. She stopped eating their trash and started eating fresh pies on countertops or whole legs of ham in kitchens. She stopped crawling up walls and started clawing through them, making great wide holes that let in biting sheets of rain and wind, snow and ice.

  Clara went so far as to sneak into the bedrooms of the children and bite the little ones. The attacks had ballooned in sadistic quality. She didn't want to scare the people anymore; she wanted to hurt them. With a ferocious thrashing of teeth, she would maim the babes in slumber, removing fingers or ears, so as to inflict a lifetime of deformity.

  She became so evil that the townspeople feared the raccoon and could talk of nothing but defending themselves from it. They tried boarding up their homes and locking up their food, but the coon could chew and claw through anything. They tried to hold vigils again–singing and praying and chanting for protection against the diabolic fur. They oiled their naked bodies with the familiar ointments of repentance, unsure of what had caused such misfortune.

  It wasn't until Maya and Turnik's great hound, Beloved, was found dead one winter morning with his chest torn open by what looked to be a thousand flesh wounds that the townspeople began to whisper, "The raccoon has been sent by the gods to punish the people for putting Clara in a grave." This rumor spread like sores on an invalid's back, and all the people knew without a doubt, that the raccoon came in retaliation for their own evil toward the tiny girl. Soon the word Claradid was replaced with the word Raccoonadid to describe any and all horrific events or unfortunate accidents.

  The people talked of the time when Clara lived among them, bringing joy and good luck. She'd been a prophet really. She'd been the emblem of the time of peace, they'd tell themselves, pulling up memories and reweaving them with new details of benevolence and love. If only Clara hadn't left us so young, then the attack of the raccoon would have never befallen us.

  Miniature shrines were made to commemorate Clara, and the people wore bits of silver jewelry, which were quarters melted to engrave the new image of Clara's face. This was not only protective attire for the people, but it also became the currency of the town.

  After such foolery, Clara was addicted to the manipulation of the new body and the people. So much so, that she was bolder than ever and her deeds more wicked. When she killed the son of Beenard in her third year marooned in the brain of the raccoon, she started attacks in the light of day, feeling invincible to the retaliation of the townspeople. She was like a wrathful god, who could not be smote by the weak and fearful minds of an inferior people. Yet it was this recklessness that was Clara's borrowed body's demise.

  Beenard vowed to kill the coon for the murder of his son before his last hot breath left his mouth. Many in the town doubted that Beenard could kill the animal, let alone see the animal, since he'd lost his glasses, as you know, on a drunken binge many years prior. Beenard was not good at replacing things. But it was because Beenard was
almost blind that he developed a keen sense of smell and detected the stench of the filthy coon, creeping in the shaft of his closet one afternoon. Beenard flung open the door; the scent of the beast was furrowed in his brain and heavy in his nose. He fired his shotgun twice into the shelving for his shoes.

  "I'll kill you, god-forsaken coon!"

  Clara moved the raccoon across the shoes. She gripped the brain hard and waited. Beenard fired again, this time closer.

  "Die you demon from the depths!"

  Clara moved further into the closet, looking for a way out, but she was afraid to claw, making too much noise. Beenard fired again, this time even closer. Clara scrambled.

  "You will pay for your little horrors!"

  Beenard's shot tore through the wood, splintering it. The shot that followed hit the coon.

  It screamed.

  Clara screamed.

  Warm, black blood wrapped around Beenard's bare feet, and he knew he had finally killed the beast that had ruined his life and all the others of Fankfret. He pulled the furry black and white creature from its deathbed, tail dragging behind it. He skinned the animal there in his bedroom with his hands dirtied from the stains of leaking interiors.

  It was during this death ritual that Clara fell from the nose of the coon. Unhinged, she stumbled to her tiny feet before Beenard and wiped the juices of the animal's brain from her small person. Dazed, she blinked as if she'd been under a spell during the years controlling the raccoon. Slowly, she began forgetting the pain she had inflicted upon others, shedding the identity like a mismatched garment. She took in the new air of the outside world. Clara soon forgot the torments of her own life in the town; they faded like an interrupted dream.