He puts his hand on her neck to hold her still.
Then she puts the knife blade in his throat.
He falls sideways into her lap. Gulping, suffocating, confused noises bubble angrily from his mouth. She watches, holds his face still, and cries some. Blood pours gently from the knife handle and pools between her knees, seeps through her skirt, runs down her legs, over her feet. It takes a long time for him to die.
When he does, she pulls the blade out, pushes him off her, and, with the honey jar in the crook of her arm, exits the car.
She just stands there holding the jar in her left hand and the knife in her right.
And the long, silver blade is out and cobwebbed in warm red the same shade as the red handle—little droplets falling from it like spiders weaving themselves downward on ruby threads; and there she is, standing, looking at the spiders and the unmoving boy inside the car; she is standing there and looking at what she's done; and she isn't sorry. She isn't sorry.
House
She stumbles into the living room and sits on the tweed sofa, smearing it with the red covering her clothes and skin; folds the blade, slips it into her skirt pocket; then sets the jar down beside her and removes her shoes—a thin trickle of blood dribbles from one—and she leaves them there. Voices seep through the floor. So she stands and walks trancelike toward the basement entrance.
The door is ajar.
With trembling hands, she pulls it open, then places a foot on the top step.
It gives slightly under her weight, creaks, and she stops, listens.
No change. The voices don't pause.
She continues to the next. It doesn't make a sound.
The air becomes colder the further she descends, yet she feels herself sweating as the blood chills and dries on her clothes and skin. Her legs shiver with each slow footstep. The voices grow louder.
“Open the gate easy, Joseph.”
“Get your cat-grabber ready. He's a biter.”
“I got it.”
“Okay, I'm opening it it on three.”
“I'm ready.”
“One. Two—”
Stepping down, she sees a large dog kennel at the bottom of the stairs. The Reverend, still in his minister's outfit—today must have been Monday Evening Bible Study—kneels brandishing a long-handled claw. To his right, her father stands in his overalls and tee shirt, facing the door of the cell and slowly slipping the lock off. Inside the cage, the naked child cowers on top its heap of blankets, far from the bars and on all fours, back arched like a frightened beast ready to pounce. Martha's foot lands on the bottom step which creeks loudly. This time the two men turn their heads and look at her.
“Good Lord!” her father says.
The Reverend glances at him. “Language, Joseph.”
The Reverend then looks at her again. “Martha, whose blood is that?”
“What are you doing?” she asks, stepping over the kennel.
The two men look at each other, and her father replaces the lock but doesn't click it shut. They walk toward her and The Reverend’s head knocks against the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. He sucks his teeth as the bulb swings away and back and a small pink oval appears on his forehead.
Her father says, “Sweetie,” but he's not called her that since she was a child. Then, “This's just something that's gotta happen.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
They continue forward and she looks for a place to move to but finds none. And the bulb swings and splashes the color-starved crannies of the basement with brown light like a tide advancing and receding and advancing again.
“The Reverend has been telling me there's a place he's planning to sponsor in Vivid Greene that'll take mongoloids like yours and raise them up right, civilize them.”
“What?”
“They're all God's children,” The Reverend says, “just like we're all God's children and deserve a chance to know that.”
“You're taking him?”
“It's for the best,” The Reverend says and reaches into his pocket, removes his wallet and from it a crumpled photograph.
“Come here,” he says, placing his cat-grabber on the floor, “and have a look at this.”
She does.
The picture is torn at the edges and badly faded, but its scene is clear enough: The Reverend with his arm around a middle aged woman, likely his wife, and his other tousling a much younger Clint's hair. Clint is holding hands with an older girl in a sky-blue dress. The girl has sparse hair and a veil of skin partially covering her left eye. Her flesh looks the appearance of papier mâché, and small bone nubs protrude from pink lumps on her scalp like whiteheads on massive acne clusters. The depicted family smiles the way only the God-fearing smile, including the girl, whose mouth looks more like an open gash lined with pearly barbs.
“You're not the only one who's succumb to temptation,” he whispers. “My wife was a sinner once, herself, in another life.”
She pushes the photo away. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Because that's Clinton's older sister,” he says. “I taught her to read. Taught her right from The Good Book. At age seven, her first word was—”
“No.”
“No?” The Reverend asks
“No, I won't let you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I won't let you take him.” Tears rolled down her face and she looked away to hide her shame.
“It's not your choice, Martha,” her father says.
“It is my choice,” she says and pulls the knife from her pocket, unfolds it.
The Reverend backs away and bumps against the light bulb again, but her father steps forward, a look of malice in his eyes. She lunges at her father with the knife. He catches her wrist and hits her across the cheek with the back of his fist. She turns a half spiral and falls at his feet. The blade slips from her fingers and clatters a few feet away. Then he climbs on top of her and holds her hands to the floor.
“How dare you?” he says. “Do you pay the bills to keep it alive. Do you feed the little sin, clean the shit outta its cage. No, you don't. I do. Every night. And every night I hear it scream and holler and carry on regardless, and I can't get no sleep.”
She can feel his balls pressed against her midsection as he shouts. He pauses and breaths before saying at the ceiling, “And then it ate our dog, my dog! Didn't just eat it, tore it to shreds. And I come home to hear the Pluto yowling in pain, but couldn't save him. All the blood and parts and innards thrown everywhere.”
He looks at her with fire.
“All because you couldn't listen to simple instructions and close the goddamn basement door!”
“Language,” The Reverend's voice stammers from somewhere.
She hears the child begin smashing his body against the door of his cage and screaming:
“Mrah! Mrrrah!”
“And now you wanna tell me what to do with the little sin, when all you did's make it? Little slut!”
He lets her hands go and hits her again. She tastes blood: bitter and metallic. He leans in closer, so close she can smell the coffee on his breath. She pushes her neck forward and headbutts him, and he leans backward and lifts his hands to hold his nose. Twisting her body, she grabs the knife off the floor and lunges it into his groin. She twists the blade, and he howls and launches backward, landing hip-first onto the concrete.
Then a shrill, almost feminine scream fills the room followed by the sound of another body hitting the floor. Martha pushes herself upright in time to see The Reverend with his right leg already knee-far between the cage's bars while the child straddles his ankle and gnaws fervently through the man's shined leather shoes.
“Jesus Christ!” The Reverend shrieks. “Get it off me!”
Martha glances back at her father wreathing on his back, blood soaking through the crotch of his pants. Then she stands and walks to the cage, places her hands on the bars. The child stops gnawing The Reverend's now ma
ngled toes and looks up at her. His eyes wet with tears and drooping.
His lips move up and down.
“Muh, muh.” he says.
“Yes, what is it?”
She leans her ear closer.
“Muhmuh.”
“Mamma?” she asks.
“Mamma,” he says.
“Yes,” she says and presses her forehead against the bars. “Mamma's here.”
She lifts the lock off the cage door and breathes in. “Mamma's here.”
“What're you doing, you crazy bitch!” The Reverend shouts as he reaches out to stop her, but too late. The door opens just a crack as if in slow motion, then stops. And all noises in the basement cease as the two injured men on the floor stare motionless. The child rolls off The Reverend's ankle and crawls toward the door, kicks it hard. It swings and hits the bars with a sharp clang. then the child gets to his feet and toddles out. Martha looks at him standing tall and free beside her and smiles, extends her arms to hold him, but the child doesn't look at her. His mouth opens and drops of red spittle and shoe leather fall out, his chest heaving faster as he gazes around. The Reverend pushes himself upright and hops one-footed toward his cat-grabber still lying near Martha's father who's too preoccupied with the knife in his genitals to notice it there.
And Martha watches. She watches as The Reverend reaches the grabber, bends forward to pick it up, only to look behind and see the child dart up his back, wrap his arms around the man's neck, and sink his sharp teeth into his Adam’s apple; she watches her father pull the knife blade from between his legs and plunge it into the child's shoulder, and the child shrieking in pain then grabbing her father's forearm and snapping the bone in half. But then she doesn't watch. Doesn't watch what happens next. Covers her eyes with her palms, listens to her child's screams and her father's screams and the noises of tearing flesh and cracking bones. Then, nothing, and she lowers her hands. The swinging light bulb casts weird shadows that bob and weave like manic dancers. Making the room seem to move hypnotically, seem calm. Her father, or what remains, lying motionless on his stomach beside the stairs, arms stretched out in front of him as though he were trying to reach something in his sleep. The Reverend on his back, jaw moving up and down, all color draining from his face. Near the kennel by the stairs, the family picture sits all smiles. Martha walks over and picks it up, takes it to The Reverend. Pries his hand away from the wound on his throat, places it in his palm. He doesn't seem to notice.
Looking up, she sees her son crawling his way up the stairs. His motions slow and sluggish, the pierced skin on his back bleeding a lot and leaving a trail on the steps behind him.
“Mrah Mah.”
She follows him.
At the top of the steps, she reaches down and tries to pick him up. He hisses and wreathes out of her grasp. She tries again. This time, he bites her, and she drops him. In a sudden burst of energy, he darts away out of the kitchen.
“Wait!” she says and runs after him.
In the living room, the front door is still open and leaking moonlight across the floor. She sees him running ape-like into the night. She runs outside. On the porch she stops and scans the darkness, but her eyes are tired and it is very dark. She peers around the side of the house and calls for him, but nothing.
She calls again, louder this time.
A wind in the trees: like a death rattle.
Reentering the house for a candle, a flashlight, anything to search for him, she notices her shoes lying by the tweed couch. The honey jar is gone. So she sits on the couch to think:
I'm no mama.
She leans her head back and stares at the ceiling.
She remembers a time not long ago but when she was still very small, when her mama had taken her to the fair. Martha always loved the ducklings most. That day she’d asked to go off and see them, and her mama said, Okay.
Kneeling in front of the chicken wire, Martha reached her small fingers through the gaps to pet them. She knew she wasn’t supposed to, but she wanted to, so she did. All the ducklings scuttled away from her fingers, and she began to get upset that she couldn’t touch one, couldn’t feel its soft down against her fingertips. Finally she reached and caught a passing one by the leg. Only when she pulled it, the leg bent and popped. She felt it happen and let go.
The duckling just lay chirping, unable to walk or even stand, and Martha looked at it and felt something awful in the pit of her stomach and left it there, ran back to her mother but never told her. She never told anyone.
She closes her eyes and thinks about this.
When she opens them, it is daylight.
Field
After washing herself and changing into fresh clothes, Martha steps out onto the front porch for the last time and looks around. Brightness consumes the landscape, and the weather is warm, pleasant. The car is still parked right where it is, its boy-shaped contents likely baking slow beneath the blinding-pale sunlight. Birds of prey haloing around and around miles high above. She walks to the car, looks inside, and there is so much blood, and the body looks bloated and unfamiliar. She opens the door. And a rank stench of death fills the air.
She gags and covers her face with her sleeve to keep from vomiting. When the air becomes less thick with stench, she grabs Clinton by the shirt collar and pulls him off the seat and onto the ground. He lands with a stiff thump and something in him cracks and pops loudly. Then she climbs into the driver's seat and closes the door.
The dead stench remains. She rolls down the window, tries to ignore it.
She tries very hard.
The keys still dangle in the ignition. She's never driven a car before. Only seen beautified actors do it on TV. Apprehensively, she turns the key. The engine starts. She shifts the transmission from P to D and turns the steering wheel as far as it will go. The car drifts a one-eighty, and she centers the wheel and lightly presses the gas. She looks ahead and sees there are no cars on the road and creeps toward it. Then stops, adjusts the rear view mirror and looks through it at the stillness behind.
At the house.
At the field.
At the boy on the ground and the carrions gathering around him.
Then she turns the car south, a direction she's never taken, and presses the gas.
When she was a little girl, she'd once planted a flower garden with her mother that never grew because birds kept landing there and eating the seeds out of the ground. From the living room window, she and her mother and father would watch the birds leave and return and peck the topsoil, and one time her father said, “Since there's so many of them, we should build a birdhouse.” And her mother told him, “Okay.” But they never did, and when the seeds were gone, the birds went away and didn't come back again.
But she doesn't remember this.
Only that there was supposed to be a garden but wasn't, and nothing more about it.
Instead, looking up at the glittering sky, at the stagnant clouds smeared across the azure, she wonders: What place will she find to start again, to live happy and free always, and which won’t decay with age the way this one has?
Then, steadying the wheel, she takes a nervous hand off and touches her belly—knowing it is far too soon to feel a kick, if there will ever even be one, but frightened she might anyway.
THE END.
ÁTAHSAIA by Robert N Stephenson
Tim had become the town’s sheriff by default; he had been there when one was needed and as no one else stepped forward he was sworn in, given the badge and everyone went about their day’s business. He had been the peace connection between the Indians and the miners, and the farmers and even the towns’ folk and that peace had well and truly been tested. He looked once again into the mirror, the badge shiny and still new looking; it stood for what was right. The day in town had been tense, the air hung heavy on everyone and a sense of foreboding showed in their faces. Tim didn't have to go out and walk the street, the saloon usually looked after itself when it came to drunken trouble, but for
some reason he felt compelled, as if the town depended on him to do the right thing, or to show everything was under control and all was safe.
“Please don't go out tonight, Tim.” Martha always wanted him to stay in after sunset as the last three sheriffs had been shot at night, usually after a bar room brawl, but since he’d been in charge there hadn’t been a fight all month. Not since the mine dug up an Indian burial mound. The local natives came to town, which put the towns’ folk on edge, and complained, then packed up their camps and left. The miners returned to their holes in the ground and all was forgotten. That was until today. An Indian had passed through town walking his horse; he wore no war paint, no feathers and little in the way of clothing. He just walked quietly from one end of Main Street through to the other and was gone. Then the tension set in.
“I'm only going to do one round, check in on Faber at the Garter and then head right back,” he said straightening his hat. Sweat stains ran up and over the strap and there was a small hole at the top; he'd told Martha he snagged it on a tree, but a stray shot from a gun fight was closer to the truth, he’d survived that first night without a scratch.
“I'll brew some fresh coffee, for when you get back.” She left the front room of their small house. She couldn't watch him walk out the door; she was funny like that. Wanted him to stay, fretted when he was away, but wouldn't kiss him or watch as he left. Tonight was different though and the tightness in Martha’s face said she felt the strangeness of the night as well. He’d told her about the Indian after she’d let school out; her face had paled then but she said little until dinner.
“They’re angry about the disturbed grave, aren’t they? I thought you fixed it, made restitutions to the chief,” she’d said, reaching for his hand. He told her everything was okay and that the brave was probably on his way to wherever the tribe had moved and thought it wiser to just walk through town than ride; which to Tim made a hell of a lot of sense. She’d been on edge all through dinner and now she was on edge because he was headin’ out.
“I'll be an hour,” he called as he stepped out the front door and onto the porch. The dark was black-dark tonight. Cloud cover and the expectation of rain did that; he could smell the rain coming, but only when he saw it fall into the dust would he believe winter had arrived. His boots clumped on the worn boards of the porch and crunched on the dirt of the main street. Down the street he could hear the piano playing in the saloon and the raucous laughter of the miners in from a week’s digging, and farmers. He knew the two didn't mix and by closing time someone would either be in the Doc’s hands or dead. Stone Cutting was like that, the Doc and Harry the grave digger did a good trade. He just hoped the cow hands hadn’t come to town, then the mix got too much for even the muscular Faber could handle.
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