“Wait for me! I’m coming with you!” There was no shame in admitting that she needed help and couldn’t survive on her own. Not today. Maybe tomorrow when everything returned to normal. Then she would be okay. She would get her life together and emerge triumphant. Leopold could go shit in a hat.
Butterflies honed in on her with the narrow-minded deliberation of raptor birds. Mona noticed with disgusted dismay how they had changed, as if their grisly diet of human flesh and offal triggered some kind of rapid evolutionary jump. On the wings, the dark, violet hues throbbed against the duller orange sections, refusing to touch as if miscegenation was repellent to both. Their mouths lacked a proboscis. Specialized palps curved into wicked, mandible-like pincers gouged chunks out of Mona’s flab. She swatted at them furiously, squealing in pain.
Their bodies were segmented into a bulbous sequence of rounded sectors reminiscent of the head, abdomen, and thorax of typical insects, but not quite the same—they appeared to be more closely related to annelids or slugs, an unholy hybrid. Surviving them was going to be quite a challenge. But wasn’t everything about life a challenge? When Mona thought about it, today was no different than any other day. It’s just that the danger was more apparent than normal. Hopefully, this realization hadn’t come too late. All she wanted out of life was to be happy.
There was a sudden stabbing and burning at her belly. Mona looked down. The butterflies were carving into her abdomen in an organized group! She crushed two handfuls of them against her rolls of fat, their greenish-yellow blood squishing between her thick fingers. Their blood smelled sweet and feculent like honey-suckle on top of feces. She licked her thumb, and shuddered. The goo tasted like three-month-old rotten chicken and was horribly bitter. Eating them would not be a survival strategy.
John must not have seen Mona or known she was on the way. He gunned the motor to encourage Gwen to hurry up, stop dawdling, but in his alarm he must have placed the gearshift in reverse. The car peeled out and ran Gwen down. Mona cringed. It sounded like a card table collapsing at a bridge party. Now John was parked on top of her. The old fool. There was no reason for an elderly man with ague and cataracts to still be driving.
Mona couldn’t help but burst into tears. If only she had gently broached the subject months ago, offered to give him rides around town so he could run errands safely. But she hadn’t wanted to upset him, knowing from past experience with elderly members of her own family that giving up the car was a traumatic decision. Aunt Milly claimed that the only thing worse that had ever happened to her was being widowed. Mona shook her fist at John and called him a moron. Sometimes old people drove her nuts.
John floored it and finished running over his wife. He was probably in a flustered tizzy, not thinking clearly, and very much like any older driver whose keys should have been taken away long ago, he left her there and sped down the street backwards. The car vanished around a curve. Then the sound of a loud crash. All that was missing was a lone hubcap making a return appearance as it rolled down the street.
“Help me,” Gwen croaked before several butterflies slithered between her lips and into her mouth to devour her from the inside out. She was a pile of tattered rags.
Mona spun in indecisive circles. She wanted to save her friends but didn’t think it was going to do any good. John was too far away. She’d be half eaten by the time she got there. And Gwen was fatally banged up and swarming with bugs. She looked like that guy at the state fair who wowed the crowds by wearing a twenty-pound beard of honeybees. Mona didn’t think she could carry her to safety.
Butterflies continued to dine upon her own nourishing fat deposits. The pain was unbearable. She was covered all over with their squashed bodies but new ones just kept coming. Blood loss sapped her strength. A terrible realization seared her to the core. Backed into a corner, did she have the ability to make bold, difficult, necessary choices? Absolutely she did. She’d done it before (No, Leopold. I will not go to Africa with you; I shall get revenge on the children) and was going to do it again (If I help my friends, I will die too; I’m going to get my life back on track; nothing will intimidate me again).
Mona told Gwen, “Sorry. I love you,” and then ran for her life. Her kneecaps popped and her lungs sizzled from the unaccustomed strain. She had a gym membership but never went. Letting herself go like this was inexcusable.
Once back at her house, she tottled inside and slammed the door. Butterflies clung to her body, chewing holes in it. They flew around her head looking for a place to land, like pesky mosquitoes. Mona stopped, dropped, and rolled. That killed twenty-one of the damn things outright. They popped like squeezed grapes, gooey splats of bug juice that stank of corruption. She chased the rest around the house with a fly swatter. Killing them was hard work but enjoyable. She gave them names—Leopold (whap!), Heidi (bam!), Sutton (pow!), Florence (whammo!)—people who’d hurt Mona’s feelings at some point in the past.
Pfffft went Joel, who’d laughed at Mona when she fell down playing kickball at vacation Bible school in 1982. And as for Chris, whose butt crack showed whenever he sat down but had the audacity to tell Mona that she looked bad in shorts, she yelled the loud WONK! used on game shows to let the contestant know they’d given the wrong answer and lost any chance of winning a new car.
The final butterfly glared at Mona from the dining room chandelier. She knew exactly who it was. That boy in the dune buggy. She’d been staring at him, admiring his chest, when he flipped her off, the arrogant jackass. To fool the creature, Mona lay down on the floor and pretended to fall asleep. Zzzzzzz. Moments ticked past. Woozy from blood loss, she worried about losing consciousness for real. She yawned.
Fuzzy legs tickled her stomach. It felt like a wooly-booly caterpillar crawling across her bare skin, leaving a trail of livid rashes. Mona repressed the instinct to bat it away, an atavistic memory from the prehistoric past when insects were apex predators and devoured human invertebrate ancestors with chittering relish. The plan was to pounce when the creature was distracted, its guard down. There wasn’t long to wait. The butterfly bit into a chunk of belly flesh.
“A-ha!” she roared, eyes snapping open. She snatched at the butterfly with piano-key fingers. “Gotcha!”
Mona stomped into the kitchen. The creature was desperate to escape, wings flapping like tentacles.
“I am so sick and tired of you,” she hissed. “I’ll fix your wagon.”
She placed the monstrosity in between her infected toes so she could root around in the junk drawer for some twine. It made no attempt to bite her foot. Mona felt bad about herself. Toes so diseased even long-leggity beasties refused to touch them.
There was more than enough string to tie its legs together. Once the knot was secure, she let it go, swinging it around and around in the air like a whirlybird as she hurried down the hallway to the bathroom, where she doused it with hairspray. Back in the kitchen, she turned on the gas and lowered her enemy to the tips of the bluish flames until it smoldered, pulling it back up only at the last moment. She tortured the butterfly like this for twelve minutes. Then it burst into flames.
“Well, that was fun,” she said, brushing the ashes onto the floor.
She went back to her peeking vigil. Where was everybody? The police, a SWAT team, some jerk in a Pinto. Anyone? She doubted that she was the only survivor. They were butterflies for God’s sake, not an alien invasion or Godzilla. Just kill the stupid things! Mona felt dumb about being victimized by something as silly as butterflies and found herself sympathizing with characters in killer-doll movies. Up until now, Mona would have hollered at the screen, “Kick it, you moron! Kick the damn thing across the room! It’s a freaking toy!” But when something like that happened to you. . . . It seemed that she was as helpless as any scream queen. And her toes! Dead skin flaked off them like peeling paint. Lead-based. If children chewed it, they’d get brain damage. Still, if some dumb-ass kid was stupid enough to go around eating paint, they deserved to wind up a retard.
&nb
sp; As Mona’s thoughts raced, she lost control of her appetite. Hunger struck her down like a speeding ice cream truck playing a crazed ditty. The refrigerator and pantry were thoroughly grazed. Old Mother Hubbard with a serious alcohol problem and clinical depression. All she found was a can of cream of mushroom soup, a forgotten bag of jellybeans, a canister of Italian-style breadcrumbs, and some sour cream, which she mixed together in a dirty bowl. When she spooned it to her mouth, it was kind of like munching on an uncooked casserole while having dessert at the same time. She sipped water from a butter dish because all the glasses were filthy.
Mona suddenly burst into tears. What a hypocrite to look down on brain-damaged kids gorging on paint chips. Look at what she was eating! No wonder she was a heifer. Closing her eyes and not having to look at the food lessened the impact. That was when she choked.
She felt like a complete loser. Look at the fat chick gagging on a meal. Of course, labeling herself as a loser indicated that she had something worthwhile to lose in the first place. The only thing Mona had to lose was weight. She recalled one of Leopold’s most hurtful postcards: a rock python swallowing an entire gazelle. Babe, take smaller bites.
Spiraling blue flickers spun in officious circles—sirens with the sound turned off. Here we are, they announced. There’s nothing to worry about. Help has arrived.
Mona stumbled over to the window. People in biohazard suits with rifles slung over their shoulders surrounded a slow-moving procession of anonymous government trucks. Jets flying overhead released clouds of poison. Butterflies dropped from the sky like daredevils with tangled parachutes. Finally, the Army! They were going to have to give Mona the Heimlich maneuver.
She lobbed open the door and hurried towards the soldiers with outstretched arms, unable to form the words that expressed her gratitude for being saved and the swelling love she felt for her rescuers. The only sound that came out was a garbled retch. Hheeccchhhh! Hhheeecccchhhhh! She knew she was turning blue.
Four soldiers broke away from the main regiment. Hidden behind hoods and breathing masks, it was impossible for Mona to tell if any of the soldiers were handsome. She made the universal gesture for I’m choking.
They aimed their guns at her. They made comments she couldn’t quite hear. Mona just knew that they were judging her chubby body covered with dozens of squished butterfly carcasses and their bite marks marring her skin. Maybe even gauging the droop of her boobs. If they didn’t help soon, she was going to pass out.
A decision was reached.
“Ready! Aim!”
Mona shook her head furiously. Millions of people starve to death each year. There’s rampant child abuse, global climate change, terrorist attacks, and the government decides to tamper with Mother Nature and develop a mutant strain of superbug? What a bunch of imbeciles. She’d never been so angry. I haven’t been parasitized! My brain isn’t infected with mind-controlling larvae. I’m fucking choking on jellybeans!
“Fire!”
They shot Mona dead.
“You have five minutes to rejoin the regiment,” the leader said before jogging off down the street.
They made fun of Mona’s weight as they cut her head off. They wrapped it in tinfoil and placed it into a large metal box with several others, including John Mortensen’s. There was going to be a lot of lab work to do, checking for disease and contagion. Then they’d blame it all on foreigners so the fat cats in Washington would have another flimsy reason to invade more non-Christian, non-white countries to rape, pillage, and plunder. For no good reason. For fun.
“Get a load of those feet,” the tall soldier said.
The one with the clipboard agreed. “Man, those are fierce.”
She was one of the ugliest women they’d ever seen. An absolute pig.
Christopher Fox lives in a small town in the southern Appalachians where he sells vinyl records. Previous work of his has appeared in a variety of markets.
Fire
b.E.L.F.r.y.
by
Dan J. Fiore
When, exactly, the townsfolk of Babel started acting strange, Reed Groom couldn’t tell for sure. Ornery just runs in the mountain springs, some say. But, in hindsight, it was probably safe to assume the Confusion hit its stride when his mother’s neighbor, frail, shaky Amelia Sever, after fifty-two years of marriage, decided to stab her husband seventeen times with a knitting needle.
Old Marvin Sever bled out on his front patio—the same spot where passing locals always knew they’d find him toking a cigar in his handmade rocking chair. Curious what all the commotion was about, Reed shuffled over to the Sever house and saw the blood-spattered cement. He approached the open kitchen window by way of the side lawn, keeping his metal crutches quiet so he could hear the words spoken inside.
When the sheriff asked Amelia why she did what she’d done to her husband, she said Marvin had once cheated on her with Silvia Stanwick. But, on account of a car crash out along Clay Pike, Ms. Stanwick was dead going on two decades by that point.
He then asked Amelia if perhaps her husband suddenly confessed to this long-past affair, spurring her moment of enraged violence. She pondered the question and then shook her head. “No,” she said. “But I know I’m right.”
After getting one more good look at the patio, Reed hobbled back to his mother’s house and figured the event for just one of those fucked up things that sometimes happen in hick towns like Babel.
Reed never did talk much. Townsfolk would see him around quite a bit and, while they all knew him—Reed could tell by their snickering—they knew very little about him. Before disappearing forever into the mountains, he lived all his thirty-three years in this tiny Appalachian town. And yet only a handful of locals knew more than the basics. He went to Mount Kindling High, used to drive a beat-up yellow Datsun, grew up out past the cemetery, and he was a roofer—or, rather, he’d been a roofer until one false step sent him flailing.
He fell four stories. Landed headfirst on a thick slab of sidewalk. It was a fall that robbed him of his depth perception, clarity of thought, and use of his legs. He would never, the doctor assured him upon waking, walk again. Thirteen bones in all—bruised, broken, or shattered. They even drilled a titanium plate where the back of his skull used to be.
When he finally could, Reed asked the doctor, “Was I out fo’ vewy long?” and the slow realization of what he’d said—how he’d said it—thickened in his chest like mill smog. “Weed,” he said. “Weed … Gwoom. Weed Gwoom! Weed Gwoom!” He repeated his name, ignoring Dr. Peters. Echoes of cruel laughter reached from the recesses of his mind. The doctor had to send nurses in to sedate him.
Because, for nearly three decades around Babel, nobody ever called Reed Reed—besides maybe his mother. You see, there was a reason for his quiet demeanor, a childhood catalyst to even his adulthood shyness:
Growing up, he couldn’t even pronounce his own name.
No matter how hard he tried. No matter how intensely he focused on each syllable, each letter, each careful maneuver of his lips and tongue. Every time until well into his teens, Weed, he’d say instead. Weed Gwoom.
And so that was the name that stuck with him. Even as an adult, long after his rhotacism had faded.
Until, of course, that fall of his robbed him of his R’s again.
And, lying in that hospital bed, as his speech sputtered back to silence, his thoughts wavering and his vision dimming, he first heard it—the whispering. Long before the Confusion, it popped in his head like a thought, but not a thought of his own. Its voice—a woman’s voice—was distant, distorted. But calming, too. The muffled words crackled as if played through a buried, broken tube radio.
Dr. Carl Peters is a liar, it said.
And as Reed drifted into the calm pond of narcotic sleep, he distantly realized that the doctor had yet to mention his first name.
But just three months after Reed first heard the whisper, he proved the doctor wrong. Proved him, just as the whisper promised, a liar. Sure, his
legs were far from agile. But he managed to work himself free of the wheelchair. Got upgraded, as it were, to the relative mobility of forearm crutches.
Though that affliction of his tongue did persist.
Once he’d gotten his first unsteady steps behind him, the hospital let him return home; home not to the two-story he’d been renting along Babel’s outskirts, but home to his mother’s house in the hills just past the cemetery.
Throughout that long trip back, his mother refused to let nary a silent second pass between them. As she talked, Reed watched out his window, focusing on rolling, rambling hills. Gas drills spiked up across them, like religious relics awaiting worship.
The new wave, Reed thought. Same as all the old—the poultry conglomerates, the crop tinkerers, the coal mine companies, even the government folks a decade back doing their weather studies up in those same mineshafts. In the boom days, Reed’s grandfather worked in those mines, as did most Babel men of that time. And ever since, the town saw a long line of outsiders coming in, promising they’d be the ones who would return the struggling backwoods town to prosperity and importance.
Importance, Reed repeated in his head with a single huff of laughter. How could these small-minded animals believe such . . .
But his thought trailed off.
In its place, beyond the drone of his mother’s gossip and the rattle of her minivan’s engine, Reed heard something . . . unusual.
A growing murmur.
The nagging, knocking pressure at the back of Reed’s head built, mile by mile, to a pounding. A sea of voices spoke at the same time some far ways off, both inside and all around him. They grew stronger the closer he got to his little hometown at the foot of those mountains.
“Here we are,” Reed barely heard his mother say. Pulling into the driveway, the strength of the colliding whispers now crowded his brain. “Home sweet home.”
Mother's Revenge Page 20
