by C M Muller
Daniel’s brothers joined them.
Daniel had never seen the transformation before—Lucas tried explaining it to him one evening, but it was a thing which Daniel could not understand. The closest he imagined was a butterfly emerging from the cocoon it cast, but that was only similar in terms of the physical impression, rather than the physiological process. He watched the cicadas climb over her and over each other, emitting sticky residue like golden honeycomb. Soon, Momma was immersed in the secretion. It hardened and cracked, as mud does under the sun, until she looked like a great rigid pod, the features of her bones pressing up from beneath.
Moving as one, the insects rose from her in a dark, glittering cloud and flew from the room. As they left, the cicadas introduced themselves to Daniel, those long-ago townspeople he had never before met.
It was true, they told him, that they once hated Momma. But her curse caused their rebirth, and they cherished her as a herald of immortality. She was the mother of them all.
Momma’s shell lay in bed for several days, a frozen monument to her majesty. Her remains mummified, turning to a rigid, brown mask of hard lines, so unlike the soft flesh that once dimpled with each smile and laugh. Daniel sat with her, stroking the calcified husk and talking to her as he did all his life.
“Orlie says he sure misses your singing. I reckon I do, too.”
He traced one finger along a hollow knot that he thought might have been her mouth.
“Your voice was beautiful, Momma.”
A wind blew through the trees, sounding like distant murmurs. The house creaked on its foundation.
Daniel cupped one hand under his cheek and leaned in closer. “I wish I knew Poppa. Ezekiel says he wasn’t killed at all, just ran off one day with sights set on a new life. I don’t know why Ezekiel says that; wouldn’t nobody abandon you, Momma.
“You were so powerful. You bound the souls of the townspeople to this land so they couldn’t leave. But the thing is, they don’t want to leave. They say Poppa’s trying to trick you and there ain’t nothing after death but lonely cold shadows. It’s a good life to remain, when your friends and family are still around. That’s why I’ll never leave you. We all love you, even the townspeople. They just want to keep you right here with them.”
The shell quivered.
Daniel ran his finger down the ridges of her neck to the pitted hollow of her chest. Between the bulging remnants of weary breasts, a thin crack split.
“Don’t be scared. C’mon out,” he said.
The split widened like a yawning mouth and a pair of pale green legs poked out. A mass pushed from underneath the shell and the chest broke open as if poking up through a piece of wet paper. A cicada emerged, glistening and trembling.
“I’m sorry, Momma. I’m real sorry. I was gonna fix it so your spell didn’t work.”
He extended his open hand to the crumbling husk. The cicada climbed up his middle finger, probing tentatively with bobbing feelers. Daniel carried it to the parlor and set it on the kitchen table. Poppa’s portrait faced them.
“But you see, we’re all here, we’re a family again. Here comes Aaron and Lucas, and there’s Henry and Ezekiel and Orlie and William.”
Six cicadas flew to the table top, landing with taps and chirps.
“You said this world is a cruel, cruel place, and maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re right, too, about Poppa at the golden table. But maybe the townspeople are right. Nothing is as it seems. I remember your list, Momma, and maybe one day, when I’m tired and can’t go on no more, I’ll go out and pick the right ingredients.”
The cicadas circled her.
“But for now, I think you’ll be happy. Like you always said, heaven is family.”
He leaned down and whispered into her ear. “I love you, Momma.”
Each of her other sons repeated the sentiment, and six more times were said, I love you, Momma.
The Trees Are Tall Here
Marc E. Fitch
The trees are tall here, in this new place that I have come. And at night I hear them moving. Not just their branches and leaves swaying in the breeze, but rather I hear them encroaching, gathering around us, darkening the world and blotting out the moon. On the surface nothing appears different, except that, maybe, weeks ago I could see through small gaps in the forest to another farmhouse in the distance or patches of blue summer sky. But no longer. The small gaps of light and breadth have disappeared and are now only leaves flickering pale green and back to black.
A tall man with long hair came to our house. He had no car and must have walked the endless straight road that cut through the tobacco fields. He asked my name and I told him. He said he was an artist and he wanted to paint the landscape. He had the eyes of a crow, they twitched and darted, noting small things, tiny things that lit on the breeze that no human should notice. My father came to the door suspicious and probably already beginning to clench his fist. The man said if he could paint here he would give us the paintings to hang in the house. “It’s considered good luck to have a painting of your property,” he said. My father looked at him with hard, angry eyes. I begged him to let the man paint our house. It would be nice to have someone else here instead of being alone all the time. My father agreed. He said that he would paint something special just for me.
It was only a small farm and the front was the tobacco fields and in the back was the black and terrifying woods. My father didn’t notice. He worked too hard in the field tending to the rows of tobacco that raced like a little boy running along the road, each row a leg, the head disappearing into the thick trees. He said we could live on one hundred acres, just me and him. Mom and Thomas were dead now, buried in a patch of land at the farthest corner of our plot beneath a weeping willow that cried at night.
Moss hung from branches, dripping with decay.
I watched my father tend to the field of leafy undergrowth that had been dried and smoked for millennia. I watched the artist set up his easel in the dusk, dressed in black and sweating from the southern humidity. I watched him as he stared past our farmhouse and out into the woods where the trees were tall and moved at night.
I tended the chickens that stopped giving eggs and I milked the cows that had gone dry from spooked nerves. Father’s harvester was on the fritz and things were looking bad. Dad got drunk one night and said that small farmers don’t stand a chance these days but the next morning he was back out working on the harvester and calling the veterinarian to see what was wrong with our chickens and cows.
I put my hair in braids and took our specially packed tobacco to the farmers’ market where college students liked to buy it and make boyish eyes and perverted comments to me. They rolled their own cigarettes and felt at one with the land and talked about Native Americans and everything we had stolen from them. They wore wool caps in the heat and tight black jeans and asked me when we would start growing marijuana. I smiled and said nothing back. “Farmers’ daughters really are cute,” one of them said. He was always there every Friday at the market and he always looked at me with this sly smile that told me he was dangerous.
I sold almost all of our bags of tobacco and then traded with Harley and Mona for eggs and milk.
“What’s wrong with your stock?” Harley said. It was pride masked as concern that farmers use when they see others struggling; it somehow makes them feel superior to be producing when others are struggling.
“Don’t know. Something seems to have spooked them.”
“There’s been talk of a big cat in the area,” Harley said. “Took a go at a horse a couple miles away. Tell your dad to keep an eye out and you keep an eye out, too. Little girl like you would make a tasty snack for one of those things.”
“I will,” I said. But I knew it wasn’t a big cat. I knew it was nothing that simple or easy. It was the slow and steady pressure of the forest with the tall trees that moved at night.
The artist was back when I got home. He had his easel set up and was painting and he kept looking out at the trees
and then returning to his work. I walked up behind him and spied on his painting.
“Why are you painting something that ain’t there?” I said.
“It is there,” he said. “Just not in the way we are accustomed to.”
The painting was of a massive birch tree with the farmhouse and forest in the background. I remembered the tree. In the background the forest was a deep, dark blackness that seemed to form a face of some kind.
“That tree came down last year. It was hit by lightning,” I said. “It was tall.”
“It was tall and old,” he repeated.
“So why do you paint it?”
“I paint what I see. You don’t see it, but I still do. It is still there in another time and place.”
“Why does the forest look so scary?”
“Because the birch is gone now and the forest can overtake anything it sets its mind to.”
“How many paintings are you making?”
“Three,” he said. “It’s a sequence.”
“You know Indians used to live here?” I said.
That night there was something else in the trees, something large, roaming through the underbrush, seizing and sending birds and bats into the sky. It smelled of wet earth and ground-up milkweed. I could almost see it there beneath the light of the moon as it stalked among the tall trees. I suddenly heard an ear-shattering gun-shot from just outside my window and I saw that flash of yellow fire like lightening. Then another. Then another. I went to my window and looked down. My father was on the back porch with his rifle firing shots into the trees, pulling back on the bolt, loading another round of .30-06 and firing again. Not even taking the time to aim. His motions jerky and panicked, not smooth like a hunter, but like a cornered animal.
“Harley says there’s a cougar around and it might be what’s spooking the cows and chickens,” I said but Dad was silent. It was bright morning, dry, pale and hot and he was just staring out the window of our kitchen, out into the trees, dead silent with his coffee in hand.
“What were you shooting at last night?” I asked.
“Just target shooting,” he said.
“At night?”
He looked at me, clearly annoyed. “When else do you think cougars come stalking around?”
In the afternoon he was able to get the harvester fixed and was out working the rows. I hated the harvester, its three wheels, glass eyes of its cabin, insectoid arms and diesel fumes made it seem like some kind of bright red monster shuffling up and down the furrows gobbling everything, consuming, no matter who or what was in front of it. The clouds were building at the horizon, dark and ominous and there was a wind that was pushing against the leaves and turning their pale underbellies skyward. I walked out to the willow where my mother and brother were buried. I sat down next to the two crosses that served as headstones and let the moss and pollen fall in my hair.
Then the artist was there with me and he said, “What happened to them?”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I said, “Are you putting them in your painting?”
“I see them, so I will.”
I watched my father in the harvester, churning and chugging, and the clouds purling at the borderland. Then I turned and looked into the forest where it was dark and cool and so unbelievably thick. The tall trees looked like revival worshipers with their hands raised to God in holy ecstasy rocking back and forth in the coming storm.
“They was killed,” I said. “There was a man. The police say he killed a lot of people. He came here preaching the good Word with Bibles for sale. Me and daddy were away at the market. Momma and Thomas were here. He used a knife. Daddy never told me what happened but we weren’t allowed to see their faces at the wake. Everyone cried and hugged me. I hated it.”
The artist looked into my eyes and I could tell that he was good and gentle. “The world is a terrible place,” he said. He pulled me close and kissed me once on the forehead and then went back to his easel.
The storm came and the rain pounded against the windows and roof like gravel thrown by a lynch mob. Lightning danced across the fields. Everything was electric. I watched out the window. There were flashes of light and in those flashes I saw things in the woods. I saw the tall trees leaning down and staring at me with strange eyes. But it was like a flipbook cartoon. It was like a memory. I never saw them move, I just saw that they had moved and that was the most frightening part.
And I saw a figure out there in front of the trees, walking behind them, disappearing from view and appearing again. I recognized him as the artist. I pressed my face and hands up to the glass. I saw the trees bending down toward him, embracing him.
The wind whipped against my nightdress and the rain came in waves carried by the gales. I was drenched and the air was cold. There was lightning everywhere and the sound of sirens in my ear. I ran out to the edge of the trees and was calling for him but my voice was lost in wind and rain. My eyes strained but everything was moving, the leaves whipping and turning and the rain pounding the bark and underbrush. The trees were so unbelievably tall here, swaying, bending in the lightning strobe. I looked everywhere but he was gone. I stepped into the underbrush moving beneath the trees, entering into their embrace where the wind was blocked and the rain came in big drops that rolled off the leaves and suddenly everything seemed calm and quiet and I stared into the dark recess of the trees and saw a pair of eyes staring back at me, bright yellow and predatory in the night. They watched me with a cunning stillness and I stopped in my tracks. It was not the artist. The lightning flashed and lit up the whole world and I saw it there, crouched in the leaves, spine coiled like a spring, fat, padded paws tense on the wet earth, ears pulled back against its dreaded triangular head. It tensed and then sprang and I was running toward my house, the dim porch light the only sign of life left in the world.
The cougar padded softly and swiftly. I could feel it almost on me, my voice hoarse, sucking in rainwater enough to drown. It swiped at my ankle and I felt a dagger pierce my skin and my calf muscle shuttered in electric shock. The second swipe knocked my foot out from underneath me and then I was in the grass, the water rising up on me, and there was the feeling of hot, wet fur and carrion breath at my neck and then a thunderclap that sent vibrations reeling through my skull. All I could feel then was warmth.
My father was there, standing over me, rifle in hand. He towered over me like the tall trees of the night and he let off another shot at the ground near to me. Then he picked me up and I was galloping into the light, the only life left in the world.
Word got around about the cougar attack and Father dragged its carcass by the scruff of the neck and skinned it in the barn. I got stitches in my calf and shots to ward off the infection. Everyone at the farmers’ market asked how I was feeling and examined the bandaging. I recounted the story a dozen times and I sold more tobacco than I ever had before. “What were you doing out there in that storm?” Harley asked, but I couldn’t give him an answer that made any sense. None of it made sense to me, so I told them that I had been sleepwalking. Maybe that was true.
The college student that was always staring at me made a comment about the loss of such a beautiful creature. “Too bad it had to die,” he said. I punched him in the face and Harley sent him scrambling and whimpering to his friends.
When I came home, my father was once again in the field with the harvester and the day was bright and dry and warm. I walked into our house and there was something different. It felt safer somehow, more secure and stronger than it ever had before. I walked through the place like a ghost, touching nothing, disturbing nothing, drawn to the living room like moth to flame.
There, above the fireplace, was the painting of the big birch tree and the farmhouse and the monstrous woods in the background. It was framed in wood and hung above the mantle. I walked over and stared at it. It wasn’t the greatest thing I had ever seen, it wasn’t perfect. The images were disjointed, just slightly off-kilter and out of focus. I looked closer and closer
and deep in the black hues of the woods I saw something very faint, very light, too tiny to be truly seen.
My father appeared in the doorway. “He dropped this and two others off this morning. Said he’s all finished here. Kinda weird, if you ask me,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“There’s another in the kitchen and one hung up in your room,” he said.
I walked to the kitchen and saw the second of the sequence hung above the kitchen table. It was the same disjointed image but magnified one hundred times so that the trees nearly covered the canvas and Mother and Thomas’ crosses could be seen in the very far corner. But the slight, ghostly figure in the trees was so much more visible with its light brush strokes against the raging blackness; a girl in a night dress, soaked to the skin, rain dripping from beyond the borders. Now, I could truly see the frightening darkness of the trees that moved in the night and I could see the faint figure. My eyes and mind magnified the image like a fever dream and maybe that is what it was, the infection from the cat claws reaching into my brain.
I ran upstairs. It was there above my bed in a gilded frame this time, something cheap but with the appearance of gold. This painting was different. The darkness of the tall trees engulfed the work but there in the middle was the ghostly figure in a night-dress. It was me on that night, soaked, facing into the woods, into the maw of the cavernous trees, whose branches were reaching down through the storm, a small light from our farmhouse in the background. It was an image painted from the perspective of the forest, as if he had been there that night, looking out at me from the darkness, furiously working at his easel. I could see myself in my nightdress, just beyond the shadows, with dark branches reaching over me and my face in a fearful, ghastly scream.
I rushed out of the house and ran down the driveway in the hot, dry sun with the smell of cut tobacco.
I stood in the dusty road that stretched for miles into the horizon with the lost boy running in the rows and furrows of tobacco farms and I called for him again and again. My father watched me from the doorway and I could tell that he was terrified of having a daughter, of having a last piece of himself that he could lose forever; a piece of himself that he couldn’t understand anymore without his wife and son to help him.