A little girl shouldn’t have to worry about losing such things.
THE KITCHEN IS TOO hot. It is always too hot.
Her mother and aunts race from oven to Frigidaire to counter to oven again. The air is honeyed with the scent of ham glaze and rich with the earthy scent of baking sweet potato casserole. Sugar cookies cool on wire racks. But the wonderful smells are tainted by the tangy stink of cigarette smoke. All of the grownups smoke, it seems. Aunt Sheila stirs the ambrosia salad. A cigarette teeters precariously on her lower lip as she scoops great spoonfuls of Cool Whip and canned fruit. Sheila’s husband sits in the corner; Henry adds nothing to the women’s babble. He smokes a cigarette of his own as he’d done in the side yard the night before, staring up through Sally’s window. With a penknife he cleans his fingernails and pauses only to ash his cigarette in the bulky glass tray on the windowsill.
Sally tries to not look at the man. Every time she does, he is looking back at her, and his eyes still look fiery, his front teeth are still too large. Henry has full, rounded cheeks, covered in a rough fur of stubble, and it’s Easter so Sally immediately thinks of bunnies—not rats the way she had the night before. Had she warmer feelings toward him, she might feel grateful to have an uncle Easter Bunny. Only Henry doesn’t look like the dapper, well-groomed Peter Rabbit from her storybook; he looks like a sickly and mean cousin to that magical creature.
“Sally,” her mother barks, “you get on out of here. I don’t want you getting muck on your dress. You go on up to your room until it’s time for church.”
“Don’t badger the girl, Millie,” Uncle Henry says, sounding uncommonly protective.
“Mind your business,” Aunt Sheila snaps at her husband.
Sally doesn’t move. Leaving the kitchen means passing by Uncle Henry, and Sally doesn’t want to get near the man.
Impatient, her mother says, “You go on, now. I won’t tolerate a disobedient child. Go on.”
Sally turns and encounters her Uncle’s sick-bunny eyes. He smiles at her and shrugs as if to say, I tried. She lowers her head, focuses on the light playing off the toes of her black shoes, and hurries out of the too-hot room. Her mother’s voice is trailing after her: “And don’t forget your basket. You won’t get many eggs if you don’t have your basket.”
She trudges through the house, avoiding the screeching, silliness, and roughhousing of her cousins. In her room, she closes the door and sits on the edge of the bed, wishing the holiday were over so the family would go away—so Henry would go away.
ERIC AND MARY WERE at the sunrise service held in St David’s Lutheran Church. Even if she hadn’t been charged with decorating the eggs, Sally wouldn’t have joined them. She hadn’t been to church in thirty years, not even for her wedding. Another point she refused to discuss with Eric, or anyone else.
She was glad her daughter enjoyed it, though.
Sally’s faith had never been allowed to fully form before it had been broken. Sometimes, she regretted her belief in religion’s impossibility. The comfort. The hope. To shed life and rise into glory. To one day know the grand plan, to feel swaddled in its calculation and reason. It would be amazing to believe that everything had a purpose, and the guiding force of all things was a being of good. Wonderful. Sally so wished she could look forward to such a revelation. But she couldn’t. Life was life. Death was death.
Her family would be gone until ten-thirty, and then Eric would bring their daughter home to begin the hunt for the things Sally had been charged with hiding: the plastic egg holding the silver bracelet and most of the eggs Sally had decorated that morning.
Most of them.
She drank from her coffee and opened the fridge and knelt down to open the crisper. There, the decorated eggs rested on a white cloth like vivid tumors. Sneering at the display, Sally placed her coffee cup on the counter and reached in for the fabric nest. Her hands shook, and she closed her eyes. Took a deep breath.
Once the eggs were on the counter, Sally transferred them to a wicker basket she had filled with green plastic confetti. Mary would use the same basket to gather the colorful atrocities later that morning. Joyful and ignorant of the ritual’s meaning, her daughter would push aside leaves and crouch behind stones…
Such a lovely, ghunt.
“Don’t,” Sally whispered, choking back a sob.
All she had to do was get through the next ten minutes. Hide the eggs and come back inside. She didn’t have to watch Mary. Didn’t have to watch the…
Ghunt.
SALLY SITS ON HER bed. Uncle Henry fills the doorway. Though not tall, he is an adult and built wide, so he looks like a wall erected between her and the rest of the house. He holds a sugar cookie out to her, but she shakes her head.
“You look pretty,” Uncle Henry says, bouncing the cookie in the air like he’s trying to lure a dog inside. “Why you have to look so pretty?”
“F-for church,” Sally says, wondering why her uncle is asking her a question when he already knows the answer. “F-for the pi-nic and the eh-ghunt.”
“For the what?” Uncle Henry asks. A terrible grin pulls at his lips.
Her uncle steps into the room, and the reek of cigarettes pours from him like skunk and Sally is all the more unsure. She can barely think, and when she tries to tell her uncle about the church’s picnic and Easter egg hunt, all that comes out is, “Ghunt.”
“A ghunt, huh?” he says. “Tell me about your ghunt.”
Now he’s really smiling, but something has changed in his eyes. They look like the eyes of a painting. Flat. Hard. Fixed on an image Sally cannot imagine. Startled by this transformation, she forgets to speak.
“Cat got your tongue?” Uncle Henry asks. He pushes the cookie into his pants pocket and draws out a pack of cigarettes, never breaking eye contact with Sally. “Such a lucky pussy,” he says. Then he chuckles and slides a Marlboro between his damp lips.
Sally doesn’t understand the filthy sentiments adrift on her uncle’s foul breath. She doesn’t want to know. Something tells her to move, to get out of the room, so she stands from the bed. Before she takes her first step, he says, “Sit back down, now. Your mama don’t tolerate a disobedient child, so you do what you’re told.”
“But, I have to get ready for church. Mama’ll be cross if I make everybody late.”
“Your mama’s already left. I told ‘em I’d get you there. Ain’t a problem. Church is just down the street. Hardly a walk at all.”
“She left?”
“You sound worried. Nothing to be worried about.”
Sally tries to speak but her throat is completely closed as if she is being strangled.
“We got things to talk about,” Henry says and closes the door.
ONE EGG WENT BENEATH the rose bush on the south edge of the lawn and another went behind the bleached stone beside the patio. Sally put another at the base of the redwood play set and then, as an afterthought, she climbed the narrow ladder and put another in the corner of the play set’s second level.
Carefully, she climbed down the ladder and began walking to the back of the property.
“SEE THAT?” UNCLE HENRY whispers, his voice dry and rasping. “Just like an egg.”
Sally can see little through the scrim of tears. She doesn’t want to see.
“And what do we do with eggs?” Uncle Henry asks.
SHE DROPPED THE EGG on the grass and stared at it, half expecting the dyed shell to emit a scream of terror, of pain. Sally took a step back and closed her eyes, pushing out the tears pooled on the lower lids.
“YOU DON’T TELL ANYONE what you did,” Uncle Henry says. “You understand that? You never tell a soul what you did to me.”
She doesn’t know what she’s done to him.
Sally stares at the floor, but it isn’t there. There are no boards, no nails. Beneath her is the surface of a swirling black lake, like a swamp filled with grease and bile and…
The fluid ripples and twists under her feet like the mouth of a ma
elstrom and she wishes it would pull her down and away—even drowning would be better than enduring her uncle’s stare. His voice is like pennies in a grinder, and her mind pulls away, so far away, until his words are lost in the gurgle of the whirling bog. She shivers and closes her eyes and begins to whisper a prayer to the black fluid, but then she is being shaken and drawn back from the whirlpool of filth, and she is looking into the diseased-rabbit face of her uncle and his foul breath is on her skin and his grinding-penny decree demands her oath.
“You say it,” he insists.
“I promise,” she says.
“Promise what?” Uncle Henry asks.
“Promise I’ll never say anything.”
“About what you did?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get out of here,” he tells her with a chuckle. “We don’t want you to be late for your ghunt.”
She shuffles to the door.
“Get yourself a bushel of eggs,” he says.
He laughs, and the sound is wet and horrible and far worse than his speaking voice. Sally shakes all over as if emerging from a frozen lake. She hurries to the bathroom and vomits and vomits until her body feels like it’s been crushed between two cars.
SALLY WALKED IN FROM the backyard. A single egg remained in the basket—the cracked one with the red bottom and the halo of glitter. She traced the crack from the narrow dome to the fat base with a finger. She carried the basket to the basement door, opened it, and descended the steps. At the bottom, she again regarded the egg and again touched it as if it were a good luck charm.
She was still infuriated with her mother for including Uncle Henry in the family Easter. Sally had protested vehemently, going so far as to nearly break her promise and reveal what the sick old man had done to her all of those years ago, but Sally couldn’t get the words out. She couldn’t explain about the egg.
How could her mother not see his disease? Filth and sickness covered every inch of him. He was woven from perversity. Carved from shit. How could her mother let him anywhere near her?
How could Sally let him anywhere near her daughter?
In the basement, she crossed the cold cement floor to the door to the fruit cellar and pulled it back, allowing a wedge of light to drape along the plank stairs and puddle on the mud-caked feet below.
The simple answer was: she couldn’t.
As she descended the stairs, Uncle Henry was slowly revealed to her. He lay motionless. Naked. Damaged.
The dark dirt beneath him coiled and swirled and turned darker still, and together they road the surface of the gloomy bog. Nail heads jutted from his eye sockets; they had punctured the orbs and released a greasy pale fluid along with blood to dribble down her uncle’s stubbled cheeks—the juice dried to a crust, now. His upper lip had receded in rigor, adding prominence to his bucked teeth. His jaw lay open, propped against his second chin. Blood clotted the frayed gray hairs and made dark veins in the creped skin of his chest and belly. Before the drill, she’d used the clamps, and she’d used the hammer and she’d used the pliers. She’d used the blowtorch. Between his legs was nothing but a blackened terrain that looked no more threatening than a scoop of scorched casserole. The holes in his torso—ragged, clotted, and numerous—had been bored over the course of thirty minutes. The third aperture, the one through the hairy flesh above the old man’s heart, had been the last wound her uncle had protested—though he’d done so with little more than a hiss of breath. After that one, he’d lay still. There were twelve holes total: an even dozen.
“I know what to do with an egg,” she said.
Sally knelt down and placed the decorated egg against her uncle’s prominent front teeth. She forced the shell and the tumescent content through his parted lips, and worked it back and forth, trying to insert it whole. It cracked further and broke apart. When a piece fell to his chest, Sally retrieved the yellow scrap and worked it between his cold cheek and gums. Additional bits of yellow and white began to rain from his lips.
Unsatisfied, Sally retrieved them and worked them into his gums as she’d done with the first piece. Then she took the hammer from the floor beside her. She swung it with all of her strength. The steel head smashed her uncle’s lips and shattered his buckteeth, sending them and the bulk of the egg deep into his mouth and to the rim of his throat.
“Swallow it,” she whispered.
Then she pulled back the hammer and swung again.
JOYEUX PQUES
by Emma Ennis
Christine Lake inched her way over to the window. She planted herself in the corner, her hand shaking as she stretched it out to the curtain that was only ever closed on that particular night of the year. As her fingers probed a tiny gap between the material and the window, her body leaned away on instinct, as though she had no control over its various attachments.
Her fearful eyes scanned the garden in the gloom of early morning. Her heart hammered against her chest as she took in the eerie mist hanging low over the lawns and wrapping around the boles of the miserable trees that cried dewy tears. It was to the end of the garden, down by the fence that her eyes feared to travel the most. But she willed them, and her heart was stilled, her blood slowing to a more civilized trickle in her veins. There was nothing down there.
Suddenly the horizon pinked, a great slash of rosy dawn cut the gray sky and she watched it spread. The glow warmed her and one by one her knotted muscles began to unwind. After all those years of fear and hiding, of wondering, it turned out that the rumors were just that—rumors.
Light began to spread and now the dew glistened on the leaves. In the corner of the garden the hedge moved. Christine stiffened and almost jumped away from the window in fright before a gray-brown rabbit hopped into the clearing. She breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at the sight.
The little fella was in no hurry; its whiskers twitched as it glanced around, absorbing its new surroundings.
And then time seemed to slow down.
As Christine watched, her eyes wide, she saw a clawed hand creep from the hedge. With a swift swipe it captured the rabbit. Its snowy legs thrashed against the hold, but the gnarled fingers tightened around it, the filthy, pointed nails puncturing the little body.
From inside the house Christine could hear the creature’s agonized squeal as its captor squeezed ever tighter.
A bloody, coiled thing fell from the rabbits anus, still attached somewhere inside. Its eyes bulged like cooking egg-whites and were seconds from popping with the pressure as its head lolled around on its neck in a desperate struggle for air. With one final jerk its spine snapped and the writhing ceased. It hung like a used dishrag over the grotesque fingers.
And then she stepped into the garden.
Christine clamped her hands over her mouth. Air hissed from between her fingers as she screamed her throat raw, the sound muffled against her palm. She dropped to her knees when the thing on the lawn turned towards the window.
Fear and shock invaded her body, turning it ice cold. Her stomach convulsed and she braced herself against the wall as she vomited pools of bile and terror.
AH, EASTER. A TIME of yellow and green; of fluffy bunnies and downy chicks. Kids with chocolate-ringed lips grip colorful baskets in smeared hands, their teeth watering and fingers itching for the egg hunt. For a few hours there is an excitement in the air that is almost akin to Christmas.
But not in the town of Murrins. There the doors were locked and bolted, blinds firmly closed. And they remained so until the sun was high in the sky and the latter half of the day had begun. Nothing happened before then; there were no morning egg hunts, no early sermons in the church to celebrate the Ascension.
Families huddled inside in darkness and fear until the clock in the village struck twelve. Then cautious cracks appeared in curtains. Doors eased open and father figures emerged to inspect the lawns. The lucky ones got to walk back inside with such obvious relief that the difference in his posture from the man who had walked out moments before was as stark
as if it were two separate people.
Small bonfires were lit around the backs of the houses of the less fortunate. Fathers, husbands, eldest sons could be seen toting shovels, grimacing and staying as far back as possible from the pulsating, oozing thing carried on the other end; big green globs that dripped mucus and trailed after-birth. They were tossed into the flames with a hiss and crackle. And then, as the heat set in, an unearthly wail like a cat being skinned alive would fill the air.
When the sound faded and died, and the town fell quiet, only then could the Easter festivities begin.
Murrins was not a pretty town. There was nothing in particular wrong with it. It had all the right ingredients; pretty flowers sprang from their perfectly groomed beds, litter was kept off the streets. The buildings all had uniform, old-world façades of wood and stone; no tumbledown shacks or ugly, unpainted edifices to break the charm. Livestock grazed contentedly in the lush meadows that surrounded the town and wild critters could often be seen darting from the woods.
It was like a dream, a postcard, but one had only to set foot in the town to sense the tainted air of the place. Especially on that day: Easter Sunday. No amount of town planning or aesthetics could mask it.
The town had a history, and not one that it was proud to tell. This was not something one would find in local tourist information pamphlets; it was known only to the inhabitants, passed around by word of mouth in whispered conversations designed to shock and frighten. Inevitably leaks occurred, rumors got out, and that history became a stigma that lay like a cloud over the town and stained gray the countenances of the inhabitants.
The story varied depending on the age of the teller and the shock-factor intended, but the basic plot was always the same.
A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous Page 5