by Hal Bodner
He blinked away the tears and his vision cleared as he balanced on one good leg and shoulder.
Look and see, son. You need to look and see now.
Hare turned his eyes back into the sun. He felt its warmth through his pain and exhaustion. He turned back toward the flags and his blood ran with ice.
The white, brown, and black fur stretched by twine over the wooden frames above the matted grass. Through the cold blaze of fear in his mind, Hare recognized the texture of rabbit fur on the hides, but the myriad aromas of urine gave him the impression of a dozen haired beasts. Some of them would have been his predators had the tyranny of the reptiles not usurped nature a generation earlier.
The reptiles collect the urine of their mammal prisoners and then they use it to tan their skins one murder at a time until no creature of hair remains.
A short, shrill cry escaped Hare’s throat as he staggered to his feet and stumbled sideways in the road away from the displayed hides curing in the breeze.
“I know this, mother,” Hare bellowed, “You died long ago. This is not you. Did they do this to you too? Is that what you are telling me or are you just shocking me to my feet.”
Her voice gave no answer as the thunder in the Earth grew. He smelled the loose, alien flesh of the tortoise over the stolen stew of the urine on the skins above him.
Hare spoke the words he had heard from his father as the elder buck was being crushed. “Curse the shell.”
Hare found the will to run.
***
He left the road once he sped ahead on the tortoise’s pace behind him. The hollow grew thick with trees and undergrowth that had once been kept clear. The territory he entered had not been friendly to rabbits in the past, but Hare risked the detour to seek either shelter or aide in his escape.
He knew the dens lay abandoned once he spotted the collapsing entrances. Even the cobwebs that stretched and fluttered over the mouths of the openings were abandoned.
Hare closed his eyes to focus on smell over unreliable sight. The scent of bear lay so faint in the air it could be memory or hope over reality.
Hare stood alone in their ruins.
He gritted his front teeth and allowed the change to come. He knew the pain would be more intense than normal—both because it had been so long and because of his injuries, but he needed his fingers.
His fur retracted and exposed naked flesh. The muscle and fat thickened and he screamed as his wounded shoulder stretched. The ears shrank and shifted to the side of his head as his nose pulled back into his face. His bones crackled and threatened to snap as they transformed.
The sounds of the forest dampened and the odors in the air vanished as Hare lost his lupine powers for the use of fingers. His screams changed from high and shrill to low and guttural.
He collapsed naked in the grass and undergrowth outside the bears’ forgotten den. The blades of the dry grass irritated his exposed skin.
He gritted the rows of teeth that ached and felt strange in his mouth. “I have saved the reptiles the trouble and skinned my own fur.”
Hare stood slowly on his human legs. The arm below his wounded shoulder hung limp. He used his other hand to hold the trunk of the tree to keep his balance. The bark felt good in his touch and he missed the sensation. He took a moment to remember which way the knees and elbows were supposed to bend.
He crawled into the den with more trouble in his larger, human form. Hare struggled to see in the dark with his human eyes. He felt through the cast aside and broken possessions of the bears. He could not find the needle and thread he sought to close his wound, but he rolled the shattered table and found cloth inside crockery.
Hare pulled out the strips and bandaged the shoulder. The cloth became wet almost immediately.
“I’ll have to remain human until I find thread to do this properly.”
Hare dug further until he found a tablecloth to wrap around his waist and sandals to strap to feet not evolved for running. He crawled back out of the den coating his skin, skirt, and scant patches of hair with mud.
He heard the growl from the woods before he smelled the danger and Hare cursed his human senses. He crouched to the ground and peered through the grass behind the den. He glimpsed movement through the grass just beyond the swampy edge of the trees and water. The creature lifted its snout to smell him in the distance and his blood seeping through the bandage.
The alligator’s slit of an eye rolled in its socket scanning the grass. Hare could not tell if he had been spotted. The monster’s green and brown flesh rippled under its scales. Its back arched and its white underbelly came into view as it began its transformation.
Hare took advantage of the blindness of the gator’s metamorphosis from reptile to human. Hare felt the white fur tear back through his human flesh. As the alligator took on human characteristics, Hare raced him shrinking back into rabbit. He closed his eyes as his ears stretched back out to their full length on top of his head. He gritted his teeth until only the single set protruded in the front.
Hare turned painfully on his bad shoulder and bounded back toward the road away from the swamp and the alligator’s territory claimed from the perished bears. He did not wait to see if he had won the race from human to animal.
He left the tablecloth, the sandals, and the bloody bandages on the ground outside the vacated bears’ den.
***
Hare continued to run up the road until the pavement gave away to battered cobbles. He had to watch his landings from each stride closely. Many of the stones had been lifted from the street leaving deep pits and puddles in Hare’s path.
The thunderous steps dropped away behind him, but he did not lose them completely. The alligator did not pursue Hare into the road, but Hare knew that other minions of the lizard king patrolled deep into the countryside far from the shell of the castle.
Hare observed movement under the porch of a boarded house just off the road. He broke stride and stood ready as he waited for what might come racing out from the shadows for him. Stones from the road had been used to create three stacks for steps up to the porch. The stones sat askew and the boards of the porch split in splinters and rotten patches.
The sun beat down hot and brutal from above, preventing him from seeing clearly into the darkness.
Hare whispered. “I might as well just have my human eyes for all I can see.”
The creature bounded out from under the porch as dark as a shadow himself. He tilted his head as he stared at Hare with eyes wide and dark. He spread his wings and let light shine off the barbs of his black feathers. Hare watched light glint brighter off the slender needle in the creature’s beak.
Hare breathed and spoke as clearly as he was able in rabbit form. “If you know mercy or generosity or pity I need your needle to close my shoulder, Crow.”
The crow mumbled over the metal clamped in his beak. “It is still a crime to provide comfort or assistance to creatures of hair.”
Hare glanced down at the road and the remaining cobbles. He sighed.
“Sewing my shoulder closed will hardly feel like comfort. Perhaps you might drop the needle and fly away. That would not be assistance in the eyes of the law.”
Crow cawed. The needle fell to the dirt. The bird bobbed his head and snatched it back up.
“I can hear the thunder of the tortoise’s approach. I’m certain he would disagree. Birds do not meddle in the business of scales or shells. We do not have a stake in the wars of fur.”
Hare folded his ears back against his head. “It is not a war when we are simply skinned and tanned with our own urine into extinction for the crime of being furry. Once they are done with fur, the lizard king and his creatures will surely turn to feathers.”
“I’ve heard that argument before, creature of hair,” the crow said, “but joining your losing battle will surely hasten your self-fulfilling prophecy against my kind. Your kind should have sued for peace before you needed to sew your shoulder and to flee down pillaged cobb
les.”
Hare bared his teeth. “There is no peace to be had when the reptiles’ only demand is our death.”
The crow tilted his head toward the sky. “Good luck with your race then, rabbit.”
The bird took wing and carried the needle up with him.
Hare cursed and said, “You only want the needle because it is shiny.”
He bounded forward zigging from stone to stone along the cobbles. The process tested his failing shoulder.
The puddles between stones shook with the impacts of the tortoise moving watery rings from their centers to their muddy edges.
***
Hare no longer had speed. He just plodded forward in a manner unnatural for rabbits and hares. He pulled his wounded limb up to his chest and hobbled forward without touching it to the road any longer. The heavy pounding on the ground behind him remained loud and no longer fell behind with time.
The terrible feet continued to close in on Hare with slow and steady resolve.
The cobbles vanished and the road became dirt with deep, ugly ruts. Hare dropped his head and stumbled forward through the wheel tracks. Out of the edge of his vision he watched his wound turning black. He smelled infection setting in.
The ground wavered in his vision with each step of the overlord close behind him. Dust lifted from the road into Hare’s eyes and nostrils.
He came upon a ravine across the road. He heard the stream through foliage under him, but he could not see it. The beams of the bridge extended across a short distance to the point where they snapped in an earlier storm and were never repaired. Hare considered jumping. He thought he might survive, but probably not.
Hare hissed over his dry throat. “That’s not what my father did.”
He peered through the field in both directions. The sun dipped low on the western side of the dirt road. In the angled light, Hare spotted the broken bones of animals being reclaimed by the grasses. He lifted his nose with effort and smelled the air. No odor remained on the bones to identify the creatures that rested in the grasses.
Hare shivered in the falling light. The quivering of his muscles hurt his shoulder and irritated his other joints.
The steps of the tortoise shook the ground hard enough to nearly take Hare off his feet. Another section of bridge collapsed off the wall of the ravine through the tree branches underneath.
Hare peeked back and saw the elephant-like legs below a shell large enough to serve as the lizard king’s castle. Its terrible neck stretched up into the sky ending in an expressionless face. The overlord didn’t even bother to look down on his prey.
Hare huffed. “Do you even have a human form?”
Hare took a few steps off the road toward the sun dipping into the trees beyond the ravine. He felt the grass under his three feet. He felt it brush his belly.
Hare dropped his head and fell to his side. He considered pulling himself to the edge and tumbling down the finish line cut across the Earth just a single stride away from his body. He might not win the race, but he would deny the tortoise one more kill.
“That’s not what my father would do.”
The tortoise veered off the road as it closed on the Hare in the grass. Hare had bled into his fur and mired his hide with dust and mud making it unfit for curing. The overlord clearly had other intentions for the insolence of the hare trying to escape and outrun the authority of the scales and shells.
Hare’s eyes began to slide closed. “I’m sorry, mother. I tried and I failed.”
The tortoise’s feet found bones hidden in the grass and crushed them into dust as he approached the finish line with excruciating slowness.
Her voice whispered back softly causing Hare’s ears to perk one last time. It’s okay, son. You can rest now. We will see you very soon with all your brothers and sisters.
The tortoise took his time placing his foot over Hare’s body. Once he had him centered and pinned, tortoise rested his massive weight, barely feeling the spine snap and the ribs shatter. Hare was too exhausted to scream.
The shelled overlord never glanced down. He made a slow, wide turn to return to the road and to begin the long journey back to the shell castle. Full darkness set in before the tortoise finished turning and before Hare finished dying.
The tortoise’s back foot slipped over the finish line. The monstrous reptile did not react with fear. He lifted the leg up slowly to step back on solid ground. The ground crumbled again under his weight and both his back legs slid off together. The tortoise lowered its long neck to try to lean forward, but he acted too late and too slowly. The wall crumbled and his massive body tumbled over the finish line, crashing through the trees on his back. The sharp rocks cracked his mighty shell.
Hare’s vision blurred in the darkness, but he saw the tortoise fall. Hare’s body started to transform in response to the pain. His bones slowed their change and stopped expanding in mid shift. His ears and nose remained. He had too many teeth in his partially changed mouth.
Hare groaned as life seeped out of his twisted, broken body.
The reptile overlord took a very long time to die as he expired at a slow and steady pace. Hare won the race down to death even though he never crossed the finish line.
Hare’s half-human chest hitched as he struggled to breathe his final words. “Curse the shell.”
The reptiles wrote the official version of the tale praising the pace and virtue of the tortoise, but the surviving creatures with hair kept their own telling in their hidden burrows. As the small mammals snuck out for food under the tyranny of the reptiles, some of the curious or courageous among them would venture out to the finish line to view the last stand of the hare and the hollow victory of the tortoise overlord. In the darkness, they transformed into human shapes to use their fingers. They touched Hare’s bones near the line resting peacefully in the grass. They peered over and witnessed the trees growing through the tortured shell of the monster. They whispered their secret cry of rebellion spoken by Hare and by his father before him.
“Curse the shell.”
As quickly as the words left their human lips, they regrew their fur and shrank back into their smaller bodies.
The mammals scurried back to their hidden homes dreaming of future days lived in the warmth of the sun. They hoped for lives without hiding or running. They imagined the time where they might give their war cry out loud at the gates of the lizard himself because Hare had the courage to run his final race in the sunlight of his last day of life and lead the deadly monster overlord to his finish line.
About the Author
Jay Wilburn lives with his wife and two sons in the coastal swamps of South Carolina in the southern United States. He left teaching after sixteen years to care for the health needs of his younger son and to pursue full-time writing. Both his family and his writing are doing and going well. His novels include Loose Ends with Hazardous Press and Time Eaters with Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. His work appears in Best Horror of the Year volume 5 with editor Ellen Datlow and in Zombies: More Recent Dead with Prime Books. His collections include Zombies Believe In You and a shared collection Dragonfly and the Siren with T Fox Dunham and artwork by Amy Rims. That trio is joining forces again to create another spectacular collection. Follow his many dark thoughts at JayWilburn.com and @AmongTheZombies on Twitter.
The Golden Goose
A retelling
Robert Holt
Once upon a time, on the edge of the dark forest lived a little woman with her three sons. All of her sons were special to her, and she awarded all three with nicknames for their abilities. The oldest son she named Wiser, for he was as smart as anyone in the village. Her middle son she named Kinder, for nobody had a kinder heart. The third and youngest son was Simpleton. Simpleton raged over the nickname as many of the town folks would utter the name with a sneer and treat him as though he was slow or stupid, but that was never his mother’s intention. She named her son Simpleton for his eagerness to always discover the simplest solution t
o any problem.
Simpleton lived up to his name on the first day the little woman sent her sons out into the forest to chop trees for firewood and to sell in the village. Simpleton separated from his brothers immediately and rested in the shade of an old oak tree. He could hear his brothers working long into the afternoon. Near sunset, Simpleton got up and stretched. He spotted his brother Wiser coming with his wagon filled with fine logs and timber.
“Greetings, Brother Simpleton,” Wiser said as he approached. “How did you fair today?”
Simpleton smiled. “I should say a fair bit better than you.”
“What do you mean?” The coy smile faded from Wiser’s face.
“Your logs, brother, they are clearly diseased.”
Wiser looked at his logs. “How can you tell?”
“My eyes are very sharp. I can see the tiny worms crawling between the rings in the wood.”
Wiser bent close to study the logs he had cut. Simpleton strolled up behind him. He lifted his ax in the air. He paused for a moment to decide which side of the ax would be best. The sharp side would be a sure kill, but the blunt side would leave less blood and raise less suspicion. Simpleton chose the simplest choice, and the ax fell with the blunt side down upon the back of his brother’s head. The dull thud was virtually silent amongst the clatter of the forest.
Hiding the body was Simpleton’s first instinct, but he knew the body would soon be found by the King’s dogs. Instead, Simpleton hoisted the body on the cart of wood and brought it home to his mother.
Upon seeing her first-born dead on the cart of wood, the little woman broke down into sobs. Simpleton tried to console his mother, and once Kinder returned with his bundle of wood, Simpleton told his story about how his brother had died. “A little tree sprite came upon Wiser while he was eating his cake and drinking his beer. The sprite asked for a bite, and Wiser refused. The sprite hurled a curse at Wiser. Soon thereafter, a tree Wiser had started to cut fell in the wrong direction and landed upon him. He was alive when I found him, and he told me this tale before he died.”