Mother's Revenge

by Abuttu, Querus

  I squeeze the claws tight in my palm. A child would absolutely love these. There are three of them. Enough for a small family to make necklaces out of. I pull away from the memory of a predator. Ten paces away, I come across a paw print.

  A track, in fresh mud from the two previous days of hysterical rain. Unless that skeleton was walking ... I peer over the track mark. I’m not close enough. I squat, dip my head forward, and nearly stick my face into that massive, perfect track. The sloshing, churned wet earth around me suddenly becomes a map as the other, less impressive paw prints begin to pop to my attention. Bears, oh my.

  Am I afraid of being eaten? I don’t think they eat you; no, they maul you, drag you along the dirt and then prance upon you like an overweight cat combined with an ape. It’s a black bear, surely, despite its size. Grizzlies are farther northwest. They have got to be farther northwest. Am I afraid of being killed by a bear, or am I afraid of lying abandoned and torn up in the dirt as I bleed out? I think I may be fearless, with aberrance to pain.

  I don’t want to let the claws go, but as I absentmindedly brush them across the pocket of my mud-stained sweats, I realize my wallet’s missing. Relief or not, I’ll never be cured of idiocy. Why the fuck did I bring a wallet into the middle of the woods? So they could identify you, the voice of a shrouded thing whispers from the outer reaches of my mind. As much as I want to spit at the thought, in the cheer of daylight at least, I could almost mutter a “maybe” to myself.

  Swinging the rifle in my arms, perked up at the idea of there being worse things than coyotes in these woods, I head to retrieve the wallet, cautious now that the shadows between things could hold something. The little leather money holder is right where I left it, beside the pile of boulders, between a cluster of trees with fresh green claw marks dug into their moisture-thick trunks. Am I oblivious? Am I losing my mind? I walk up to the closest trunk. I don’t need to hold the claws up to the scratches to know they fit. Instead, I run my fingers over the scratches and wonder just how silent a big lumbering beast can be. There’s something in these woods, and it’s been right in front of me this whole time. Has it been watching me from my porch as I moan and drink my nights to waste?

  When I was little, I wondered if the world and everything and everyone I knew was fake, and if I was in a mental asylum somewhere. I think it’s a common thought experiment, or maybe I’m just nuts. Maybe I could have been a scientist somewhere. I used to wonder if I was actually alone in the woods, talking to a bunch of trees that I thought were the people in my life. At this point…

  I stick my wallet in my pocket and start running. My feet find the confidence they were missing earlier. I don’t trip, I high-step through the ever-tripping bite of roots, and my lungs—those untrained, unpracticed bastards—are my real enemy as I heave and cough and taste the cold in the air worse than anything else. The cold claws into my stomach, forming cramps. I pass by the hunched-over beast like it’s a stopped car along the side of the road. Only when it twitches do I realize it’s not a part of the forest.

  Thing’s an underhand toss away, as I veer, letting out a yell that wastes half my lung capacity, and then I’m squeezing through a trio of trees that have formed close together, thinking it won’t be able to follow me. It’s not black, but muddy, its brown fur stained with grime, like it’s a sewer bear. Idiotic curiosity causes me turn around to look at the thing and it’s chasing me, just as I expected it to, just as I pretty much willed it to. Something wrong with its face. The fur is missing in scattered patches, like it was burned. A shine emits from its eyes, like the pale glow of the moon. Each cascading extension of those four limbs hauls it ever closer. The bear is silent.

  I don’t make a beeline for home. It’s faster than me, it has to be with how almost mechanical its ability to run is. Will it tackle me or will it swipe at my ankles? Was it alligators or bears that I read about being capable of running down a sprinting man? What I do know about bears is that they will do anything to fill their great, empty belly.

  Running, even with all the desperation and what must be adrenaline—that woozy, thought-clogging feeling of action, of instinct—it can’t be an infinite thing, no matter my reason. I can’t run forever. My lungs are going to explode and my chest is pierced by pins. I collapse, dive forward onto my knees when I’ve had enough of running because I can’t go on anymore and my rifle’s fallen by my side and survival instinct with no training doesn’t give you the magic know-how to use a gun as a reflexive killing tool. I’m hunched over, ready to be violated, but it doesn’t come. The bear is gone. I am alone on the forest floor, sweating, wheezing, choking on myself, because of myself.

  I’ve lost my wallet again along with my knife. Maybe the bear has them. To the victor go the spoils. I can’t even try to run; the cramps are invasive anchors, stripping away logic. As I pick myself up, I realize the bear claws have been in my hand the whole time, dug tight into the flesh, drawing blood. I push on with the little I have left, sparing a look over my shoulder every few steps.

  The clouds are invading, choking out the sun when my home returns in my sight. It’s been nearly an hour since I gave in to the idea of a mauling and the crushing of my skull. This is real, I’m not crazy, I didn’t imagine the thing chasing me.

  I’m thinking about a cold beer, because a hot shower is out of the question. I haven’t paid my oil bill in a while. I’m slinging Dad’s rifle over my shoulder and I’m almost feeling something nice. I have a story to tell, even though I have nobody to tell it to. Nobody that I can—nobody that I want to tell it to.

  My front door is wide open and the interior of my oil-less home is black. An angry, hungry monster inhabits this place.

  Somehow it’s the bear, with the same scorched face and lunar eyes as it slowly thumbs down the steps of my porch. I raise my rifle, clutching those blood-slick claws against the side of the barrel. I fire, having aimed right for the head, right between the two silver-dollar moons. I swear, I swear it hits. I don’t know why I hear the crack of my porch being struck by a bullet, not when the bear’s face remains untouched, unmarked. Whole. No burst of blood.

  I forget even pain as the bear hauls itself toward me. My home is gone, along with the world of men. There is only the bear and me. It is beyond hungry. It has been sent to mop me up, an emissary of the forest sent forth to reclaim its kingdom. I squeeze off my rifle’s last two rounds and then toss the useless sentimental thing away as I flee into the forest.

  The bear comes from every angle. It is not a living thing but a ghost, a spirit, a mirage of the sun. One moment I can feel its hot breath on my heels and then it’s leaping out of a bush to my right. Nick by nick, it slashes the backs of my legs. Somehow it gets ahead of me, pops out of the ground like the forest has a trap door and it dives toward my chest, vanishing just as I close my eyes. Is this what happens to you when you lose your mind?

  I close my eyes once more and a jagged vice grips my ankle and begins dragging me along the forest floor as I howl and beg, my face alive with thorns and bludgeoned by rocks. No matter how many times I blink it never releases me. It’s quiet, without snarl or roar or whatever it is bears do. I’m not even sure if I can hear it ripping through the woods. That’s just my back as I crash through the underbrush.

  I tilt my head up, craning my neck, stuck in a half sit-up, trying to avoid bashing my skull in. The bear is near sprinting, pulling me with such frenzy that its energy can only come from pure emotion. The woods are chewing me up. The bear, the memory of a bear, is just a reflexive digestive pull, a swallow that sends me deep through the throat to the stomach.

  The forest doesn’t let me sleep as my body grows numb and the silence of the bear scrambles my dimming mind. I think of myself as flowing on my back down a savage river of thorns. If I were religious, I would pray, but I only believe in the finite black. The bear can shrug off all the bullets it wants, and be a thing made of shadows to its very core, but I will not accept faith, only suffering.

  I’
m not sure how long I have been free of the bear’s grip. Eventually I roll over onto my stomach and a moan escapes from my mouth as the air meets the ragged wounds pulsing along my back. If my ankle hurts at all where the thing’s teeth had met, the pain is lost in the whirlpool of every other sting and sore.

  There is logic, still, like the impulse to breathe and, some mornings, to remove myself from the floor. To switch the stove off or slip on a pair of shoes. This same logic forces me to sit up and, after a cautious bundle of minutes spent waiting for the bear’s re-emergence, to stand. Above me I see a hill. Pecked into that hill is a black mouth no different from the barrel of my gun. A cave, open and hungry.

  There is a thing about logic, and then there are a great many things to know about pain; and below what can be understood and felt, there is something else. A hunger of my own. A craving, an insane desire for something I cannot have, because death is the final barrier and its emissaries can only drag you so far. I don’t know why I limp toward that mouth in the hill. I know what I want, but I don’t know why. I don’t need answers. I don’t need the world to make sense. I don’t need sense with death, or what comes when your life veers too close to it, or all the anger, all the empty lust that follows. I stumble and have to finish climbing on bleeding hands and aching knees so I can meet the mouth, so I can give it a kiss.

  The cavern is a shallow thing, no more than shelter from wind and rain. A resting place for wretched beasts. I could just lie down and sleep, heal and live. I don’t have to go too far in before I see the scattered sticks of white along the ground. Bones, of course. Not human, after all. Sifting through the dirt, minding maggots and worms and other fellow burrowers, I come across the skulls of two cubs. Both bashed in, cracked and near ruined beyond comprehension. Hope doesn’t exist when you realize that children are not exempt. When you realize they die just like the rest of us, hope becomes a prayer that you don’t live to see just how fast the rot can spread.

  I try to deny the tears streaking down my filthy face, but they’re an element, they are impervious to manipulation. I brush a hand over one of the innocent skulls. I then turn, limping home, sure the bear is following me through the trees. I no longer run.

  The sun is falling away by the time I get home. I am not dying, I don’t think, not any faster than anybody else. I pick up my father’s rifle and eye the four blast holes scattered around my porch. I’ll need to go to the store tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even drive all the way to Home Depot. There’s work to be done around here.

  Beside the rifle, in the dirt where I left them, are the three bear claws. I don’t have anybody to give them to, so I bring them to the backyard, where there may have once been a garden and may yet be again. Crouching, half keeling over to the point that I just may spend the night out here, I set about digging a little hole. I feel the presence of something mighty, scorned and sorrowful behind me. I place the claws into the earth, and as I bury them the image of the necks they might have once adorned turns to ash.

  Nick Manzolillo is a Rhode Island native who finds himself living in Manhattan. His writing has appeared both online and in anthologies such as Thuglit, Wicked Witches, and World Unknown Review Vol. III. He is earning an MFA in creative and professional writing from Western Connecticut State University.

  Mud Babies

  by

  Soumya Sundar Mukherjee

  When the horse-drawn carriage was moving through the Fields of Charity of the Good Folk village, John Weldon remembered a woman’s face and wondered if she were still alive.

  The sun had already set; the last copper glow of the sky was still reflected in the vast plains of the Fields of Charity. Crickets sang from the wanton hedges. The horses galloped over the darkening fields.

  Somewhere in these fields . . .

  The carriage neared his mansion in the village. Weldon could see its silhouette standing like a giant bat against the liquid darkness of the newborn evening. Two of the servants came to the front door to greet their master, who had come home after spending quite a few years in the city.

  The police could not find any proof against him and no one was eager to bear witness against him. The locals could not even dream of telling something against Weldon in the court. The philosophy of the villagers was simple enough.

  Life is not a thing you throw away for others, even for good people.

  Weldon stepped down from the carriage. He was a tall man with high cheekbones and a pointed nose. As he descended, his overcoat flapped in the wind. He peered up at the sky. Rain clouds were gathering over his head. The servants bowed to him and toted his luggage inside.

  “Is Bert here?” he asked.

  One of the servants answered. “Yes, master. Mr Smith has received your letter. He is waiting for you in the drawing room.”

  “Tell him I’m home. I’ll meet him after half an hour.”

  “As you wish, master.”

  The servant accompanied him to the door of his room. Weldon hesitated and then asked, “Have you seen Old Nick’s daughter recently? Is she alive?”

  The servant, too, hesitated before answering. “Yes, master, Martha is alive, but . . .”

  “But?”

  “She is insane, sir.”

  Weldon smiled to himself. “Very well. You may leave now.”

  After half an hour, he strolled into the drawing room where Bert was reading a book by the fireplace. Weldon was happy to see a friendly face. “Hello, old friend! Reading books? That’s quite a change, I’d say.”

  Bert stood up from his chair. “Hello, John. You’ve changed very little in these years.”

  Weldon sat on the wine-colored sofa and ran his hand along the fabric. It was plush, soft, and seemed as if it were not subjected to much use. He gazed at Bert. “So many grey hairs. You have really grown old.”

  Bert smiled. “With you gone, I was not very popular in the village, you know. They still think that we did it, although none of them have the courage to say it to our face.”

  “Are you repentant, Bert?”

  Bert looked up at him. “God dries the tears of the man whom he wants to send to hell.”

  Weldon lit a cigar. He offered one to his friend, but Bert shook his head. “Since when,” Weldon said, “has Bert Smith become a believer in heaven and hell?”

  “It settled in gradually,” Bert said, gazing at the crackling fire. “Like blots of ink. You drop them one by one on a heap of paper and wait; they stain even the lowest of the stack.”

  “You think too much.” Weldon let out a perfect ring of smoke.

  “And don’t you?”

  “I don’t let it trouble me anymore. What is done is done.”

  Bert kept quiet for a while, and then said, “John, don’t you think what we’ve done was wrong?”

  Weldon smiled again. “We’ve done nothing, my friend. The court thinks that we are innocent.”

  “Not all courts are the same, John. And neither are all judges.”

  “Oh, please stop your Judgment Day sermons, Bert. We did what we had to do.”

  “It was a child, John! Your child!”

  “You don’t need to remind me of that, Bert!” Weldon’s voice had become harsh.

  Bert shivered unknowingly and fell silent.

  In the fireplace, tinder cracked continuously.

  Then Bert spoke of something Weldon had been thinking for some time. “Do you know anything about Martha?”

  Weldon started. “Um. . . . Yes. I just heard that she has gone mad.”

  Bert said, “People are saying that she is not mad. She has been visited by the Spirit of the Fields.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Bert, don’t start those old wives’ tales now!”

  “I’m just saying what people say,” Bert said with a little quiver in his voice. “And what they say is not good for us.”

  “When have they ever said anything that’s good for us, eh?” Weldon said angrily. “They envy us, Bert, because we’re wealthy. They try to occupy the lands for
ever. The only medicine for those peasant fools is the whip. And if the whip does not work, you know what to do!” He imitated a gun with his fingers and fired two imaginary shots at the closed window.

  Bert said, “Martha has changed completely, John. She looks like a hundred-year-old hag now. Looking at her, you can’t even imagine that she hasn’t passed thirty yet. They say that after that night she used to wander in the Fields of Charity in search of the child. And then the spirit of the earth possessed her. And now she wanders in the village like a reverent prophetess. People hear what she says and they claim that she can see the future.”

  “And what’s the future she has seen?”

  “That her child will rise from the earth.”

  “And people believe that? That’s how prophetic she has become?”

  “John, she predicted that you’ll come back this month. Nobody in the village but me knew it.”

  “What? She predicted my return? When?”

  “Two weeks ago. She had no way of knowing it. Not even I knew then that you were coming back. And now, I’m sure, people are talking about her other prophecies.”

  “What are they, pray?”

  “That her child will come back from the earth, and . . .”

  “And?”

  “And the earth will take blood as payment to raise the dead.”

  Weldon made a thoughtful hmm inside his throat. He never showed his weakness in front of anyone, not even his closest friend. But inside his chest, he was feeling a certain kind of uneasiness.

  Bert got up from his seat. “Take care, John. I am really happy that you are back. But I tell you, we should not have done those things. They say that she has been waiting for your return. I’m not afraid of anything, but I feel that I should not have done those things. I know that it’s too late now, but still, I’m sorry for that night.”