Eat It

Beverly was a small woman with arms that bent like bird bones at her sides. She stared down at her lap, chewing her bottom lip with two top teeth that were jagged and almost broken at the edges.

"I don't know anything," she said softly.

"You don't know anything about your husband? The man who we just found in your basement with a fish hook in his mouth and groin?" the detective asked.

She shook her head. "I know Ron. We were married weren't we. Forty three years."

The detective tossed two photos onto the metal table between them. One was of Ron on a boat, holding a large mouth bass and smiling. The other photo was of his body as they'd found him. Slumped over in a fetal position, two large fish hooks piercing him. Blood pooled under his body, soaking the dirt floor of their unfinished basement.

"Quite a contrast," the detective said.

Beverly peered at both photos. Her gray eyes were as flat as a doll's.

"He was always on that boat. Ever since he started winning those tournaments."

She pointed to the first picture. "You know he had a portrait done of that damn fish? Spent a thousand dollars on it but couldn't give me so much as a dollar for a new hairdo or new shoes. He wouldn't even buy us a new tv set. Ours still had the built in VCR. The man was a prime example of accismus. That was his vice."

"Is that why you killed him Beverly?"

"I never said that. I never said I killed him. Maybe it was one of his competitors. There was some talk of Ron cheating. Putting weights in his fish. He was never a good fisherman before. Never good at anything really. Just sat on the couch all day, watching gangster movies on that old tv set. Sometimes I'd put a dollop of salt in his coffee to see if he'd notice. He never did. The man had the taste buds of a frog."

"I can't help you unless you tell me the truth," the detective said. "You need to tell me what happened. I know you couldn't overpower him on your own. Did you lure him into that basement and smash his head open so he wouldn't struggle? Did you have help?"

Beverly smiled. "I see that fish portrait wherever I am in the house, you know. Its beady little eyes follow you. Sometimes I could hear the bass talking but it sounded far away like it came maybe from the river or the ocean. It said, "the most important thing is to build more" and "how splendid it would be... to swim among the stars".

She'd thought that a lovely idea, to swim in starlight. She'd read it in a book once. Or the fish had spoke it to her. One of those was true.

"Crazy is not going to work here Beverly. Are you trying for an insanity defense? No one is going to buy it. We found cyanide in your house. When we find it in his blood we'll have you cold."

"Is that the one that smells of bitter almonds? Ron barely touched that pie," she said, staring at the picture of Ron on his back. His blood had never looked so red. When he'd cut himself shaving or busted his knuckles on her face, it had always seemed to ooze out in a black sludge.

She wondered if there would be big screen televisions in prison. But she'd be gone then at least. Far from the house and the talking fish. Free maybe. She thought she'd like to try being free.

Reward Poster, 1928

Rachel the duck had a very boastful quack though she did nothing but lounge in her plastic kiddie pool. Lysander knew this because he was fluent in duck.

Rachel had been born with club feet and Rockwell High School had created new ones. She was in a picture there that said she was "Our Hero".

This was a lie. That felonious fowl was a flower killer.

When he took her, he only meant to frighten.

Feed the fire! He did not intend to cook the duck. Still, she stiffened and floundered, falling over dead.

Lysander buried her near the petunias.

Not Fit for Birds

Daniel was tired of cleaning up intestines. The thresher was faulty, cutting up skin and muscle but leaving organs and softer tissue to gum up the machinery. He worked into the night, brushing by stalks of bodies fashioned from grafting people and corn together.

They screamed as he turned the machine back on, the gears once again spinning flesh into food.

He felt no connection, no familial or fraternal bond. These were engineered people, not real in any sense to him. He knew real people who starved to death after the blight. His father had been one of them.

Forgetting is painful. Daniel did not want to remember his father's bruised ribs, the concavity of his chest.

He wiped the sweat from his brow, walking back into the house where he wife sat, stirring an ancient pot full of stew. Small pieces of thigh and belly floated to the top.

She was a small round woman with the face of a moon maiden. She never seemed to smile but he didn't mind that.

"I miss the birds," he said.

They'd stopped coming around when he switched the crops. Nothing to eat for them he supposed though the ravens had sometimes come and made a mess of the eyes just for the hell of it. Animals avoided his farm. Or they were all dead. He wasn't sure which was worse.

W/C 229

I like your topic here and the way divinity becomes a personal characteristic. I like the imagery that connects earth to body to eventually fire/creation. Especially love the salt/earth connecting to grains.

I think your last line is good but I might go with hellfire rather than "hell, in fire" because I think the hell connects better if it comes right after and makes for a more succinct ending.

kitchen

​

show me the

moon's belly

the bottom of her white skirt

crescent stretch marks

yellow light firefly

drive in movie

​

on the mountain immortal dogs run wild

watch out for curled tails bared teeth

each awake when tomatoes bloom

​

winter woods watch

shedding woolen wrappings of ice blanket

peaks shred revealing naked rock thigh

as spring lights the spark parting

powder snow leaving ash behind

each season a funeral procession

A Fine Catch

Dilbert watched his father pry two gold teeth out of a skull and wished his grandmother was alive. She'd have prayed as soon as they found it, dangling as if chewing through the bottom of that metal mesh on the crawfish trap. She'd have made his father bring the bones to the sheriff or a church. Maybe baked a sheet cake to raise money to bury it next to that old willow tree that had Spanish moss for hair.

All Dilbert could do was watch as Walter took the teeth then threw the skull back into the murky water where no one would ever find it again. It sunk under the new growth of weeds, the weight of bone and age pulling it down.

He wondered if he'd known whoever it was. He watched his reflection in the water and didn't say anything. His father's hand was hard and he had enough bruises already. At night, he'd lift up his shirt and count them, trying to imagine them as blessings or marks of valor or anything other than strange purple lessons that ached even after he'd healed.

Walter drove a town over to their pawnshop, trading the teeth for fifty dollars and a faded Hulk figure for Dilbert. He didn't want a toy, he mostly wanted to forget what a person looked like on the inside. He stared at the green flesh of the Hulk, imagining it stripped bare. Just a Hulk skeleton.

Dilbert couldn't sleep that night or any night after. He saw a man much like his father only this man had a smile. He held his kid up on his shoulders and their smile shone brightly with bloody teeth. He dreamed they both tried to crawl in his trailer door, demanding he give back what was stolen.

He took his Hulk and a mason jar of peach moonshine his father brewed last summer and rode his bike back out to the river. His t-shirt was soaked by the time he got to the edge and the sun had almost set.

He sat by one of the trees whose roots had dug into the mud, and held up his treasures.

"I'm sorry," he said.

He threw both in the water, watched as they hardly made a splash. He blinked hard as a dark, disembodied hand, emerged from the water to grab them both.

"Thanks." The voice sounded like a chorus of grasshoppers all moving at once.

Dilbert screamed and tripped, getting some of the muddy water on his pants. He jumped on his bike and rode away as fast as he could, jerking the wheel in his haste.

He didn't dream of the man again and he was punished for losing his Hulk and the jar of moonshine but he figured it was worth it.

After that Walter didn't scare him as much. 

WC: 475

Fourteen cats seemed like a good round number. Loth had just enough kibble in the giant bag he carried to fill each bowl with the appropriate amount.

Gar, an orange tabby he'd rescued from a garbage bin meowed in protest at the amount.

Loth bent over and hissed. "The vet says you're getting too fat. Don't blame me."

He stood upright, the bones in his back popped like fireworks. He wasn't sure if being a lich made his back hurt more in the bitter cold but it didn't help. He missed flesh some days. Or rather he missed the memory of warmth.

With the last of the food gone he'd have to bike into town or the rest of his cat herd would resort to murder and there were some very tasty looking kids in the suburb that had sprung up near his cottage several years ago.

Loth put on his heaviest robe and a pair of pink mirrored sunglasses. He had just enough magic left for a mirage spell. People saw a wizened old man with a hump and a shuffling walk. He added a multicolored scarf he'd knitted last winter to the ensemble.

He rode on his ancient red Schwinn, his robe a billow of black behind him. The closest town wasn't much of a town. Just a few stores and a post office. He went to Maggie Cooper's general store because she stocked the organic food his horde of kitties demanded.

He waved to her as he pondered a pink mouse cat toy. Goober or Gary might be into it. He heard a gasp from somewhere behind him and turned to see an old woman staring at him with her hand over her mouth. Her face was haloed in wrinkles, leaving only two small black eyes.

"Mishko Velnias?"

Loth looked down and away. "You are mistaken madam."

"No please. I have paid the price. I have sacrificed so many. But you never answered me," she sobbed.

He'd gone deaf to prayers ages ago and had been thankful for the silence. So many voices all saying the same thing: I want I want I want.

Loth shrugged. "I am not the one you named." He shuffled to the counter with his bag of cat food and one single orange. Maggie raised her eyebrows at him as the old woman followed him, pleading and crying.

"Lois, do you want me to call your grandson?" she asked the old woman.

"No, I want him to give me what he's supposed to," she yelled back. Her eyes were red and swollen as she pulled at Loth's robe.

He felt his image flickering, sputtering as his worshiper tore into him. His eyes glowed red. His horns sprouted, dripping with red. He roared and she cowered, kneeling at his feet.

"Please," she whispered.

He reached with his spirit, pulling hers free from her withered body. Her soul, black and liquid, funneled into his open mouth.

He left her body on the floor, taking his sack of kibbles and his orange. The bell on the door heralded his exit.

When he got home he touched the orange with his bone fingers, imbuing it with a tiny piece of the old woman's soul. The orange split, sprouting a small sapling bud in his palm. He would plant it next to the other fruit trees the cats liked to climb.

Beth considered her house her castle. If the HOA hadn't been watching her so closely she might have built a moat to keep riffraff out. The skateboarders and porch thieves and Cindy Harper who lived next door and kept trying to get Beth to join her knitting group, Stich and Pray. She imagined them all drowning in dirty water, nails scraping as they struggled to spit

and breathe.

She eyed the package UPS Dave just dropped off. She'd had to sternly tell the boy to come to the door each time and not just leave it without her being home. Pirates were everywhere, ready to snatch any box that looked unattended. At least now she might be able to do something about it.

She adjusted her thick silver glasses, peering at the instructions. Seemed simple enough to install a video doorbell. Her son Reggie could do it if he weren't so lazy. Or if he ever answered his phone.

A few screws later and she had it affixed to the outside of her door. The directions said to set it up on her cell phone but she never approved of a phone that traveled with you. She used the ancient laptop she'd gotten a few years ago at a garage sale instead.

Her wrinkled face smiled in delight as her front porch lit up on her computer screen.

"Finally I can catch the bastards."

Almost every night for months now one of the neighborhood brats had been leaving an unopened can of tuna at her front door. Her cupboards overflowed. Her trash became too heavy to move.

The police laughed at her, asking if she'd just forgotten she'd bought the cans. As if Beth was so old she kept purchasing cases and cases of tuna fish. In oil no less. So nasty.

What she needed was proof and she'd get it, damn their eyes. If the police wouldn't help her she'd do it herself. Reggie had left a .44 when he'd last visited ages ago. She'd done a bit of bird shooting when she was in high school. She could still hit what she aimed at. Most of the time.

She went to bed a little after eight, unable to wait the whole night.

In the morning, she found another can of tuna. No letter. No footprints. Just a single tin, shining dully in the morning sun.

Beth checked her camera feed.

"I bet it was that pimply Darrel Winthrop. He has shifty eyes."

The boy was fifteen and half black. She'd caught him snipping a rose from one of her pink lady's for mother's day. Rude.

She fast forwarded , squinting at the screen. Around ten, a figure in shadow knelt by her front door, placing a single can on her welcome mat. The figure paused and looked up. Beth leaned in. The figure's eyes glinted mirror-like in the dark. The rest of his face was shadowed behind a dark hoodie.

"Ghost," Beth whispered then shook her head. No such thing. If there were ghosts her beloved Harry would have come back to haunt her for strangling him on the toilet.

It was his fault anyway, he knew how Beth felt about her roses. He'd pissed on them! Brute.

She called Reggie, her gnarled fingers moving on her pink rotary phone.

He answered on the seventeenth ring.

"Ma I don't have time for this, the kids are late for school."

"Why are you watching them for? Rosalee left you again?" Beth said.

Reggie sighed. "What is it again Ma? Did Kathleen leave you a note again? You know you gotta stop harassing that woman. It's not her fault your paint is peeling."

Beth pursed her lips. "It is her fault. She makes that barbeque every Sunday and the propane is eating my siding. I ain't calling about that. I caught the tuna man on my doorbell camera and I'm gonna shoot him."

"Ma you're not shooting anyone. You'll go deaf or shoot yourself in the foot."

"I know how to shoot! Your daddy took me out duck hunting for years," Beth grumbled.

"Just call the police next time. I gotta go."

Beth listened to the dial tone for a long while. Her own son couldn't stand to talk to her for more than a few minutes. Ungrateful.

She loaded her gun. She was reasonably sure she could shoot the tuna miscreant on her porch. Stand your ground and all.

Reggie knocked on her door a few days later, early in the morning. He found her collapsed just inside her front door. Her floral nightgown was down around her fuzzy slippers. She held a .44 in her hand.

"Ma?" He knelt, nudging her cold body. "Shit did you shoot yourself?"

He looked but couldn't find a wound. Her wide open eyes scared him. She'd always scared him but now she seemed to be silently screaming. An unopened can of tuna was left at her feet. It had a single bullet imbedded on the side, spilling foul smelling meat. He gagged, kicking it outside but the smell lingered.

He saw her laptop on the living room coffee table. She had that doorbell camera. Maybe something was on it. He thought about calling the police but she'd been dead for a while. They could wait.

He watched the night before and the night before that. On screen, his mother opened the door, brandishing her weapon at nothing. She shot the tuna can and fell back inside.

A dark figure appeared, pulling the door shut. The porch was so shadowed he couldn't see a face at first. It wasn't until the figure knelt to put another perfect can of tuna on her welcome mat that he saw inside the hoodie. His mother's face looked back at him and hissed, exposing two sharp fangs.