Ewan Marsh never believed in mystics, psychics or any of that paranormal nonsense, but he stepped into the tiny shop with bright red and blue neon lights in the window announcing
Authentic Tarot and Palm Readings @ Reasonable Prices
because it was Sunday night, nearly every other place was closed, and he was utterly bored out of his skull.
It was a hole in the wall, barely larger than a closet, walls covered in dark curtains. A round table covered with a tablecloth that matched the drapes sat in the center of the space. He was directed by hand gesture to take a seat in a padded wooden chair across the table from Madame Siora, skin of alabaster, lips of blood and eyes of emerald.
“Tired of living in the moment?” Madame Siora asked. “Of making a blind guess at the correct path that will lead you to what you desire? Are you ready to seek the counsel of one who is attuned to the forces that science and logic cannot define or understand?”
“I have to give you credit,” Ewan said. “You actually managed to say that with a straight face.”
Madame Siora smiled. “Doubters make the best believers,” she said. “Please, may I see your palm?”
With his patented cheesy grin in place, Ewan proffered his hand…and seventy-five dollars later, he knew this woman would be his wife.
They broke dawn together and over reheated Chinese takeout and beer, he learned that Madame Siora’s birth name was Kiera Houghton, and when they became serious and knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together, Ewan, being the old fashioned type, wanted to ask Kiera’s parents for her hand in marriage. Kiera told him that was absolutely not necessary, but Ewan insisted, so she arranged a date.
Ewan arrived early at the Houghton Family residence, but Kiera was running late because of a client who was paying serious money for an in-depth reading. Kiera’s mother, Tegan, welcomed Ewan with open arms. He must have caught her in the middle of a meditation session because she was dressed in a long velvet robe, deep crimson with some sort of crest over the right breast, and the house was illuminated only by candlelight.
“If I’ve come at a bad time, I can wait in the car until Kiera arrives,” Ewan said apologetically.
“Don’t be silly,” Tegan said. “It gives us a chance to get to know one another.”
Mrs. Houghton led Ewan to a room that was too large to be a sitting room and too small to be the living room. The walls were lined with tapestries depicting the darker nature of the Old Testament of the Bible, and the room was devoid of furnishings besides the sturdy long table varnished in a dark red lacquer in the center and the surrounding medieval metal candlestands.
Tegan Houghton moved with the grace of a cat and stood almost nose to nose with Ewan. She turned her back on him and asked, “Can you get the zipper, please?”
It took Ewan a moment to understand what she was asking. He located the zipper in the back of the robe, fumbled with the hook and unzipped the robe down to the small of her back.
“Thank you,” Tegan said, as she turned to face Ewan again, still a hair’s breadth away from touching noses. She did a little shimmy and the robe slid off her shoulders and gathered around her ankles, exposing her nude body.
At least Ewan thought she was nude. He wouldn’t allow himself to look down. She was Kiera’s mother, after all.
“W-will Mr. Houghton be joining us?” Ewan stammered.
“Jordan is running errands, picking up a few last-minute items for dinner tonight,” Tegan said with breath that smelled of honey and mint. “He was supposed to be here by now but he always runs late. A bad habit Kiera picked up from him.”
“Um, Mrs. Houghton?”
“Tegan, please.”
“Tegan, I, um, don’t really feel comfortable being in the same room with you while you’re naked. If anyone walked in right now, they might get the wrong idea.”
Tegan laughed. “If either Jordan or Kiera walked in right now, they would know exactly what was going on. They know how I am. I love the naked form, Ewan. May I call you Ewan?”
“Sure, no problem.”
“This was the way we were intended to be before that silly original sin was committed. Here I stand before you, naked and exposed, with all my secrets revealed. Do you want to see my secrets, Ewan?”
“No,” Ewan answered, sweat beading on his brow. “You’re entitled to your secrets.”
“How generous,” Tegan said, wiping sweat from Ewan’s temple and tasting it. “If it is too hot for you in here, feel free to strip down to your level of comfort. There is no dress code in this house.”
“I’m fine.”
“But I am not fine, Ewan,” Tegan Houghton said, her voice an octave lower than a moment ago. You stand here before me tonight for the first time and you have not yet become initiated into the mysteries of the ancient House of Houghton.”
“Um, I think there’s been some misunderstanding. I’m not here to be initiated into anything. I’m just here to ask for Kiera’s hand in marriage.”
“And you believe that my husband and I would grant you access to our daughter without first testing your mettle to determine if you are worthy of joining our inner circle?”
“That thought never really crossed my mind, if I’m being totally honest. I figured you’d either say yes or no.”
“Well, now that you have been made aware, you may be wondering what is going to happen, so I will tell you. Before proceeding to the mysteries, it is, of course, necessary for the mind and soul of the initiate to become purged and to be made clean.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“You are going to need to become in tune with us by submitting to a very simple process of control,” Tegan’s eyes seemed to grow somehow, filling up Ewan’s entire field of vision.
“C-control?”
“You will need to place yourself under the guidance of the House of Houghton.”
“Please, can I just go back to the car and wait for Kiera? Maybe she can explain all this to me in a way I’ll understand.”
“Do you refuse to be initiated?”
“I mean, I really love your daughter and I want to be with her for the rest of my life…”
“Then you are decided!”
“Well, I’m not so…”
“Be silent! And relax,” Tegan took Ewan by the chin and turned his head in the direction of the nearest candle.
“What’re you doing?”
“Calm your breathing and keep your eyes fixed on this candle flame.”
“But why?”
“Shhh, just relax and keep your eyes fixed. Before receiving entry into the House of Houghton, your mind must be white and blank. You are already feeling sleepy. Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” Ewan heard his own lazy voice coming from outside himself.
“Your mind is becoming quite blank. You feel that, don’t you?”
“Yes, quite blank.” His concerns were evaporating level by level.
“And you will obey my every command.”
“Yes, obey.” It was less stressful to obey than to resist.
“Good. Now, remove your shirt and expose your bare chest.”
“Yes, remove shirt.” It was too hot in this room.
“Now climb upon this altar and lie on your back.”
“Yes, lie back.” Ewan climbed onto the table and did as he was told.
“Now, are you prepared to sacrifice everything to have our daughter?”
“Yes, sacrifice everything.” It was true. He would have given everything to be with Kiera.
“Even your heart for hers?”
“Yes, my heart.” It was the very least he could do.
From its special housing secured beneath the table, Tegan Houghton unsheathed a ceremonial dagger engraved with symbols from a time before language, gripped the handle in both hands and raised it above her head.
“Mom!” Kiera yelled as she burst into the room. “Will you stop fucking around with Ewan, put some goddamned clothes on, and snap him out of the trance, for chrissake!”
“Oh, come on, honey,” Tegan turned to her daughter and smiled. “I wasn’t really going to sacrifice your boyfriend.”
“Fiancé,” Kiera corrected.
“I was just having a little fun, that’s all. Who knew he’d be this susceptible?”
“Fun? You were about to stab him in the heart!”
“Only a little. You know we can bring him back.”
“Yeah, but you’re not the one who has to make love to a reanimated corpse!”
“Who says I haven’t?”
“Ewww! Too much information, Mom! I want this one alive, not all necromanced up like all the others, do you get me? In his original condition!”
“But look at his chest…it’s so stabbable. Just a quick one?”
“Mom, I’m not playing with you!”
“All right, all right, spoilsport, but if I let this one live, you have to promise to make some new friends and invite them over so your father and I can have a little fun. We don’t get out as much as we used to.”
“It’s a deal,” Kiera said. “And I know whom I’ll bring. Remember I mentioned that psychic shop that just opened right across the street from me? Turns out it’s run by some Eastern European outfit that’s using it as a front for a bordello.”
“Works for me,” Tegan Houghton said. “And just so you know, I think this one really loves you. He didn’t look at my body once. Imagine ignoring this pretty piece of flesh?”
Erp! Kiera placed a hand to her mouth. “I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. Now, get this all cleaned up before Dad gets home, and not a word of this to him! I’m not in the mood to hear him questioning Ewan’s manhood for not trying to cop a feel off you.”
“He might have a point.”
“I can reanimate, too, you know, so don’t push me,” Kiera warned. “And you never know, a good resurrection might just help you to mature.”
“Good luck with that,” Tegan said with a smirk, before slipping back into her robe. As she prepared to bring Ewan out of the trance, she leaned and whispered in his ear, “You’d better not let anyone slice into that heart of yours before I get a crack at it.”
“I heard that!”
“Honey, retrace your steps,” Tegan said, rolling her eyes. “I think you lost your sense of humor along the way.”
Everyone who ever met her, knew there was something wrong with the little girl, but not one single solitary soul could tell you what it was that set her apart from the rest of humanity.
She loved her parents dearly, was respectful to adults, kind to animals and everyone she met, and never spoke a bad word against anyone or anything, never threw a tantrum, and was never angry or upset with anyone over any matter, not even when people were unkind to her.
But each time Susa’s head touched the pillow, the young girl would spend her sleeping hours traipsing through the dreams of the unkind others, pulling them into a phantasmagorical landscape which showcased the death of everything, their loved ones, hopes, ideas, memories, and every other type of death both real and imagined.
Not as revenge or punishment, mind you, but as an example of the rewards that awaited those determined to remain on the wrong side of her good temperament.
Dean wondered how long it had been since death set in? Had it actually mattered anymore? Of what relevance was time to the deceased? Especially when there were other niggling concerns such as not being able to move a single inch in any given direction, trapped within a decaying coffin of flesh. That was the toughest adjustment to contend with. And what was the explanation? What answers could he have offered himself this night, the last of his life, the first of his death, in the wee slight moments after the coil of mortality had been sufficiently shuffled off and he lingered in the strangled silence of limbo while the haunts of regrets past swooped down like raptors from on high?
There wasn’t only the matter of kidnapping and molestation, as if he could have simply left it at that. There were also the mutilations, amputations, beheadings, and cannibalism that needed to be addressed. All sorts of mental distractions that, in the short run, served as curative methods to hush the whispers that shouted malevolence into the folds of his brain. Dean explored them all as he was never quite sure how much of which activity would have been necessary to ground him back down to normalcy.
There was also the presence of the obfuscation demons who frolicked in public places, daring the rest of society to gaze upon their putrescence, that forever clung to Dean’s flesh and flashed serrated toothed smiles from their insatiable maws, fingers tapping, awaiting the next feast. One million beasts ever at the ready, awaiting a sign or signal from him that the carnage that fueled their existence was about to begin.
Go on, they prompted, we understand what you need to do. We won’t judge you because we understand how difficult it was to treat meat with dignity. We can see it all so clearly from where we are.
They made it seem so obvious to Dean. Just one nudge at the right moment in the right direction. One glimmer of hope that the nightmares would end and he would find peace at last. One suggestion from the proper imp who offered him the precise piece of the puzzle that was needed in order to view the larger picture.
Pick your targets, that’s the ticket. The demons advised. Start small.Tiny murders can be done, they’re done all the time. Success stories abound. We can read you a list. Start today with a little ‘un and keep your focus there. Lay down a simple execution that you’re happy with. A death can be executed a thousand ways and despite how clairvoyant you think you are, you can’t predict the pleasure you’ll derive from adding this exciting little twist in the structure of your average day.
And of course, you can kill anytime. Why don’t you kill? You never kill when you get like this. Why don’t you just kill? It’s not a burden, not at all. Not killing is the burden, don’t you see? Look what happens when you don’t kill. We get to this point of crisis where nothing works. It all gets broken like a skull shattered with the claw end of a hammer and you can’t reach down to gather up all the skull fragments because you’re holding your grey matter inside your head and we’re saying let’s stop the skull from shattering in the first place. We can turn the hammer away from you and swing the claw end at someone else. But you have to help out on your end and let us know you’re reaching for the hammer.
And eventually, we’ll get to a place where you don’t take every godforsaken murder you commit personally. It’s not always about you and where your soul will visit when you die and you’re making these assumptions and it creates all this drama. All the outbursts, then the realization that what you’re doing serves the greater good, then the embarrassment from the remorse and the humiliation from the shame.An endless tug of war needlessly played against yourself until you just feel tortured about feeling tortured. And you see this as somehow easier than slitting a random throat for our bounty?
Perhaps what troubles you is you don’t believe that our words, our cause has merit. Fair play. Why should you trust the imps? We’ve never trusted anyone’s word. We’ve never followed a single command that anyone has given. And who has really? Is that ever how it’s done once you’ve been blessed with the gift of free will? The heart wants what it wants and who can deny it? What does yours want?
That was the question that ran through Dean’s mind. What did his heart want? Love? What good was that? Even if it wasn’t too late, what would it matter if the whole world lined up to love him if there was no penetration? Knowing what the heart wanted would be an unsolved mystery that would plague him in the grave.
And he would have eternity to hunt for clues. As the imps who turned on him abandoned him and found another, who in turn slaughtered Dean in much the same manner that he himself had killed so many others.
His soul should have wept as the demons tore into his flesh, but the truth of the matter was he finally had something to occupy his mind.
And that was the grace he found in death. The peace to deconstruct an unsolvable mystery.
Aida was awakened by the gamey scent of wet dog fur amalgamated with mildew, blood and rancid breath. Instinctively, she reached for her husband’s side of the bed to find it empty and soaked with sweat. She rose to sitting and once her eyes adjusted to the darkness, her hands flew to her mouth in order to stifle a scream. There was a figure crouched in the corner of the bedroom, half hidden in the black slashes of shadow. It was moulting from translucent skin and changing in the process into a thing that resembled no man or beast, like the stuff and nonsense creatures of fish wife tales, only it hadn’t occurred at the fall of dusk or when the full moon was at its apex. No, this transformation began at the hour of the wolf, when the stars faded into pitch and the sounds of nature were lulled into unnatural silence.
At first, Aida feared this changeling had devoured her husband but as it turned to look at her she noticed that its eyes belonged to Benjamin, the man she had loved before she knew what the word meant. It was those very same eyes that studied her now, and she thought she detected the creature’s internal struggle, being torn between a deep-rooted love and overpowering hunger as if it was trying to puzzle out how to satiate its appetite without breaking its own heart.
During a riot in Hell, a breakout occurs in which 666 souls escape to wreak havoc on Earth. Satan has his hands full restoring balance to his domain, so he makes a deal with the Plague Doctor, the Butcher Ghoul, and Grisanos the Griffin to track down the malevolent souls and return them all to Hell.
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“Nothing will ever harm you when I am near,” Alethea said, her voice mild and her breath moist with the promise of spring laced with the potential of a budding romance.
“That is not true,” Calvin said. “This is all a trick to lure me into dropping my defenses.”
“You do not trust me?” the she-demon who wore the face of a human seemed genuinely injured by the remark. “Do you see me as the weak-minded do, as some sort of heathen monster?”
“I meant no offense, miss, believe me,” Calvin answered, backing away as slow as humanly possible for he was taught as a young lad that immortal beings take no notice of unhurried movements. “It is simply against my religious beliefs to engage in amorous congress with The Beast.”
“And there we have it,” Alethea said as her gaze slid off his innocent, blanched face. “The sad truth and the final nail in your coffin. Before I send you from this wretched thing you call existence, know one thing: I would have protected you with my life til my undying day had you only accepted me as I am. Now, however, I will feast on your flesh and bake my bread with your bones.”
In Relic, directed by Natalie Erika James and written by James and Christian White, Kay (Emily Mortimer) receives a call from the police that her mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) has gone missing which prompts Kay and her grown daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) to travel to their remote family home to investigate.
When they arrive, they find the house is full of clutter and mold and certain sections appear to be deteriorating and Post-It Notes are tacked up in every room with reminders like “set the alarm” and others with warnings like “do not follow it.” Kay remarks that Edna is sometimes forgetful but it’s clear the elderly woman is suffering from dementia.
As is the norm with horror films, there are creepy, unexplainable noises everywhere inside the house, a room (in this case, a walk-in closet) with a lock that spells trouble for anyone who enters inside, and one of the characters, Kay, is plagued by spooky dreams. I don’t mean to diminish this film by any means but some of the tropes simply weren’t handled very well, such as, Kay and Sam hear a noise coming from inside a wall in the living room, a loud thud in response to Kay’s knock and something massive is moving up inside the wall seemingly following a large path of mold. So, what do they do? Why they ignore it, of course. Move along, audience, nothing to see here. Now, let’s inspect Kay’s dream:
Kay is following a shadowy figure through the foggy woods and is led to a rundown cabin (wouldn’t be a respectable horror film without a cabin in the woods) and the interior is covered head to toe in mold. A naked, old, decrepit man is sitting on a bed and there are a series of jump cuts of decaying animals with the sound of buzzing flies and falls off the bed and there’s a jump cut to a decayed corpse who opens his pitch-black eyes just as Kay wakes up.
In the morning, Kay is drawn to the kitchen by the whistle of a tea kettle and finds Edna making a cuppa. The family doctor makes a house visit and despite the large black and purple bruise on Edna’s chest, that she can’t explain, the old woman seems to be in good physical health and has her mental faculties about, though she won’t say where she’s been. The doctor recommends that Kay and Sam stay with Edna to monitor her condition. Kay sensibly decides to look for a nursing home for her mother despite Sam’s protestations.
While cleaning the house, Sam finds a sketchbook from her granddad, and in it is a picture of the cabin from Kay’s dream. It turns out the cabin was the first house on the property, occupied by Kay’s great grandfather who died abandoned by his family. The cabin was torn down but the windows were rescued and reused for the house they’re currently staying in.
Edna’s dementia is getting worse. She’s talking to people who aren’t there, remarking about how unfamiliar the house seems, cutting her hand with a knife, throwing violent tantrums, eating photographs, and burying photo albums in the woods to keep those memories safe.
Sam, in the meanwhile, returns to that creepy walk-in closet and discovers it’s deeper than it appears. Past a pile of items in the back is an entire labyrinth of crawl spaces within but when she tries to turn back, she finds herself lost.
And that’s when things really get crazy. And nope, I’m not gonna tell ya what happens next. I’ve said too much already. If you really want to know, go watch the film for yourself.
So, would I recommend Relic? I suppose I would, though, fair warning, if you’re looking for jump-out-of-your-seat scares or cover-your-eyes-and-peek-through-your-fingers gore, you’re barking up the wrong film. Natalie Erika James’ directorial debut is a well-paced slow burn that successfully creates a unsettling atmosphere with superb acting, but if I had my druthers, I would have liked to see the story played straight without the gimmicky tropes that served no actual purpose other than to make it feel like a “horror” film and having Kay and Sam react to the bizarre and unexplainable occurrences happening before their eyes in a more honest and realistic fashion would have sold me even further. Cutting away from terrifying moments without the characters doing a proper investigation just to move the plot along (it happens twice) took me out of the film. Having said that, you could do a lot worse with 90 minutes of your life.
Once there was a kindly woman who was known all about the town as Lovely Lucy, not so much for her appearance, for she was endowed with plain features—which wasn’t a bad thing at all—but she was called this because she was arguably one of the sweetest people who ever walked the face of the planet. The only parts of her life that suffered were her love life and her inability to bear children.
One morning, Lucy went to market and spoke with the town sculptor, who made statues large and small, some for himself and some which he sold. Lucy hadn’t much money so she explained what she wanted to do and begged the sculptor to spare some clay and promised to pay him another day. The sculptor remembered how Lucy had brought soup and sat by his bedside when he had taken ill, and gladly gave her as much of his special clay as she could carry, free of charge.
Thanking the sculptor for his kindness, Lucy rushed home and began working on a life-sized statue of a boy, aged five. She made the little boy perfect. His reddish-brown features depicted an unblemished beauty and innocence such as no real boy had ever possessed. Although she had no skill at sculpting, she crafted the statue with such love that upon first glance it seemed to be a live boy standing still. She took great care in painting her little angel, making his eyes blue like the sky, his lips and cheeks pink like the sunset and his hair black as twilight.
Lucy marveled at her creation. She held his little clay hand, kissed his rosy cheek, and told him many times a day how much she loved him. When she went out to market, he was always in her mind, and she searched for presents for him – flat, smooth rocks for skipping across the lake, seashells for tooting like horns, and twigs and vines woven into a ball. She bartered her baked goods for hand-me-down children’s clothing and dressed him in different outfits each day. She even brought him a puppy from the neighbor’s litter for company while she was away.
Lucy was not able to manage the other part of her suffering as easily. For reasons unknown to anyone, she attracted the wrong sort of suitors and was far too kind of heart to dismiss them, despite their many transgressions against her. It pained the townsfolk to see a woman so intelligent in all other respects remain so foolish in love.
Her most recent failed relationship was with a traveler who suspected her of being unfaithful one day when she had gone out to market, so he barred her from her own house and drew obscene pictures of her and posted them about town. Lucy begged and pleaded with the traveler and after a week or so, he changed his opinion and let her back into her home to be reunited with her clay boy.
That evening the traveler fixed her dinner and his mouth was sweet with words of love and a possible reconciliation. Cautious at first, Lucy finally let her guard fall, assured that his feelings and his intentions were genuine. That was the last thing she remembered before she awoke the following afternoon, face down in her bedding. She felt groggy and her body ached in unspeakable places as though she had been violated. She knew she had been drugged.
Lucy reported the incident to the authorities. The traveler confronted her in public, on the road from the market, after the authorities questioned him. Wishing to avoid an argument, she simply turned to walk away. Her next waking recollection was being bound to a chair in her home. The traveler had struck her a cowardly blow to the back of the head. She was helpless as he raged against her with rock and branch. But fortune smiled upon her when a neighbor heard her cries of anguish and contacted the authorities. This time, he was imprisoned.
From his prison cell, the traveler requested an audience with Lucy, and she, having a forgiving nature, went to visit. And his tongue was dipped in honey and he spoke sweetness and there was yet again talk of a possible reconciliation, which she honestly considered.
All was calm and happy between Lucy and the traveler when he was once again a free man. They sat together and talked, went out to the seashore and walked, and the traveler also lavished attention on the clay boy. All seemed right with the world and Lucy’s life was as close to being perfect as it had ever been.
Until one night she bolted upright out of a sound sleep and found the traveler standing over her, eyes doused in rage.
“I know you play me for a fool!” He spat through gritted teeth. “I know you have taken a lover! Who is it? The neighbor? The sculptor? Tell me who it is or you will never know a moment’s peace ever again!”
When she did not answer, he stormed out of the room and Lucy hoped he would leave the house but instead the sound of his thunderous footsteps headed in the direction of her private room—the room where the clay boy lived.
“No!” she cried as she dashed from her bed.
In the private room, she found the traveler with the wood axe resting over one shoulder. He stood next to her perfect little boy.
“Shhh,” he said. “If you wake him up, I will have to kill him.”
Lucy hadn’t a clue what to do so she started begging for the statue’s life, whispering as not to anger the traveler.
“What can I do?” she kept asking him. “What can I do to make this right?”
The traveler commanded her to her knees and she did this without a second thought. “Down on all fours.” And she complied. Then he made her crawl from the room backward, back into her bedroom.
“Now, on your knees,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Close your eyes and smile.” She was nervous, of course, but she obeyed. The next thing she felt was the ax handle as it smashed into her mouth, shattering her front teeth.
“Your life is mine! Your sad statue is mine! You both will cease to exist if I so wish it!” the traveler ranted.
She felt his foot on her shoulder, pushing her over, toppling her flat on her back. She wanted to look at him but was afraid, so she squeezed her eyes shut as he straddled her and beat her. Her head swam with pain, but Lucy knew she couldn’t scream for fear of this madman destroying her little boy, so she took the beating until she passed out.
Lucy dreamed she that she was an eagle soaring through clouds misted with morning dew above a river where children frolicked and although she was too high to hear the sounds of their tiny voices, she knew they were happy and having fun. But something tugged at her tail feathers like a dragging weight, pulling her back down to a place she did not want to go, a place of pain and sorrow—
When she woke up, regaining consciousness piece by piece, she was surrounded by the sharp claws of searing pain that pawed at her like a hungry animal. As her mind struggled for clarity she wondered where she was. In her bed? But how did she get there?
All around, the walls were covered in blood, so much blood. Too much to be her own. Then she saw the bits and pieces. Parts that belonged at one time to a whole, red soaked clumps of the remnants of the traveler. Divided from one another and from life itself by the wood ax buried in the man’s severed head.
She looked at her hands. Had she done this terrible thing? Then she heard a voice, tiny tingly, that chirped in song, “Not to worry, not to fear, everything is fine, Mama, I am here.”
She stared at a living boy whose eyes were blue as the sky, cheeks the color of the sunset and hair as black as twilight.
He hugged her neck and kissed her cheek and whispered, “I love you, too.”
About Strong Roots Amongst the Clay: As a kid I never had much interest in fairy tales. In fact, I hated them. My mother told me that someone had given her a book about Squanto, also known as Tisquantum—the Native American of the Patuxet tribe who assisted the Pilgrims after their first winter in the New World—thinking it was a book of fairy tales. And where Mother Goose and The Brothers Grimm failed to put me at rest at night, the adventures of Squanto did the job nicely.
And I wouldn’t fully appreciate the cultural richness and power of fairy tales until revisiting them in the 1980’s. For the longest time I searched for something to spark an idea for a fairy tale story that I probably would never bother writing—there’s a difference between the wanting of a thing and the doing of a thing.
Then one day a story was relayed to me about a coworker at a retail job that I absolutely hated and the first thought that popped into my mind—after showing proper concern for my coworker, of course—was to give my fairy tale story a spin.
At the time I wrote the story, I wasn’t a fan of the fairy tale narration. I didn’t like reading it and I didn’t like writing it. I’m still not a big fan of a lot of the story’s voice, but finally sitting down and writing a fairy tale piece taught me appreciation of it.
I’m still not sure if I like the ending or not. There’s a fine line between chilling and cheesy and I’m not sure which side I’m on.
Dean wondered how long it had been since death set in? Had it actually mattered anymore? Of what relevance was time to the deceased? Especially when there were other niggling concerns such as not being able to move a single inch in any given direction, trapped within a decaying coffin of flesh. That was the toughest adjustment to contend with. And what was the explanation? What answers could he have offered himself this night, the last of his life, the first of his death, in the wee slight moments after the coil of mortality had been sufficiently shuffled off and he lingered in the strangled silence of limbo while the haunts of regrets past swooped down like raptors from on high?
There wasn’t only the matter of kidnapping and molestation, as if he could have simply left it at that. There were also the mutilations, amputations, beheadings, and cannibalism that needed to be addressed. All sorts of mental distractions that, in the short run, served as curative methods to hush the whispers that shouted malevolence into the folds of his brain. Dean explored them all as he was never quite sure how much of which activity would have been necessary to ground him back down to normalcy.
There was also the presence of the obfuscation demons who frolicked in public places, daring the rest of society to gaze upon their putrescence, that forever clung to Dean’s flesh and flashed serrated toothed smiles from their insatiable maws, fingers tapping, awaiting the next feast. One million beasts ever at the ready, awaiting a sign or signal from him that the carnage that fueled their existence was about to begin.
Go on, they prompted, we understand what you need to do. We won’t judge you because we understand how difficult it was to treat meat with dignity. We can see it all so clearly from where we are.
They made it seem so obvious to Dean. Just one nudge at the right moment in the right direction. One glimmer of hope that the nightmares would end and he would find peace at last. One suggestion from the proper imp who offered him the precise piece of the puzzle that was needed in order to view the larger picture.
Pick your targets, that’s the ticket. The demons advised. Start small.Tiny murders can be done, they’re done all the time. Success stories abound. We can read you a list. Start today with a little ‘un and keep your focus there. Lay down a simple execution that you’re happy with. A death can be executed a thousand ways and despite how clairvoyant you think you are, you can’t predict the pleasure you’ll derive from adding this exciting little twist in the structure of your average day.
And of course, you can kill anytime. Why don’t you kill? You never kill when you get like this. Why don’t you just kill? It’s not a burden, not at all. Not killing is the burden, don’t you see? Look what happens when you don’t kill. We get to this point of crisis where nothing works. It all gets broken like a skull shattered with the claw end of a hammer and you can’t reach down to gather up all the skull fragments because you’re holding your grey matter inside your head and we’re saying let’s stop the skull from shattering in the first place. We can turn the hammer away from you and swing the claw end at someone else. But you have to help out on your end and let us know you’re reaching for the hammer.
And eventually, we’ll get to a place where you don’t take every godforsaken murder you commit personally. It’s not always about you and where your soul will visit when you die and you’re making these assumptions and it creates all this drama. All the outbursts, then the realization that what you’re doing serves the greater good, then the embarrassment from the remorse and the humiliation from the shame.An endless tug of war needlessly played against yourself until you just feel tortured about feeling tortured. And you see this as somehow easier than slitting a random throat for our bounty?
Perhaps what troubles you is you don’t believe that our words, our cause has merit. Fair play. Why should you trust the imps? We’ve never trusted anyone’s word. We’ve never followed a single command that anyone has given. And who has really? Is that ever how it’s done once you’ve been blessed with the gift of free will? The heart wants what it wants and who can deny it? What does yours want?
That was the question that ran through Dean’s mind. What did his heart want? Love? What good was that? Even if it wasn’t too late, what would it matter if the whole world lined up to love him if there was no penetration? Knowing what the heart wanted would be an unsolved mystery that would plague him in the grave.
And he would have eternity to hunt for clues. As the imps who turned on him abandoned him and found another, who in turn slaughtered Dean in much the same manner that he himself had killed so many others.
His soul should have wept as the demons tore into his flesh, but the truth of the matter was he finally had something to occupy his mind.
And that was the grace he found in death. The peace to deconstruct an unsolvable mystery.
I opened the apartment door performing my famous grocery juggling act, organic cotton bags of the heavier items in each hand with two more sacks containing lighter stuff dangling off my wrists. I could have pulled out the shopping cart and saved myself the hassle of lugging the load from the supermarket, true, but the building’s elevator was on the fritz yet again and I didn’t relish the thought of pulling my arms out of their sockets by dragging the cart up seven flights of stairs one agonizingly slow step at a time. Slamming the front door shut with my heel, I went to the kitchen and flicked the light switch with my nose—and nearly dropped the bags.
There was someone standing in the kitchen.
My husband was at work and Katy was watching my daughter so the apartment was supposed to be empty but there this stranger stood. Terror trapped the scream in my throat and locked my legs rigid. I walked in on a robbery and now there was a very distinct possibility that I was going to die. And even if the burglar didn’t kill me, I wouldn’t be able to identify him. I was born with a visual processing disorder where I wasn’t able to differentiate between certain shapes, letters, small details and facial features. Therapy helped me learn a unique way of processing visual information so it was manageable except during anxiety attacks or when I encountered a sudden visual shock.
The man in my kitchen–I assumed it was a man because the blob was taller and broader than me–appeared to me as nothing more than a silhouette, a thing that didn’t compute, that didn’t make sense because he wasn’t supposed to be here. Still rooted to the spot, unable to move, I tried to calm myself, to focus, so that if I managed to survive I could give the police some sort of description.
And slowly I began assembling and rearranging bits of visual fragments. It was a man. His back was to me. He was standing in front of the under-cabinet mounted microwave, his hands picking at something that sounded like plastic. Then the puzzle pieces fit into place and I knew this man by his brown comb-over with its deep part, the slump of his shoulders in the navy pea coat.
“Caleb! Oh, my friggin’ God! What the hell are you doing lurking in the kitchen in the dark like that? You almost scared the living daylights out of me!” The tension flooded from my body and I was suddenly aware of the weight of the groceries that nearly slipped from my hands as I stumbled to set them on the kitchen table.
“I thought you were a burglar about to kill me or something! What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at work?” I demanded.
“Sorry about that, babe, I should have called,” Caleb said. He was about to put a small bag of pork pot stickers in the microwave but set the plastic pouch back on the counter. He didn’t turn around.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
“I have to tell you something,” he said and I didn’t like the sound of his voice.
“What something and why won’t you turn around and look at me?” I asked but my heart was hammering in my chest because all I could imagine was that he was going to admit he was cheating on me. All those long hours when he was supposed to be at work–
“It’s about the job.”
It almost didn’t register because I was preparing myself for the worst. When it finally sank in I let out a sigh of relief but caught myself. “Did you get fired?” That was something that absolutely positively could not happen now, not with Elizangela going back to school next month.
“Worse than that, I’m afraid.”
“What’s worse than getting fired?” I asked. After being frightened half to death, the needle on my patience gauge was swiftly approaching the big red E.
“I got–” Caleb swung around and smiled that fantastic smile of his, the one that made the butterflies flutter in my stomach. “Promoted!”
I could feel my eyes going wide. “No friggin’ way!”
“Yes friggin’ way,” said Caleb and he was on me before I knew it, sweeping me off my feet in that wonderfully secure bear hug of his. “And it comes with a hefty, hefty, hefty salary bump!”
I went rigid in his arms. “Wait a minute. Three hefties? Either you’re exaggerating or that’s a lot of money. Don’t get me wrong, honey, I’m not saying you don’t work hard and deserve every penny of it but what’s the catch?”
Caleb set me down gently. “It isn’t like that, babe, there’s no catch. Not really.”
“I knew it. Spill.”
“Built into the pay raise is an insane relocation fee–“
“Relocation?”
Caleb nodded and continued, “If I can manage to move house and start work by the fifteenth.”
“The fifteenth? That’s only a week away!”
“I know but we’ve always been the #ChallengeAccepted type,” he smiled again but I wasn’t having any of it this go-round.
“Relocate to where?”
“Fort Wayne, Indiana,” he said under his breath.
“Who-what-where? What the hell is in Fort Wayne, Indiana?”
“I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff but the biggest attraction is the relocation fee could cover the cost of our first house. Our. First. House. Our dollar would go a long way and we could spend more of it on Liza to make sure she gets the best of everything, things we can’t afford to give her in New York. Where is she, by the way?”
“With my sister, it’s easier to do the shopping with her preoccupied.” Elizangela was at the Ooo, Mommy, can we please get this? stage in her development which was okay for the leisurely stroll through shops but not so great on the money-is-tight necessity runs.
I looked at him for a long moment. He’d have had to know about this for a while now but he kept it from me even though we made a no-secrets pact and if I brought this up he’d hand me some line about not wanting to jinx the promotion and I’d be upset but I’d know he was telling the truth because he was a big believer in the almighty jinx.
My first instinct was to say no, to fight him tooth and nail, all because he hadn’t consulted me on this enormously life-changing decision. But that would have been petty. Yeah, my feelings were hurt but it would be our first house, something we’d been talking about for years. And a better life for our daughter? I’d be a heinous-monster-worst-mother-on-the-planet if I didn’t set my wounded pride aside and at least consider it. So, I did.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay, let’s do it,” I shrugged.
“Are you serious? I can tell my boss yes?”
“You didn’t accept it already?”
“Of course not, not without checking with you first.”
I gave him a hug and a quick kiss on the cheek before leaning in to whisper in his ear, “You big, stupid idiot! I love you, sometimes, you know that?”
***
Thanks to the internet, finding a house, even one that was seven hundred and forty-seven miles driving distance away was a piece of cake. The hardest part? Ignoring the common sense warnings from our parents and friends who thought our decision was rash, something we’d done because we were bored. But in the end, it was our choice to make and if they still hadn’t liked it after we explained the situation to them, they could just go ahead and lump it.
Online, we managed to locate a real estate agent who understood our situation and was willing to work with us in finding a fixer-upper in our price range, getting the house appraised and coordinating the paperwork so we could close the sale in five days, skipping the entire mortgage credit process by paying in cash.
Elizangela was the biggest shock in the relocating process. I’d have bet my eyeteeth that she would have kicked up a storm having to leave Queens and all her friends behind but Caleb cleverly presented the idea using Duck Tales, her favorite tv show, as an analogy.
“We might solve a mystery?” Elizangela asked, face full of childish hope.
“Or rewrite history,” Caleb answered and joined her in singing the show’s catchy theme song.
And like that, our daughter was sold on the idea and helped pack all her things with nary a complaint. My only complaint? We decided it was cheaper to drive, though it added five hours or so to the trip which Caleb and I took turns behind the wheel of the rental so there was no problem there, it was Elizangela singing the once adorable but now monotonous Duck Tales theme song on a loop for most of the time she was awake that began grating on my nerves.
***
Our new home pretty much matched the virtual tour we took on the realtor’s website. It was indeed a fixer-upper and would probably take the better part of a year before all the repairs could be completed. The outside was another story entirely. The front lawn was a respectable size, enough for me to create a nice vegetable garden, but the backyard was massive and overgrown to the point I thought we’d have to buy a couple of machetes, like in those old safari films, to hack the tall grass down to a mowable size. The plan was to tame the savage land and maybe build a grilling deck for our eventual summer barbeques and a playset for Elizangela to go on her Duck Tales adventures in and maybe entice some of the neighborhood kids to come over so she could make some new friends. Those plans all changed the moment we came across the graveyard.
I was on Caleb the moment he stepped into the house after work. “Do you want to know why this house was so cheap?”
“It’s a fixer-upper,” he answered, confused and a little more than slightly uncomfortable at the proximity of my face to his own. “We both knew that going into this. Why is it a big deal all of a sudden?”
“It’s not the repairs, Caleb Allen Mitchell,” I whisper-screamed. Even though I was on the verge of hysteria I was mindful not to upset Elizangela who was upstairs playing in her room. “It’s the friggin graveyard sitting smack dab in the middle of our backyard!”
“Graveyard? Did the previous owner bury a pet or something?”
“Pet? There are twelve graves with headstones out back! That’s not a memorial for poor, dead Fluffy, it’s a creepy-as-hell-honest-to-goodness graveyard!”
“Okay, calm down. Let me check it out,” he said trying not to sound skeptical and doing a lousy job at it.
I marched–it was more of an angry stomp-walk that seemed to me at the time to be childish but I couldn’t help myself–him down the foyer, past the living room, through the kitchen and flung the back door wide.
“Tell me I’m overreacting,” I said gesturing at the tombstones.
Caleb trudged over the carpet of tall grass that I spent the better part of the day attacking with the weed wacker and knelt beside the closest headstone.
“These are pretty old,” he said, running his over the cracked surface of the crumbling stone. “The inscriptions aren’t even legible anymore, most likely due to acid rain which means they’re probably made of calcite.”
“How do you know so much about headstones?”
“My dad,” Caleb answered. “My gran died when I was little and I was terrified of the cemetery when we buried her so my dad took me on walking tours of graveyards and told me the truth about what happens when we die and why funerals were important. Sometimes we’d just marvel at the tombstone designs and he could tell what they were made from just by looking at them. Some fathers and sons had sports, me and my dad had graveyards. That may seem pretty morbid to you, but those were some of the best memories of my dad. It was just the guys and he would talk to me like a man.”
“I think it’s kind of sweet in a weird way,” I said and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Yeah, Dad’s always been pretty unconventional,” Caleb patted my hand, stood and dug the cellphone from his pocket. He made several calls, the first being to the realtor who sold us the house. I had to admit, he was good deal calmer and damn sure more polite than I would have been had the roles been reversed.
“No, this is not a crank call,” Caleb said into the phone. “Yes, there are twelve headstones. No, they’re really old, the information on them has been worn. No, I have not dug them up to confirm the existence of dead bodies. How do I know it is a graveyard? The headstones I just mentioned are giving me a strong indication that someone interred their dead beneath them. I can snap a couple of pics and send them to you if you’d like.”
Believe it or not, he had to repeat those answers several times to several different departments and organizations and what we learned was there was not going to be a swift resolution to our problem.
First, we had to contact the Historic Preservation Office to see if the land our house was built on was a former cemetery. Luckily for us, it wasn’t. Nor was there a family plot permit on record with the town Zoning Commission or approval from the state Department of Health.
We were informed there was a possibility the gravestones had been discarded. As creepy as it sounded, some people saw the value of the stones as building materials, but our stones–I didn’t like the fact that Caleb acknowledged ownership when speaking on the phone or that I had come to refer to them in the same manner–were out in the open and not used as part of our house’s foundation. The other suggestion offered was the previous owners might have thought they made for cool conversation pieces during backyard barbeques. Since the only way we could have verified this was to dig up one the graves ourselves–and there was no way in hell we were going to do that–we contacted the police.
To make a long story short, let’s just say the grave markers weren’t for show. Each stone did indeed contain a coffin in which were human remains. When the medical examiners arrived with the local tv station reporters and camera crew, our internet-folly-first-house became a tabloid story and possible crime scene.
A forensic anthropologist was brought in to examine the human remains to establish the identity, or if that was not possible, at least the age, sex, number of individuals present, and other facts. Once it was established that the remains were not part of a crime scene they were turned over to a local cemetery for reburial.
Then we were contacted by the Registrar of Cemeteries and told about the Funeral Burial and Cremations Services Act, which made it our responsibility to fix the problem. Because some grieving or possibly idiotic person choose to bury their dead in the backyard and the realtors hadn’t bothered to check the tall grass behind the house, we had to foot the bill for either reinterring at another site or cremating the remains–hell, let’s just call them what they were, bones–at a price tag that ranged between $500 and $1,000 per body.
That was when I went lawyer shopping, even though the realtor assured us, “The situation can be worked out amicably.” Amicably meant they might accept partial financial responsibility for a clerical oversight. My aim was to make them pay entirely for their screw up with a little extra for the obvious emotional distress. I played that distress up on camera the day I discovered a newspaper reporter lurking outside my daughter’s school waiting to ambush the both of us for an interview.
During the entire ordeal, Elizangela was grace under fire. She got that from her dad. She was full of questions, though, and we answered them as truthfully as we could. The graveyard forced us to introduce the concept of death sooner than we wanted to and she struggled with the same concepts I struggled with when my parents had the talk with me.
“Death is permanent,” Caleb said. “Do you know what permanent means?”
Elizangela shook her head and her bangs danced in front of her eyes.
“It means forever, honey,” I said, taking her tiny hand in mine. “It means once you die, you go away and never come back.”
“You mean move? Like we did from our old home to our new home?”
Calen shook his head slowly. “No, Liza, when a person dies, that means their body stops working. Their heart doesn’t beat anymore, they don’t need to eat or sleep, and they don’t feel any pain ever again. They leave their body because they don’t need it anymore.”
“But that’s other people, not us, right?” Elizangela asked.
What followed was a very long, extremely exhausting everything that is alive eventually dies conversation that ended with our baby saying, “Oh.” No tears, no hysterics, no subsequent nightmares or follow up questions. Just, “Oh.”
***
After a month or so of avoiding the backyard after the police concluded their business and things in the neighborhood began returning to normal, Caleb and I revisited plans to spruce up the area behind the house. The first order of business was filling in the former graves.
The problem was they wouldn’t stay filled.
The dirt shoveled into the holes the day before appeared by the graves the very next day. Not all the dirt, mind you, but enough to make noticeable piles. I didn’t want to worry Caleb about it, he had too much on his plate as it was with the new position and following up on our lawsuit with the realtor and tracking down the previous owners of the house, so I shoveled the dirt back in and never mentioned a word to my husband. But the following morning, sure as bread fell butter-side down, there the dirt would be in neat little piles.
We had gotten to know all our neighbors pretty well, especially after the tv news coverage put our area in the spotlight longer than most of the residents were comfortable with, but the neighbors to our immediate left, Hannelore and Sean Bogatz were two of the kindest people that ever set foot on God’s green earth. I spotted Hannelore–Hannie, to her friends–one morning when we were both retrieving the morning paper from our front lawns. During casual conversation, I mentioned the grave issue.
“It just boggles the mind why anyone would sneak onto our property and dig up the graves after we fill them? I’d write it off as an animal or something but the dirt is always piled up so neatly.”
“Well,” Hannie shrugged. “It could be kids up to a little mischief they consider to be fun or funny and if you’re leaning toward that way of thinking, I’d take a good look at those Woods boys, always up to no good. Sean and I had a run in with them a little while back that ended the moment we spoke to their parents. Strict as Irish priests in the seminary, Michael and Ella are.”
I had half a mind to pay Michael and Ella Woods a visit but what would that accomplish, accusing their sons with no real evidence? Which meant I needed to gather some. So, later on, after I put the day’s affairs in order, I took a midday nap before I needed to pick Elizangela from school and while she was up in her room, I quickly refilled the holes in the backyard–more scraping dirt into the open former graves that shoveling.
It was hard concentrating on conversations during dinner and the board game during family time because I wanted nothing more than to go out back and patrol the yard. But that had to wait until Elizangela had been put to bed and Caleb’s deep breathing turned into a light snore.
Sliding out of bed slowly and lifting my smartphone off the nightstand, I stepped as silent as I could manage, trying to remember where the creaking boards were located on the hardwood floor, and crept out of the bedroom and downstairs to the kitchen.
The casement window gave me the perfect vantage point to see out over the entire garden and one of the backless saddle stools we used for the kitchen island was the perfect sitting height for me to rest my elbows on the counter beside the sink. Earlier today I downloaded a night vision app–that was actually capable of capturing images at night, not the fake ones that simply inverted daylight images with a green overlay–on my phone in preparation for the stakeout. Not only was I determined to catch the culprit, I was also willing to sit up all night if need be.
I activated the night vision and turned the phone’s camera lens slowly, sweeping the yard. There was movement! Not a body, but dirt flying out of the hole nearest the house! I hopped off the stool, made a beeline to the kitchen door that led to the backyard–and it was unlocked? Had Caleb missed it when he made his nightly rounds securing the windows and doors? It hadn’t seemed likely. We were both native New Yorkers, Caleb represented Queens and I was raised out in Brooklyn, just like the lyrics of that LL Cool J song, and we never went to bed without making sure the house was secured.
Never mind, I would deal with that later. Now, I was racing across the cool grass and ignoring the pain in the soles of my feet as I pushed pebbles and pointy stones into the earth, on my way to gather evidence I could show Michael and Ella about their boys.
I stopped at the edge of the hole and snapped a picture. “I’ve got you now, you little shi–” It wasn’t the Woods boys.
Elizangela knelt in the center of the hole, nightgown pulled up above her knees, dirt cupped in her small hands.
“Liza, why are you playing in the–” I nearly said grave but caught myself and changed it to, “hole? It’s the middle of the night, honey!” Elizangela became upset and started to cry. Was it because I startled her, or made her feel she had been caught doing a bad thing?
I climbed into the (grave) hole and wrapped my arms around my daughter. I held her in silence until sobs waned to tears that quieted down to the occasional shudder.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. I just want to know what you’re doing and why you felt you had to sneak around at nighttime instead of just telling me?”
I thought Elizangela was so distraught that she couldn’t answer my question but after a long silence, she said, “Because you and Daddy said we shouldn’t tell secrets.”
“Secrets? Whose secrets are you keeping? Did your daddy tell you a secret?” I became suddenly afraid of what her answer might be, but she shook her head.
“I can’t tell you. I’m so sorry, Mommy,” Elizangela paused and asked, “Do you still love me?”
I was floored by the question. I cupped her small face in my hands and wanted desperately to say something definitive, something that would stick within her always so she never felt the need to ask that question ever again.
“Of course I do,” I answered. “I’ll always love you, Liza, no matter what.” And I meant it but it came out too quickly, sounded too rehearsed, too much like a pat answer.
“Maybe,” Elizangela started, careful not to look at me. “Maybe it’d be okay to tell if I asked them.”
I was about to ask her who they were but she began talking out loud in a funny voice, one I would never have recognized as coming from my daughter. At first, I thought she was talking to herself then I realized she was asking questions to the dirt walls surrounding us, reasoning with them, before she made her request.
My daughter smiled, finally making eye contact. “They said okay.”
“Who said–” I started and then a door opened in my vision, a door that has been hidden in plain sight, most likely for the entirety of my life. A door that could have been responsible for my visual processing disorder. From the doorway emerged ghosts of all ages shapes and sizes. Some of the older spirits carried the essences of babies that perhaps weren’t alive long enough to develop physical bodies.
They spoke to me but not in words. Images flooded my mind, of light and darkness, of peace and violence, each of them a history being forced into my mind, faster and faster until they became a subliminal blur.
Out the corner of my eye, I saw black ink bleed from the grave walls and swirl around me and I was suddenly caught up in a tornado of black. I lost sight of Elizangela and tried to call out to her but my jaw was clamped tight as if it had been wired shut. Electrical pulses shot through my body and deadened my nerve endings. I couldn’t catch my breath as my vision started to slowly fade out.
I found myself in that ethereal realm that occupied the space between dreaming and consciousness and in that space I wasn’t me. Though I couldn’t see myself, I knew that I was in another body, or better yet, bodies, twelve to be exact. The same as the number of graves. I was in twelve different places as twelve different people living twelve different lives at the same time. The histories that had been forced upon me moments? days? years? ago now made sense. I understood these people. I knew who they were, knew their struggles, their loves, their pain, their inevitable fates and more to the point, I knew their names.
The information burned itself into my memory as I lost my footing in the intangible nirvana and slipped toward the harsh reality of the waking world. When I came to my senses, my head was resting on my daughter’s lap and she was stroking my hair the very same way I’d done to her so many times before.
“It’s only like that the first time, Mommy,” she said, smiling in that way that always reminded me of Caleb.
I sat up in the grave. There was no escaping the cold that seeped into my bones and settled in the marrow. Everything felt wrong, not just the cold. There were foreign sounds in my head, voices that weren’t my own, too loud, too busy when all I wanted was a bit of silence, some time to sort things out. And there would be time but it would come later.
I focused on Elizangela with a desperation I hadn’t felt since the day she was born, when I was afraid I knew nothing about being a mother. But my daughter’s eyes were calm and wise. Without saying a word, she told me she knew.
And now I knew, too. The bodies belonged here, it was their land first. They needed to be returned, needed to have their grave markers restored with their names and information to mark their forgotten existence on the planet. Once that was done, they could finally move on.
Now all I had to do was convince Caleb which meant I’d have to give my father-in-law a call for some pointers.
MADD FICTIONAL 