Mary Toft, First Part

Mary Toft is in the garden on an August morning rich with bees. Five months along, her belly presses against the rough linen of her skirt while one hand curves protectively around it, half support, half caress. She thinks: This time next year, what will she be? And after that? In the corner of her eye she glimpses a child—like a ghost, or a prefigure—running through the morning from the kitchen door to the garden wall.

She makes her way toward a field the mowers cut three days before. On the way she meets Margaret, and together they walk to their day’s labor. The mowers are already at work, crossing another field with the regular sweep of their scythes, the second load of the season. Mary and Margaret row the hay already cut and left flat to dry.

It is Mary who disturbs the rabbit, with no ill intention. An hour earlier the doe had fled the mowers, her heart wild and her eyes rolling white, and hidden among the fallen grass of the field now being rowed. Her breast and her tail are brightly white, and it’s the whiteness that stops Mary, as much as the movement, so she is first to look up and see the creature break for the edge of the field, speeding through the stubble and the brittle grass, her rear legs sliding from side to side in fear.

Mary watches the rabbit leap for the ditch. She cannot see it, but she knows—how does she know?—the rabbit stops, listening for those terrors above who would hunt her to earth, who would tear her to pieces and eat her, dragging her heart and stomach out through a rent in her belly. The other women return to their work, but Mary watches, and finds her mind returned to an earlier afternoon, some autumn when she was a child and her father brought home the bloody carcasses of three rabbits, their eyes blank in their sockets, and their paws limp. Mary watched her mother dismantle their bodies and consign them to the pot, their bones enriching a sauce of thyme and rosemary, their blood and livers added at the end to thicken. She remembered the slender and furless paws, the tiny feet, the delicate ivory bones broken in the dish, the sharp edge where her father’s knife, her mother’s cleaver, had split the powerful thigh bone, or shattered the ribs. How, taking a mouthful of the stew, she had also taken a mouthful of bone, and the points had scratched inside her cheek.

She can taste rabbit on her tongue, the fear and ferrous of its blood, or perhaps that is the taste of her own, where the bones pierced her cheek. She knows the rabbit still hides—white-eyed—in the ditch.

At that moment the child leaps like a rabbit in her womb. She returns to work, one hand often caressing her belly.

That night her labor begins, and what emerges is not a human child, not exactly. It is unsexed, its eyes sealed, its skin dark gray, like a hairless rabbit kitten, with an open pocket that runs from breastbone to privates, and its lungs and liver hanging outside its body.

In the light of a guttering taper it seems to Mary that the child draws one breath, but perhaps it does not. Perhaps his singular moment on earth was—like the morning’s prefigure—only a dream.

The Egg From Whence Hatched the World

In the beginning there was only water, and then the egg. The egg might be, for example, the product of a dove descending on the deep. From the egg might hatch a number of different entities, depending on the context. The universe itself might float from that original albumen. Or it might be a man, creeping from the shell on which a raven knocks to waken him. Or no creature at all might escape the cosmic egg, but rather the substance of reality itself, called by some ylem: the original material, the primeval atom.

In at least one instance it was Gaea who crept out of the world-egg, who conceived—with the aid of the waters—her son-lover Ouranos, with whom she populated the world.

The Monstrous Egg, First Part

New Mexico and the Trinity Test Site. In July, a young man climbs a hundred-foot ladder to where the Gadget, armed, awaits its early-morning detonation. He has been assigned babysitting duties in case of sabotage, though he is not sure what he is meant to do if anyone tries to approach his tower. The summer night seems to have arranged its own defense, anyway, and a storm blows in all thunder-struck, lightning-hatched. He spends the night alone, reading by the light of his TL-122-A, the dull yellow center of its beam illuminating half a page at a time, first one comic book then another, until—long before dawn—its narrow circle dims. After that it is only in sudden lightning strikes that he sees the whole page at once: the Human Torch, Captain America, Superman defeating fascists. All back-issues he’d picked up in the commissary.

Outside in the darkness and storm—so dark he cannot see the ground, only the wild and disordered air—the Gadget broods; it seems to him gravid and still, except when a high wind causes the whole tower to groan and sway and another handful of rain drenches the window, its drops caught in freeze-frame flash by lightning.

He is excruciatingly aware of the Gadget, and what lies within it, what chain reactions, what potential. It might be an entirely new world. Or an end to the old world. Or nothing at all, an empty egg, unviable despite their best intentions.

Mary Toft, Second Part

Mary buried the inside-out child. Once, she looked up from its little grave to see rabbits watching in the first rain of September, a flicker of drops across a bright sunset in a slate-colored sky. Her glance scattered the rabbits, and they peeled away from the gravesite where she had set a little bunch of cottage flowers—clove pinks, richly scented, from the warm corner beside the front door.

She thought of rabbit stew and early morning rabbits startled among the lettuces of her little garden. She thought of their white bellies flickering, as had flickered the belly of that rabbit who fled the mowers and haymakers, who had—in a flash of light—quickened within her. She thought: Perhaps the womb is transparent, like water, and perhaps the flash of light from a rabbit’s white stomach can quicken within, as the word of God quickened in Mary’s own womb.

She felt something move, a creature she could not name, and who knows what shape it took? From a smear of blood to a cluster of bones, from a frog to a hairless rabbit kit, to a monkey to a man, to the shape made by certain underground roots that scream when they are torn from the earth. Something moved in that internal darkness, enclosed by the shell of her belly.

The second pregnancy was easier than the first, and the tiny, flickering creature moved within her wild and skittish, so she wondered if she had not one, but a litter of kits inside.

The Prophetess Hen

In August of 1819, in a village outside of Manchester, a farmer announces the advent of a miraculous hen. She lays eggs of remarkable beauty that bear—in copperplate letters—words of hope and advantage: Love your Savior, says one egg. Fear God, says another. Hellfire Awaits.

The hen dies suddenly. The village doctor preserves the remaining eggs. It was not until 1837 that the Farmer—on his death bed—admits what many suspected: that he had written those messages on newly-lain eggs. When the ink dried he re-inserted them into the hen—well, into multiple hens, but the Prophetess of Manchester was the only one who survived the process more than twice—and waited for the mystery to reveal itself in his chicken coop.

Gaea and Ouranos

Together Gaea and Ouranos conceived Briareos, Kottos, and Gyes, lovely and powerful creatures with fifty heads and fifty arms each. While Gaea loved them for their strength and beauty, Ouranos was troubled by their perfection—their enormous shoulders, their great height, their hundred exquisite eyes. Rather than allowing their power to challenge his own, he pushed them back inside Gaea, who was also the Earth, locking them in the underground of Tartaros, which was also Gaea’s womb.

Gaea, she cried out in pain, as her sons dragged their fifty arms against the interior of her womb, which was also the deep region beneath the earth. She felt them return, also, to an earlier posture, since Ouranos’s violence twisted them into fetal creatures, their fifty arms wrapped around their bodies and their knees drawn up to meet the foreheads of their fifty heads. She felt each kick they made in defiance of her stony womb, each flip and turn as they sought some comfort in the tiny space their father had allowed them. She wept at both the pain and the perversion, and whispered to them: You will live in the air again; you will grow into your final form and you will be free.

Gaea and Ouranos continued to conceive children, and—once born—Ouranos returned them to their mother, until her whole body was occupied, womb and bowels, with creatures waiting to be reborn. With each child her body grew larger, the shell of her belly harder, and she could not move with the weight of them. She would burst, she thought, she would rupture, and all her children would run back out into the world again through her torn navel.

Where Children Thus Are Born With Hairy Coats Heaven’s Wrath Unto the Kingdom It Denotes

Monstrous births are prefigures.

In Towton, Yorkshire, in 1461 a child was born hairy from crown to foot, with a head made entirely of barking dogs. The child rose from the bloody sheets in which his mother lay, said Fear the flames! and expired. The dogs that constituted his head barked and whimpered a moment longer; then they, too, were still.

The obvious question is: What horror filled his mother’s eye or ear or mouth when he—enwombed—was still in flux, a protean creature awaiting his final form? The child’s shape is, of course, uncertain until the moment of birth, vulnerable to any number of outside forces. A vision of rabbits. A moment of insight. An internment camp. A refugee trail. A fat man or a little boy. A cigarette. A miraculous gadget. A sudden fright. A new passion. The presence of a beautiful man. The taste of honey. The uninvited touch of a stranger while one is walking through the grocery store minding one’s own business. The evil eye. The epigenetic triggers of famine and warzone. Fallout and trace mercury.

Elizabeth Johnson observed the First Battle of Bull Run with her sister, unaware that she had just conceived a child with her now-absent husband, a Confederate officer. Captain Johnson died in the battle, and although she did not observe his death by shrapnel, she did watch a man beheaded by a cannonball. Nothing might have come of it, had he not looked up the hillside in the moment of his decapitation, to where Elizabeth and her sister stood watching.

Should we wonder, then, that Elizabeth gave birth to a headless child in 1862? He lived for three years, and though his body grew, he was never physically competent, could neither walk nor crawl, and made only a whistling, mewling noise. Elizabeth remained a devoted mother to the end, dripping spoon after spoon of warm cream into the gaping sphincter of her son’s neck.

Mary Toft, Third Part

Dr. Graves, the man-midwife who attended the birth and death of Mary’s inside-out rabbit-child, wrote an account of the new sort of creature that scratched its way from her womb, part man, part Leporidae.

Dr. Graves did not subscribe to the old discourse of marvels and prefigures. He was a rational man, interested in the science of birth, particularly maternal impression, and not the mythology. He was pleased that a mystery had fallen in his lap, and he observed Mary’s symptoms with care, nodding sagely when he felt the fever on her brow and ignoring her rambling talk about the flash of a rabbit’s belly in the August morning, and the shadow of a little girl running to the bottom of the garden.

“Yes, yes, my dear, now you must rest,” he said. Her urgency did not trouble him.

The next day Daniel Toft sent word by way of his sister, Margaret, that Mary was again in labor. Dr. Graves arrived in time to see the aftereffects: the blood-soaked sheets, the fragments of pearly bone and tooth. The creature expelled was like the others, but more clearly a rabbit now, as though some progress had been made since she birthed its litter-mates. Dr. Graves took it away and sketched it: its delicate legs, the short ears, the tiny padless paws. If it were not for the blood, its belly would have been white. Not hairless like the earlier kits, this creature was small, but its eyes were open, its claws splayed and bloody in death.

Such well-developed claws must have scratched, he thought, on leaving the maternal seat. He could not determine how it died, but was not surprised at the death of a creature so unsuited to either human or natural worlds.

Dr. Graves combined his account of the birth, his sketches of the rabbit-child of Mary and Daniel Toft, his conjecture on the nature of maternal impressions, and sent them to an acquaintance at the Royal Society. He was gratified to receive a response within the week, an invitation to bring the Tofts to London for observation. Mary’s belly was swollen with her seemingly unending pregnancy, and she often talked of her desire for rabbit stew, of rabbits she often saw now, in dreams, fleeing from her, their white bellies flashing. When Dr. Graves examined her, a thick stench emerged from her womb, and there seemed, under the skin, some angry red distemper that spread down her thighs and up toward her navel. Her skin was hot to the touch, and she never seemed to sleep, only to lapse into unconsciousness.

The trip to London was painful for everyone. Mary gave birth to two rabbits on the road, attended by her husband. They sent these children back home with Margaret Toft, Daniel’s sister, to be buried with their siblings.

Mary did not know where she was, even when they told her “London.” She stayed in dark, closed rooms, refusing light as though it might pierce her, and when the blade of the sun did penetrate her darkness, she shrieked so that Dr. Graves relented, and examined her by the near-darkness of a candle. He touched her belly, and saw the torn skin of her secret parts, scratched as by claws, or broken bones, as though the creatures had not been born in a gush of blood, but had been dragged by rear foot from the womb, leaving the route of their egress written on her purpled flesh.

Mary was not often conscious. Her fever was high, and her eyes fluttered wildly in her sockets, as though she were troubled by constant, terrible dreams. When, in a temporary state of wakefulness, two gentlemen of the Royal Society interviewed her, she told them about a hay field, about the flash of a doe’s belly through the newly-turned rows, how the doe had gone to ground in a ditch, and Mary had watched her and—for a moment—felt herself akin to that creature, driven in fear from her home burrow when the mowers passed with their scythes. She described a terrible wildness of spirit, though the two gentleman were not clear if this was her own, or the doe’s. Mary asked them: Where was she now? Had she found her way back? She held onto their hands, as the tremors shook her belly. No one could answer her.

“Maternal Impression, a very definite case of it,” one gentleman said. “We’ll present it at the next meeting. Can you arrange for an inspection? Perhaps several—a number of our members will want to see it.”

“Yes,” said Daniel. “You tell us when, and we’ll have Mary ready. She’ll like to hear so many people are interested.”

Dr. Graves nodded sagely, and offered to let them read his recent treatise on the subject, as they withdrew, leaving Mary to her darkness, where—wriggling within her—the rabbits formed and died, formed and died, and she endured their birth and their return. In her half-waking state she saw not her husband, but a hulking and ancient devil who could not bear to see children born into the world, and so returned them to her after each bloody labor.

It was the landlady who found them out, when Margaret Toft visited the kitchen and asked her for a very small rabbit—dead or alive—the smallest she could find. When examined, Margaret wept and refused to speak. It was Daniel who admitted the deception, and Mary Toft began her long, slow recovery.

The Monstrous Egg, Second Part

This is an ancient recipe, not so much invented, as rediscovered in eras of dread: the Terror, the Year of Five Emperors. It flickered in popularity after the Trinity Tests.

Take two dozen eggs. Take a pig’s bladder, or similarly round, watertight mold. From here, execution will vary by era and taste: Do you prefer chicken or duck or ostrich? Do you prefer a wild boar’s bladder or the more delicate skin-sack of a loveable piglet or a huge egg-shaped mold from a Tupperware party? Some recipes call for yolks and whites to be separated, the yolks set first in a spherical mold, then removed to the bladder, after which the whites are poured over the top and set in simmering water. These differences are cosmetic. What matters is the idea: the monstrous egg that, once cracked, spills its contents across the dining table.

(Monstrous Eggs can occur naturally, as was the case in 1862, in Antietam, when a languishing hen refused to lay. When butchered, she was revealed to be hoarding one of these creatures in her oviduct, so large it killed the hen.)

In the 1950s the Monstrous Egg appeared in the guise of a celebratory centerpiece for a summer buffet, recommended in a least one issue of Woman’s Life Weekly where it was sponsored by Jell-O and called the Delicious Gadget. The recipe required four packages of lime Jell-O cast in an egg-shaped mold, swirled with layers of sour cream and grated carrot, and, floating in its green depths, boiled eggs—the yolks like pupils—staring as they waited to spill like a secret onto an unsuspecting diner’s plate. This was recommended as a centerpiece dish for buffets and barbecues, with a garnish of marshmallows.

In all cases, the appearance of such recipes prefigures a monstrous birth of another kind. That thing your hostess has placed at the center of the buffet, garlanded with marshmallows and water chestnuts? It is, in fact, the alchemical egg from which cracks the new and terrible world. No one knows if these eggs were ever eaten, or if they watched over the table like a prefigure of doom, l’oeuf monstrueux. The Delicious Gadget sits in the center of the suburban barbecue, awaiting detonation.

Mary Toft Had a Daughter

I have heard that there is, somewhere, a complex wherein these marvels, monsters, and prefigures are stored, or recorded, if their bodies have been destroyed. There are rooms full of jars in which float the pickled bodies of dog-headed children, and moon-calves, and mouse-eared cats. Beyond these nameable creatures, there are stranger bodies, which seem to our eyes incompletely imagined, interrupted at some mid-stage of development, neither man nor beast nor angel. There are diagrams on the walls, and books of two-headed flowers and insects with thirteen wings, and other early attempts to record the marvel of conception as it intersects with history. There are bodies stretched on pins in beds of wax, the remains of vivisected creatures, labeled by origins—mother and supposed father(s)—location, and date. The dates are significant: The children of plagues as well as comets find their resting places here; the children of Bikini Atoll, and the children of Trinity, the children of the Dutch famine of 1945, and children of the Gulag.

It was to this secret archive—the Museum Clausum—that Mary Toft’s surviving child was consigned by Dr. Graves’s machinations. Graves was present at this, her last birth—before Daniel Toft confessed—and had whisked the little rabbit-daughter away when he found her among the refuse of half-rabbits that Daniel and Margaret Toft had pushed into the birth canal.

Mary Toft’s daughter was a weak creature and smaller than the rest of her litter. The plan was for vivisection, so they might compare her anatomy to both rabbit and human models while still in action. At least two gentlemen of the Royal Society were eager to begin work, to slice open her belly and see, for a moment, her heart beat in the living air.

But rabbits are clever, and their hearts are wild. Dr. Graves left the child on the hearth in the Museum’s ante-chamber, and held an impromptu meeting about who would author the resulting paper, and where they would seek publications, and what the book might be called when it was done.

While they spoke, the new thing—part Mary, part rabbit, product of a flash of light, conceived in the intersecting glances of woman and doe—escaped from her basket and onto the warm hearth. She smelled formaldehyde and vivisectionists, and though her eyes were newly opened, some knowledge must have been inherited by her infant mind, as though the circumstances of her birth had written into the code of her being a profound fear of men like Dr. Graves and his company.

She crept from hearth to door, a creature so tiny she might be missed, this palm-sized daughter, this rabbit-homunculus. Her skin was liver-colored, dark enough to fade into the carpet. When a late-comer opened the door, she hid rabbit-still in the shadows and saw her chance. She darted with all the speed of her wild mother. This was a happy ending: a second birth for Mary Toft’s unnamed daughter.

A new creature quickens. A prefigure cracks the shell of the world: monstrous, miraculous, dog-headed, rabbit-bodied, conceived by the flash of a white belly in the dawn, the methylated DNA of a woman in duress, carrying her child through a famine or along a refugee trail from the flooded coast to higher land—from this crack will emerge something entirely new.

You might try to return it to its shell, but this time I do not think it will comply.

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and academic. Her work has appeared in publications that include The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. NeWest Press published her novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. You can find her online at whereishere.ca.

^{published January 2018, Issue #41, 3900 words}

More Miraculous Births

Fallow, by Ashley Blooms
They find the bottle in the barn. There are a lot of things there, whole piles of things: tractor-part things, tire things, cutting things and bolting things, all tired things, slowly fading toward the same color of rusty brown. The inside of the barn smells of stale hay and beer. Misty picks the bottle that is the least broken and William holds it between two fingers and lets the water drain from its open mouth onto the packed-earth floor. 

Hare’s Breath, by Maria Haskins
It’s Midsummer’s Eve, and even this close to midnight there’s no darkness, only a long, translucent dusk that will eventually slip into dawn. Britt and I are fifteen, and she has just come back from That Place, the one the adults won’t talk about even when they think I’m not listening. Something’s happened to her there, but I don’t understand what it is, and she can’t find the words to tell me.

The Atomic Hallows and the Body of Science, by Octavia Cade
A spear breaks its blade upon ribs and punctures hearts. It shines with ice-coated needles in the salt air, over breakfast. “I’ve had a letter,” says Lise to her nephew. He’d come to visit for the holidays so she wouldn’t be alone in the cold country of her exile. “I’ve had a letter and I don’t know what to make of it.” She thinks she might be worried. 

January was a shit month. It never snowed. Sun barely came out of hiding. Instead, a death-cold rain dripped endlessly. Mist curled inwards from the fringes of the woods. It covered the town for weeks, as Christmas decorations slowly drifted back into garages and basements. Everything here, just off-road of the Connecticut wine trail, lived for the fall. Once autumn was over, people indulged complacently in the holidays. But then they sank, miserably, into the post-apocalyptic beginning of a new year. Into the rain. This was when the winter wonderland died, dumpsters filled with sodden wrapping paper, and the world turned brown and gray for what felt like an eternity. Theoretically, there was Valentine’s Day to look forward to, but come on.

This was the bleak world in which Jude Ostermann was living when he did it. When he read the slip of paper and gave himself nightmares for weeks. Which makes sense, honestly. Bleakness breeds bleakness.

Jude Ostermann, thirty-eight, had himself a large white house on a quaint New England suburban lane. He had two children and a wife. He sold insurance every day at his father’s firm—started by his grandfather—or was it his father’s grandfather?—either way, some day it would be his. And he walked his dog every day in the empty hours before work. The dog, a young German shepherd, actually enjoyed the January barrenness. The damp made each individual smell stand up straighter, reach out farther. His steps bounced in January. Jude’s dragged.

Every morning, Jude passed by the same field. It was down a path behind his nice, pleasant house, through the woods and next to a golf course. The field had maybe been something once. It wasn’t now. Just dead grass and a half-broken, knee-high wall of slate chunks. A time-eaten wooden fence wound its shambling way around the field and back, vanishing amongst rain-stained trees.

He always took a few moments to look at it every time he passed, but Jude never thought anything of this field. What was there to think. Whatever the thing might have been, it was now just a goddamn field. Wasn’t it?

The dog, of course, thought it smelled great.

See, in Jude’s painfully ordinary, painfully drizzly town, there was one odd thing. Every evening at sundown, it passed. You could stand on your front porch and observe as it went by, and most people did. There were some who stood outside every evening to watch it pass. But you were by no means obligated to. Many people, in fact, did not. Some eyed it through their windows. Some made a game of it, trying to predict the exact moment it would approach. The time differed slightly day by day, but not by much. You could gamble in mere seconds, it was so precise.

Some never watched it. They stayed inside, staring at the floor with the TV turned way up. Played the radio loud, expecting it, dreading it. Jude’s wife, Heather, for instance, made a point of washing vegetables at the old kitchen sink, every day at the same time. The sink whined deafeningly. She did this to avoid seeing or hearing the odd thing. To escape the usual cacophony of hundreds upon hundreds of glass bottles rattling against the asphalt…

No matter what, though, you felt it. When it passed your house, that small round scar on your left temple would always itch. Ever so slightly. A tingle. It could catch you off guard if you weren’t ready for it. Make you gasp. Which is why most people were ready for it. Why most people stood on the porch, beer in hand, and waited patiently for the thing to pass. Eyes as glassy as the rattling bottles. They scratched the dull throb in their temple and afterwards, went back into their homes, back inside to the lives they chose. Or ended up with. Or whatever. And the cacophony of glass passed down the street, into the night.

Nobody thought about this odd thing. What was there to even think. Whatever yours had been, it was now just a goddamn scar. Wasn’t it?

And a minute a day wasn’t such a bad trade.

Tristan Ostermann was eleven and Delilah Ostermann was eight. Delilah didn’t have her scar yet. So in the year since Tristan had gotten his, she had been poking and prodding at it persistently. Probing him with questions.

“Does it hurt?” she’d ask.

“No,” he’d say.

“Do you remember what it was like when it happened?”

“Nobody does, stupid.”

Jude, in his armchair by the fire, would peer at his children over the local paper. “Don’t call your sister stupid.”

Delilah would flick at Tristan’s head. He’d pounce on her. They’d wrestle until Heather came in from the kitchen, pie-stench wafting behind her, and pull them apart.

Looking at Jude: “You shouldn’t let them fight like that.”

He wouldn’t even look up from the paper. “They’re not gonna hurt each other.”

“Delilah could slam her head into the table and pop an eye out.”

Jude would shake his head. “You shouldn’t have bought a table that’s all corners.” He’d snap the paper taut, pointedly, at the table. “The damn thing is a giant marble knife, for Christ’s sake.”

“Dollar,” the kids would say together. They’d point at the jar on the shelf.

None of it meant anything. It was all in fun, more or less. Happened every night. A complacent routine. And the whole thing was very pretty.

But sometimes, very rarely, Jude would find himself wondering, Is this nice? And…what was that thing? He’d scratch idly at his temple, hardly even noticing he was doing it. Thinking. What was that thing?

Rarely.

At night sometimes, Jude remembered the girl he dated in college. Not her face or her name. Simply that she was. That she left for…something. Somewhere. They fought a week before graduation. Or she fought him. Asked him to come with her. Asked him why he needed to follow his father into The Firm (which was always said reverently, with capital letters). Couldn’t he just give that up? Couldn’t he leave that town and…whatever she had suggested. Something vague about writing novels pressed itself against the memory, but failed to attach anywhere specific.

He remembered they were naked. Had just had sex, made love. Fucked. The distinction of what that had been wasn’t clear to him now. But the tiny room in his college-life apartment stank of it. Made the argument feel visceral and desperate, which it was. But, honestly, it was too late. He already had the scar. In fact, Jude remembered his temple throbbing horribly as she fought with him. Drowning out her words. Even in that moment, she was mist. Like he had no idea who or what she was. Whether he loved her eyes or wanted her body or needed all of it or what. It was too late.

“Leave?” he repeated, numb. “Why…why would I do that?”

She was from another town. She didn’t understand.

On a shitty evening in January, Jude stood on his porch. He still had his work suit on, but the paisley tie was loosened. He stared out into the street. The lane was silent. Inside, Tristan sat complacently at his desk, doing his math homework. Delilah, eight and unscarred, colored.

The sun was just about to set.

A screen door clapped somewhere off to his left. Jude listened to the familiar sounds of Phil coming outside. Phil, fifty-nine and fat, stood outside every evening with Jude as they observed the setting sun. The man held a beer in one hand, waved with the other. Jude waved limply back. They always did this.

Phil sipped from his bottle. Licked foam off his mustache. They stared silently at the hills in the horizon. Waiting.

“Weather,” Phil said.

The man had this odd quirk where he spoke almost exclusively about the weather, but never made any comment about it. Jude always kind of appreciated this. That you didn’t need to feel like you had to say anything about the weather. Just accept that you were going to be someone who was now discussing something trivial and small. In other words, it wouldn’t mean anything anyway. So why bother.

“Sure is,” Jude agreed. The two men smiled.

The lane was silent.

“Firm,” Phil said, as a kind of question.

“Good.”

“Kids.”

“Doing well. Tristan’s thinking about being a mechanic.”

Phil grunted. “Figures. Roger is about to retire. Auto shop’ll need somebody by the time he graduates.”

“He’s got seven more years yet,” Jude pointed out.

Phil grunted again, and said nothing.

Another, longer silence floated over them.

The odd thing that happened in this town every night at sunset happened then, and happened somewhat suddenly, as it always did. Somewhere far down the lane, out of sight, came the sound of glass sliding along the pavement. The jagged, staccato clack-a-clack of empty bottles bouncing against asphalt. The two men looked towards it. The noise grew. Became deafening. A wild roar. Finally, around the curve in the road, came the usual shadow. A small, slumped figure with short legs and long sloth arms heaved itself up the street. In the fingers coming down off its arms, it held countless lengths of twine. As it rounded the bend, the twine stretched out behind it and trailed, at a distance, hundreds of small glass bottles. The pathetic, hunched little figure shuffled laboriously past Jude’s home, tugging those bottles on twine behind itself. Sisyphus against thousands of boulders.

The thing passed, and vanished around the bend at the other end of the lane. The neighborhood became silent. And the sun sank.

Phil sniffed. “Tomorrow, then,” he said.

“Tomorrow,” said Jude.

They went back inside to their families.

When Jude re-entered the house, Delilah came running up to him with a picture she had drawn.

“I want to be a painter one day,” she told him, beaming.

“That’s great,” he told her, lying.

It was three days later when Jude did it. Approached the shadow and asked for his bottle. You could do that. Everybody knew you could. Everyone in the town had their own, and you could ask for it any night when the thing passed your house. You just walked up to it and held out a hand. You didn’t need to say anything. It knew you. It knew everybody. And everyone knew that. Didn’t know how, but they didn’t feel the need to ask either. Nobody actually approached the shadow, though. They all figured, “Why the hell would you want to?”

Jude, for one, had two or three reasons. But he only thought of them much later, months after the fact. Which was, obviously, too late.

Jude’s first reason came a week or two before he did it, just as the calendar flipped bleakly into the new year. It had been a typical night. The shadow had just disappeared up the road. The silence and the dark were deepening. Jude and Phil were lingering outside for a minute or so when, abruptly, Phil turned.

“Heard in town,” he said. “You know John.”

“Yeah.”

“Heard he never had his removed.”

Jude blinked. “How?”

Phil shrugged. “Don’t know. Guess he was out of school that day.”

“And they let it slide?” Jude couldn’t believe it.

“Guess so.”

“And he just lives like that?”

Phil laughed. “I know. Bizarre, man. I’m thinking, ‘No way, man.’ I would never do that. Don’t want to see mine ever again. Can’t even imagine having it in me. Not curious. Not at all. No way.” His voice cracked at the end of his speech. He swilled beer to steady it. He finished off the bottle and gazed into its bottom. He sniffed. They sank into a deep silence, thinking. Gazed out at the growing darkness and the rain.

“Weather,” Phil said, after a long time.

“Sure is.”

The second thing that probably did Jude in came the night after Delilah showed him her drawing. Ed, who lived alone across the street, was the one who did it. The smarmy bastard. Ed said things like, “What do you think about this cold front?” and “Think the Giants will make it this year?” God, Jude hated him. Unlike beautiful, simple Phil and his “Weather” and “Giants.”

This night, the rain came down in a fine mist, moistening everything before you even really noticed. Phil and Jude were the only two on their block who stood and observed the passing of the shadow. But on this particular evening, Ed marched out of his house the second the thing came before his lawn. He bounded down his front steps and approached it. Jude and Phil held their breath.

The figure stopped. The silence of the glass then was even more deafening than the sound itself. Ed held out a hand. The thing gingerly laid its bundles of twine on the ground. With slow and delicate movements, it picked one in particular. It reeled in the bottle. Handed it to Ed. Without flinching, Ed pulled the rubber stopper off the bottle. He grinned. The bastard. The thing watched him. He flicked the cork onto the grass of his front yard, tapped the bottle mouth onto his palm. A strip of paper slid out. He handed the bottle back to the figure. Unfolded the paper, and Jude could hear it crackling from across the street. The paper was yellow and old, had been folded up for a long time. Ed took some time reading whatever it said.

Then he laughed.

He waved the paper in the air at them. He called, “Hey! It’s…” He almost told them what it said. The men twitched, expecting the worst. But Ed stopped himself. He looked at the paper again. Smiled. He waved his hand like he was swatting a fly.

“Ah, shit,” he said. He tapped the paper against his palm. And went back inside.

The thing watched his house for a moment. No lights went on. Nothing. It picked up the pieces of twine, and went on its way.

Ed’s house remained dark after that.

What probably did Jude in the most happened five days later. He was walking the German shepherd past the same old field behind his house on that exceptionally bright, but still shitty morning, when he stopped dead in his tracks. Something new had appeared in the field. A prominent, shining black stone stood in the middle of the grass. The shepherd wagged its tail. Barked. Jude peered at the stone and realized, suddenly feeling very cold, that it wasn’t a stone at all.

He had never seen the shadow during the day before. No one had. The contrast between its usual half-unseen appearance and this full-on glimpse, in the clear morning light, was startling. Jude could pick out all its features. Could tell that it wasn’t a small man, or child, or whatever he had assumed it was. Nothing of the kind. It was a small, black-furred humanoid…thing. Its coat was matted and tangled. It crouched low amongst the dead grass, watching him. The black skin of its hairless face was stretched tight over the bones, giving the mouth and eyes an eerie, wide look. The eyes were lidless, flashing globes of yellowish-green. There was a stub of a snout filled with sharp teeth like rail spikes. It looked like a cross between a rat and a monkey and some homeless, demonic child, just sitting there. Gaping at him from the grass. Ugly and horrible.

What the fuck, Jude thought. Over and over. His heart hammered against his ribs. He was sweating, even in the dreary January cold. His mind screamed, How did I never see… Has anyone ever seen… What the fuck, what the fuck…

The dog barked harder. Struggled forward. Jude glanced down, tugged at the leash. When he looked back up, the thing was gone.

He tried to grapple himself back down to Earth, but the woods swam around him. It was a child in a mask. Had to be. A large raccoon. A fox covered in dirt. Scarecrow. Leftover Halloween decoration. Art installation? Surely, though, surely it was not the same thing that stalked through the town every night. Did it crawl out of the earth? Fall from the sky? Dig its way out of a dead pile of leaves? Did it live in this field? Were there others? Why had no one thought about this?

What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck…

For the first time, Jude wondered: What was that thing?

He thought about it all the way home. It made his temple ache, made the scar there sing with pain. And that’s what really did it. Him thinking. Seriously thinking, for the first time. Seriously wondering: What had that thing been?

Over dinner that night, Tristan spoke about school. His teachers, an upcoming field trip. He talked about his woodworking class and how he wanted to take shop class when he got to high school.

Delilah talked about her art.

Jude sat there, still thinking. Was this nice? Sitting at a candlelit table in a big warm room with the German shepherd curled up in the corner? Was this good, being able to be home with his wife and kids, eating a hearty dinner with red wine and laughter and being able to ask Tristan how he did on his math test, finding out he got an A-, looking over at Heather and loving her and loving Tristan, and Delilah with her adorable little paintings that he knew, secretly, would not last, blood pumping pumping pumping through his temple, the dog hoof-huffing as he dreamed, the clock in the kitchen ticking, pipes tinging as they heated up, and the whole thing nice and simple and perfect and his wife was saying something.

“What?” he blinked. The room seemed suddenly bright and crowded.

Heather blinked back. “Sorry?”

“Sorry, what were you saying?”

“I…” She frowned at him. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just tired lately, I guess.”

She nodded sagely. “Must be the weather. Everyone feels gross.”

“Of course,” he said, unsure. He rubbed his temple. From somewhere across the table, at the corner of his eye, the furry, black fanged thing leered at him.

That night, when Jude crawled into bed, Heather was already there. She folded into him as he laid down. Fit herself to him like a puzzle piece. She called to him from somewhere far away. He tried looking at her face, but saw instead the black fanged thing shrouded in a fine mist. In an instant, his blood was cold, his forehead damp. He found himself drowning in the same thought: It might have been something small, it might have been something important, it might have been grand or fun or…something. What the fuck was it? What the fuck was that thing?

“Jude.”

She cleared. The mist vanished for a moment, and he saw her.

“Hm,” he said.

“You okay?”

“Fine. Long day.”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

She looped her arm over his chest. Moved it around, twisting her fingers in the curly black hair there. She kissed his stubble. Said his name. He turned to her. They dug into each other’s clothes.

What it ended up being was something vague, lost between making love and fucking.

Afterwards, they lay tangled together. All limbs. He closed his eyes almost peacefully, almost asleep, feeling almost good, and she shot out of bed. She padded across the carpet to the bathroom. Brushed her teeth, took a shower, cleaned herself. Came back into bed fresh and new and unmarred. She purred.

“That was nice,” she said.

The fuck-stink of his college apartment wafted into his memory. The black fanged thing leered at him from the window.

He had nightmares about it. Felt it eating him. He awoke still feeling the teeth. He stayed in bed, sweating against the flannel sheets, and listened to the sounds of his family. Tristan eating cereal downstairs. The wooden fracas of Delilah’s colored pencils. Theoretically, these were comforting sounds. Instead, they made him feel worse. Made the imaginary toothmarks down his limbs and across his belly burn.

Why did he keep thinking about it?

It was just a goddamn monkey.

Wasn’t it?

See, they did it when you were ten. They had a big day in April where everyone wrote essays on what they wanted to be when they grew up. What you truly wanted to be. You wrote it in history class, which was somewhat ironic, honestly. The history teachers, smiling, encouraged their students to be as ridiculous and as horribly truthful as they could. So the essays were all about astronauts and paleontologists, movie stars and world travelers. Every ten year-old in the entire town did this. Explained what their beautiful, ridiculous lives were going to be. Their craziest, truest, out-of-this-worldest dreams. Then they were filed into the gym, where they spent the rest of the day waiting their turn. They sat in the bleachers, clutching their essays, murmuring. They glanced anxiously towards the small white tent in the corner of the gym. They were called, one by one. And one by one, they went into the tent.

The tent itself is a mystery. Nobody knows who organizes it or what’s inside. It just shows up. And you have to go. All that is known is that you leave with a bandage on your temple. Your essay—the astronaut, movie star, pop singer dream—has vanished. And you are unable to remember what it was.

After it’s over, you go home and have a nice meal prepared by your mother, paid for by your father, and you really appreciate it, for the first time.

Delilah, of course, was eight. Her dream would not be taken for two more years. But when it did happen, inevitably, her mother would ask her, “Why don’t you color anymore?” Already knowing the answer.

Delilah would shrug. “Just don’t want to.”

And she would lead a simple, perfect small-town life.

So it happened that Jude got it all stuck in his head. Couldn’t stop thinking about it. About the college apartment and the girl and something about novels and not selling insurance. The black fanged thing. And the next evening, at sundown, Jude turned to Phil and said, “I’m gonna do it.”

Phil blinked at him across their yards. “Do what?”

“Look at mine.”

It was like he had stabbed Phil in the gut. The man made a large O with his lips. Shook his head. “Why?”

Jude shrugged. “I’d like to know.”

“Ed’s an outlier.” Phil pointed with his beer to the darkened house. “That’s not the usual. You shouldn’t… I mean, most people see theirs and…”

“I know,” said Jude.

“They flip.”

“I know.”

“That’s why nobody does it.”

“I know. But I could take it. Ed seemed to. I wanna know.”

Phil was quiet for a moment. He sipped his beer. Finally, without looking at Jude, like Jude was already dead, he said, “All right, man. Whatever.”

They were quiet. Waiting.

As if knowing it might be for the last time, Phil said, “Weather.”

Before Jude could respond, the end of the lane clattered. The thing came around the bend. Jude could now picture its eyes, fur and fangs clearly. And it made it worse knowing that Phil, who had never thought or wondered about it in the light of day, could not. Could not bring himself to ask the questions now eating at Jude from the inside out.

The black fanged thing approached. Trembling, Jude stepped off his porch. The thing turned to face him, still coming. Still rattling. Jude moved down the walk in front of his house in a trance. Shaking. Legs hardly obeying. When he got to the sidewalk, the thing stopped. Silence boomed down the block. Night deepened. From behind him, Jude could hear Phil muttering, “Jesus, man. Jesus.”

Jude held out his hand. From this close, he could smell it—the phosphorous reek rising off the creature’s hide. Could hear its rasping, hollow breath. Feel the sickly lemon-colored eyes. Gently, the thing placed its ends of twine on the ground. It took some time selecting the one that belonged to Jude. Finally, it picked one out of a large cluster. Jude’s bottle was stuck to three others, in a big clump. So, like it was moving through mud, the creature reached out a long, loping sloth-arm paw and peeled the twine free. It seemed to take years to reel in Jude’s bottle. When it finally rolled up the street and into the creature’s hand, Jude felt like he might fall over.

It might have been small. It might have been nothing at all. Or everything. Or… An even more horrible thought dawned on him. What if he read the paper, and it was exactly what he had now. Maybe that was what had happened to Ed. Or maybe the paper was blank. Maybe the dreams were all gone.

Jude took the bottle. The creature let its hand drop to the ground and it watched him. The bottle was small and round, sort of like a cannonball. Or an inkwell. A square rubber stopper was jammed into the mouth. Jude removed it in one smooth pull. Dumped it on the lawn. He shook the bottle by his ear. Paper tink-ed inside. He upended the bottle into his palm, and the paper dropped silently out. As Jude unfolded it, the creature gathered up its lengths of twine and moved on. Phil had already gone back inside, not wanting to see.

The paper shook between his fingers. It took him several tries to hold it open enough so that he could read it. When he did, he almost laughed, as Ed had. It was his essay. His goddamn essay. From when he was ten. He read it. Blinked. Read it again. And almost threw up. He couldn’t remember writing it at all. Couldn’t remember wanting…that.

He stood there for several minutes, alone, as darkness bunched up around him. Finally, he let the paper curl back up in his fingers. When he was ready, he brought it and the bottle to the garbage can next to the garage, and threw them in.

He wondered what Ed had seen. Wondered what Phil had written. Tristan. Heather. He knew what Delilah would write when her time came. He saw, now, the black fanged thing way too clearly in his mind. Saw it panting that phosphorous, horrible breath on him.

An alien. He tried to decide that that was what it was. An alien thing, penned by a ten year-old stranger.

Shaking, Jude went back inside. In the well-kept living room, his family was sitting around the television. Heather made room for him on the couch. He wrapped an arm around her, the other around Tristan. He tried to slow his heart. Clenched his hands into fists to keep them from shaking. Heather didn’t notice.

Delilah was on the floor, coloring. Jude forced himself not to look at her.

A small voice at his side whispered, “What did you see?”

Jude turned. Tristan gazed up at him with deep, wondering eyes. Jude put a hand on his head. The boy’s hair was soft and young. Jude pulled him a little closer.

“Nothing important,” he said, almost believing it.

Tristan looked back at the screen. He chewed his lip. Several minutes went by.

“I kinda want to see mine,” Tristan said.

Jude looked back at those eyes. So blue and unmarred.

“Nah,” he said. He offered a reassuring shake of his head. “You’re better off. Trust me.”

Tristan said nothing else. Jude tried to convince himself he hadn’t just lied. He was still trying when he went to sleep that night.

In identical houses throughout town, identical televisions buzzed and hummed. The town was content, now that the one minute was over. At least for the day.

In the morning, Jude would go to The Firm. He would sell insurance, as his father had. He would come home and be with his wife, and his dog, and his kids, whom he loved. He stopped walking by the field every day, and stopped standing out on the porch at sundown, because it made his scar hurt. Because he could no longer do so without seeing those shining, tennis-ball eyes. Without remembering what young, glorious things they held behind glass.

As January dragged itself along, Jude managed to put it all out of his head. Managed to stop wondering, again, what the thing had been. He managed to enjoy the complacency of his simple, small-town life, even with its one unbearable minute each day. He managed to enjoy the shitty and unending January rain.

He loved this life. He chose this life. He felt good about it. And it was nice. Really, really nice…

Right?

Sam Rebelein lives in Poughkeepsie, NY. His work has been published in Dark Moon Digest Magazine and in the May and June calendars of Every Day Fiction, 2017. It has also been performed onstage in collaboration with the play development lab A Howl of Playwrights in Rhinebeck, NY, of which he is an active member. He is a co-founder of the sketch comedy group Crebuland, which you can Like on Facebook. For whatever it’s worth.

_{Black Fanged Thing, 4800 words, published January 2018}

She came out of the peat like a sixpence in a barmbrack, her face shining like wet iron between the spade-edge and the turf, the bright rusty plait of her hair broken like a birth-cord around her neck. Jimmy Connolly swore, and Dan Wall crossed himself, and thin-faced Sean MacMahon gaped like someone had shoved him by the scruff of his neck to a keyhole, all consternation and wanting to see more. And me? Mid-cut, I stopped with my spade half-stuck in the green-tufted earth and stared until my back hurt, forgetting to step forward into the slice or straighten up to save myself the pain. The sky was a racing grey, the land brown as strong tea and talkative with water all around us. The bones of her arm and shoulder were clean as bronze hairpins where Jimmy’s spade had stripped off the fragile tissue, wadded it like old tin foil against her breastbone. Otherwise she might have been sleeping, tucked up in the pillowy bogland with the sedge snug at her chin.

“Oh,” Sean said then, recovering, “Roddy’s found his sweetheart,” and all of us laughed, jokers at the graveside. Her eyelids were their own silver pennies, closed.

After that it was talk of museums and universities, while we peeled the peat from her wounded shoulder and the crushed hollow of her throat. She was twisted in the black slices, squashed in on herself like a discarded paper bag; exposed to the scudding summer air, she gleamed like an elver in an eddy of mud. Even flattened strangely under the tarnished skin, her features were peaceful, long-eyed, her lips sealed in a dreaming curve. She would not stay that way for long if we left her to dry with the rest of the stacked sods—and God knew if packing her in peat again would save us much time. Bolder in defense of a dead girl than I had ever seen him on his own reluctant behalf, Sean was all for ringing the National Museum as soon as we got our day’s pay, no matter whether it was an archaeologist or a policeman they sent from Dublin, anyone who could disinter her from the bog without ruining the frail preservation of her body further. “And tell us where she came from, maybe, who—killed her,” and we heard a click of half-swallowed words before he went on with the sentence, as though it were impolite to mention it out loud.

“Sacrifice,” said Jimmy laconically; he had done a little reading, he explained, some years before when turf-cutters like ourselves turned up a skeleton in County Galway that was not a recently missing person, but an accidental drowning nearly five thousand years old. “To the heathen gods of ancient Ireland, for luck in the harvest and fine healthy children. She’d have been a beauty in her day, back before the Romans, that was. Anything less than the best and they’d have been cheating their gods. You can think a moment how kindly their gods would’ve taken that.”

He sounded like a professor even in his sweat-banded collarless shirt and mud-streaked dungarees; looked like one, tall and black-haired, his harsh-cut face planing itself down to bronze with the lengthening days. Sean and I were nodding when Dan Wall, who I would never have guessed read a book unless it was full of bets and long shots, snorted and spat deliberately onto the turf.

“Ballocks, Connolly. She was a whore. An adulteress, and her man caught her at it—he pinned her down in the bog to punish her, see?” We could see the leather twisted into the silver-black of her flesh when he pointed it out, tanned as foxily as her hair and tight as a garrote. He scratched a little at the peat over her breast, carving the butter-black sod away: it was not bone arching under his fingers, above her ribcage, but slim withies of some water-stiffened wood. “Tell me that’s an honor, dumping a pretty girl like a sack of shite out in the middle of this mire. He had to hate her. He couldn’t bring himself to break her face, but he made damn sure not another man’d see it after him. Cut another yard and we’ll find the man she did it with, I know that.”

Sean was bristling, but Jimmy only looked over mildly, once at Dan and once at the girl with the curve of one wrinkled breast just showing under the muddy tines. “Sure, you should be working for the Gardaí,” he said, and then Sean was arguing again about the National Museum, or anyone within a day’s drive of Croghan who might know about the ancient strangled pagan dead, and Jimmy was half-listening to him, having plainly already made up his mind to agree, and Dan was gazing angrily down at the tar-cast dead face beneath us, as if he were the man she had hurt.

I was ignoring all of them, even the girl under her bedspread of peat. I was thinking about sacrifice and murder, scholarly words for the torque of a man’s hand grinding into the nape of my neck, choking a knot of leather deeper and deeper into the hollow of my throat until I felt rings of cartilage break inward and small bones give way and my breath snap in on itself, blacking out the long, burnt-green line of bogland, the skylarks flicking across the dawn-eye of the sun—whether it was done in hatred or love, my hair waving in the cold, whisky-colored water as the willows staked me down. She looked so calm for the results of so much violence, abrupt and final as a bullet to the head or a billhook to the throat. Executions and reprisals, I thought, anyone who had lived through ’22 had seen those. And do you still think she died for something as lofty as God’s honor or her lover’s wounded pride?

I kept the question back, even while my throat tightened in useless sympathy, watching the wind stir her rusted iron hair. Likely Dan had the right of it, sour as it sounded. If I wanted to touch her with gentleness, it was because she was a woman who knew the taste and the price of transgression. If I was trying to imagine the tint of her hair and the texture of her skin before the acids of Móin Alúine cured her to a folded pewter shell, it was because I was an adulterer, too.

Katharine Morgan’s husband had left her for the wars, but she never said which ones and I never asked again. If it was the Great War, she would have known by now if he was coming back; if it was the civil war in Spain, it felt like anyone’s guess whether he had signed on with O’Duffy’s Brigade or the Socialists or just gone to make trouble out of the local authorities’ reach. She called him a blackguard and a lying bastard, she said she had never known a man so deft with a woman’s body, she missed him like the Devil and she prayed God to keep him away and she invited me into her bed one afternoon near the heathery start of May, an offer of confidence that was not quite a threat curling as provocatively on the air as the clean-washed smell of her heavy, jet-pinned hair.

I’m sure you understand me, Mr. Mathews. Or is it Miss?

It’s Mathews, ma’am.

Then it’s Katharine, Mathews.

Eventually she came to call me Roddy, but she always greeted me as Mr. at the door, just in case a lifetime of careful habits proved unequal to the powers of village gossip. She had come to Croghan as a bride and stayed there for all she knew a widow and I would take my reputation with me when I left at the end of the summer; I was not so complacent as to think that hers was so self-contained. She was a handsome woman, thirty-three to my thirty-five, decorously pale everywhere but her high-colored cheeks and the flush that faded across her breasts after making love. She had more English in her voice than Irish, though she never spoke of any home before her marriage, and she must have lived on more than her spendthrift husband’s savings, if he had been gone as many years as she hinted. I was not the first lover she had entertained since sweet-talking Desmond Morgan disappeared—I never fooled myself that way, either. But I did wonder, sometimes, if the others had only been women or men.

“Oh, Jesus have mercy,” she would say, twisting under my mouth, “sweet as a boy,” and I knew then that she loved me for the simplest part of myself. She liked my broad shoulders under their brown coat, my hair always falling chestnut-slick into my eyes; she liked my wind-rawed cheeks and my mulish jaw, the work-hardened span of my hands with their popped knuckles and old roughened marks of sacks and crates and shovels and drystone walls. She never touched my breasts, brown-nippled beneath their linen bindings, or my hips, cradled wide to take my long-striding weight, or my cunt, clenching hot and slippery as a heart behind the travel-worn corduroy of my trousers. Never once reached after my pleasure, as I worked my hand to the wrist inside her and she screamed, gloriously tight around me. Afterward, she would pull me down to the bedsheets beside her, skin pink as the lip of a whelk, and fist her hands in my hair, taste her salt sweet in my mouth and straddle me, laughing, but never with me as naked as herself. She wanted the shape of a laboring man and the spark of a demon lover—the security, too, of knowing she would never fall pregnant by me, no matter how many times she called me up from the parlor to the white curtains of her bedroom and her deep-pillowed bed. She wanted road-tramping Roddy Mathews and I was that, I was never anyone else from the time I was old enough to know my own skin, but I was the pieces of myself that she never touched, just as much, and the hunger that went with them. At most, she would watch me as I sprawled in a chair, my belt unbuckled and my own fingers busy in the folds of myself, but I thought it disappointed her that she could never see me spend, groan or gasp as loudly as I might. It ruined the illusion, spoilt the spell—

I tried not to think unkindly of her. The lovers of mine who had known me entirely, I could count on the two fingers I gave the rest of God’s earth for wanting me to be one thing or the other, like the flick of a switch of an electric light. Katharine Morgan was expressive and affectionate and she did not stint herself in desire; she was a cleverer woman than she advertised with her wide, apple-green eyes and a sadder one than she liked to let me see; she never asked me a question beyond my employment and my health and the next time we should see one another, if a man of the world could find enough to say to a woman of her house, content in her quiet life. All the times she heard me say that I loved her, I was not lying. When I left, I did not think she would tell stories of me.

Sean MacMahon was waiting over the girl in the peat when we got there, hunkered down at the edge of the cutting with the wind stirring the edges of his sugar-fair hair under his cap. He looked so forlorn, I had to remind myself that he was nearer my age than coltish, touchy Dan Wall, whose round, dark-freckled face would have looked cherubic if he were not constantly scowling. “It’s the coroner they’re sending from Tullamore,” he said without preamble. “In case she wasn’t put in the bog by heathen priests after all. The museum won’t want her if it’s murder.” The sun shone out again in the milk-blue twists of sky and he looked unhappily at the black-stepped levels of earth, the woman dreaming under the damp sods we had packed her in at the end of the day.

He must have called the Garda station, whether we had agreed on it or not; Dan looked for a moment as though he was going to shout at Sean for it, then said only, sullenly, “And what are we supposed to do until then? Lose a day’s wages waiting for the man with the little black bag?”

“Dig around her, idiot,” Jimmy said with his blunt, impatient authority, before Sean could bridle or I could start an argument of my own, and so we did, leaving a little bier of peat beneath her and a shroud of it above, so that she lay like an effigy among us as we worked, turf-veiled eyes turned to the sky. I was sweating with my coat off, well-worn báinín sticking to my shoulders; Dan kept taking his cap off and scrubbing one hand through his hair, spikily dark as treacle. He was closest to me with his barrow, spreading the sods I cut, and I tensed a little: I had guessed the day we met that if anyone was going to give me trouble in Croghan, it would be this angry half-boy, angling his way into manhood with his shoulders swaggering and his hands fisted deep in his pockets, waiting for someone to clip him in the street so that he could throw them a punch in return. He was religious and ashamed of it, better-educated and defensive of it, and I thought he was lying about most of the women he claimed to have had. But he said nothing more dangerous than, “Hold up, Mathews, give me a chance! It’s a job, not a race, for Christ’s sake,” and because we did not have another barrowman, I slowed. It took looking up at the edge of the bank for me to realize how doggedly I had been working.

“When’s he coming, this coroner from Tullamore?”

It did not sound anything like as casual as I had meant it to, an idle question to while away the time spent slicing and spreading and stacking as the sun climbed and the wet ground warmed, white-starred with bog cotton and the aniline-flowered lures of butterwort. Behind me, Dan blew out an aggrieved breath and bent to lift his barrow.

“Day after tomorrow,” Sean said, blinking a little. He was blue-eyed almost to silver; it made his direct glance disconcerting. “Rafferty said it would disturb work, policemen and coroners coming round in the middle of the day. Reporters, too, likely as not. And tomorrow it’s raining.”

I thought of her foxed-mirror face, swirled in a slick of mud; her cedar-chest hair dissolving like tobacco shreds. Mold splotching her breast, long-sheltered, like slime on a stone. Before Jimmy could speak, or Dan, or even Sean, catching up to his own thought as he heard it leave his mouth, I said, “We’ll need a tarpaulin over her, then. She won’t stand the rain.”

“Oh, what, are you studying with Connolly here now, too? Are we opening a turf-cutters’ university—final subject, murdered adulteresses from before the birth of Christ?”

“Oh, shut it, Dan Wall,” I started. “You wouldn’t know the birth of Christ from the hole in your—” and that was when Jimmy stepped in, before Dan swung to hit me. It would have been worse if he ran at me, caught me around the waist to bull me down; but his color faded and he trundled his barrow away without a word, its slats piled high with drying sods.

“We’ll find you a tarpaulin, Roddy,” Sean said into the silence. “Better yet, we’ll thatch her. Stack the sods over her, like a gróigín.” At my stare, he shrugged with the spade still in his hands, a pale, slight man in canvas trousers, lashes and brows nearly invisible in strong sun. “She’s your lass, Roddy. We’ll take care of her.”

When I dreamed of the peat girl, she was always dead, though she walked out of the bog at night to meet me. Her skirt was patterned in bilberry-blue, her shawl red as cranberries, and the garment next her skin looked most like a sheepskin with the fleece side in, but her face and her arms and her ankles above the leather lacings of her shoes were as opaque as old silver, her tied-back hair a springing mat of rust. Her nails were tawny parings, translucent as horn. Open between their metallic lids, her eyes were honey-amber, their pupils ochre lights.

Fast in my hayloft bed, I watched her blink, but not breathe; lay her palm against my chest, though no pulse ticked at her wrist. She was cold as groundwater, her smell of wet earth and fermenting wood. Her full height came barely to my breastbone. Each time she kissed me, I choked on the darkness that lay behind her tongue, a sunken, welling sourness—peat-smolder, leather-tang—that trickled like meltwater from the corners of my mouth the fiercer I kissed her back, striving for some living, human response, involuntary as a gasp. With her small, creased hands, she unpinned her woolen shawl, unlaced her skirt and pushed me down on the bright-checked, soft-scratching bedding, unwrapping the sheepskin from her shoulders so that her low breasts gleamed in the overcast light, heavy as hematite. And she touched me, with those fingers that had steeped for centuries in black veins of the bog, till my nipples stiffened like beads and my skin buzzed like tram-rails and my cunt swelled wet as a tarn, hungry for the dead cold of her. She stroked me and bent over me, searched my roughed-back hair with her mouth as if scenting me like a cat and tugged the tight linen from my breasts until she could trace the blanched red marks where the edges cut in; she slipped hard, tiny fingers inside me and I shouted with the freezing shock and jolt of pleasure, bucking as the soft ground swayed beneath us, a heather-plaited moss-tick.

And we’ll find the man she did it with, Dan had sneered, nineteen centuries from now when these silver-sheeting meadows were rush-spiked straits of turf, but they never would, not unless I laid myself down at her side like two lovers in a song and waited. Her ribs under my hands were light as a kestrel’s, her dull hammered-foil skin sail-taut across them. Even dreaming, I had the nightmare fear that she would open up around me like sodden paper, bog-soaked bones splitting free of her flesh like the rags her clothes had gone to ages before our clumsy spades brought her to light— Her cry was the only sound I heard her make, sharp as a curlew. Her weight dropped onto me and for a moment the heat of my own skin was enough to blunt her chill, hip and breast and shoulder and chin all interlocked like the twining of an ancient brooch; I could close my eyes and imagine her live in my arms, the unknowable woman she had been before the cord-choke and the drowning. Close to, the amber of her eyes was flawed with fern-seeds and tiny inclusions of dust or air. Her teeth were black as bog oak. She was smiling. I woke in a sweat of sex, my hair plastered to my forehead and my thighs slicked with their own wet; the dawn stars were shining in at the window. I never dreamed that she dressed and left me.

It did not rain the next day, after all; it misted in the morning and the streets shone like snail-tracks between the plaster-sided houses, the thatched edges of their roofs glimmering with refracting beads, but the heaviest clouds burned off before noon and we went out to the turf-cutting beneath a soft-watered sky as grey as a horse’s back. Rafferty had shifted us to another plot, fruitlessly trying to steer gossip away from the murder victim, the heathen sacrifice, the dead queen of Ireland coffined in the bog with her scarlet comet’s hair streaming away into the dark earth, the gold and bronze torcs and bracelets of her warrior’s hoard slowly pushed apart from one another by the forming peat, like planets by time… Even Katharine had asked if it was true, if a woman’s body had been found in Móin Alúine, and I told her everything but my dreams. Braced to temporize if she asked if the dead woman was beautiful—more beautiful than Katharine herself, resting in my arms as we looked out the parlor window onto the green steep of Croghan Hill, the stone-walled patchwork of the village tumbling away to the foot of the peat fields—I had no ready answer when she asked instead, Does she look unhappy?

I had not thought about it, any more than I had asked myself if an ash-tree looks hungry or a wash of limestone tired. She looks dead, I said truthfully. You can see the bones of her, dyed like bronze from the bogland. She doesn’t— and I hesitated, but Katharine’s expression showed neither fear nor disgust. She doesn’t look like a woman who died in pain, if that’s what you’re fearing. She’s a calm face. Closed eyes. Peaceful. You’ll see for yourself; they’ll have to let people see her before they take her away, and she leaned her head into the hollow of my collarbone and said no more, the dark coil of her hair fragrant with lemon and musk.

She was slighter than the peat girl for all her greater height, more slender at waist and bust. I looked at her sometimes and thought of a slim dark-haired man, dandily barbered, with a watch-chain in his waistcoat and a well-knotted necktie; I said nothing. Not everyone saw themselves with double vision: wanted to know they could be so seen. I kissed her temple and she pushed me away, rising in a China-silk rustle. Her voice trailed off on a sigh, wry as one of the reasons I loved her.

Peaceful when she’s dead. Every woman’s dream!

We walked into wetter ground, boots whistling and sucking with the sponge-mat and the damp; Dan kept pointing to pools and soft, shaking ground, calling to the rest of us.

“Put a sléan in here, Sean, we’ll dig up Patrick. Here’s where Oisín aged three hundred years when he touched the earth, only he touched Allen water and kept on falling, through land, through time—never mind, we’ll never find him. Keep on, boys.” I wondered if he had ever written poetry, and if he was ashamed of it, too. “Sure, we can’t leave the queen of all Ireland with no king, even if she was unfaithful to him. Here, Roddy, you know her best—where would she have left him? Here? Or here? Know her like Adam,” he added when I did not answer. “Where would you have bedded her, if you were a king of the pagan land?” He kicked at a grey blink of water, cataracted with the reflection of the sky. “Don’t cry, Sean, you can send the next one to the National Museum.”

But it was Desmond Morgan we found instead, floating on his back in a slurry of looseleaf water and moss as palely green as his widow’s eyes.

He was not beautiful. The bog had not had the centuries to work its alchemy on him, tightening him to the leather of himself: he was loose on his bones, and dingy, and soft and slack as meal when we hauled him up, swearing at the rank sluice of liquids that poured from his rusted tweeds, the flopping cavity of his body, his bonelessly dangling bare feet. His eyes were too soft for amber. His teeth were hard in the gape of his mouth, peat-flecked porcelain ringing the sky. His head rolled like a kicked-in football. All of his pockets had been sewn closed and stuffed full of stones.

At that Sean was sick and not even Dan had the heart to mock him, gill-green as he looked himself. “Bloody hell,” he repeated, “bloody fucking hell, fucking Christ in hell,” like he could curse the man back into the earth that had so incompletely assimilated him. Jimmy watched silently, his bronze mouth a hard-braced line, Sean coughed and retched in the sedges, fumbling a handkerchief to wipe his nose with, Dan blasphemed on through an audible knot of nausea and I tried to ignore the feel of the water the dead man had left on my hands and keep the thought down, choke it: which of them would say it first? How long? Was Katharine Morgan’s sporting wastrel of a husband so gratefully forgotten that they could not piece together who he must have been, this lanky string of joints whose long, moss-infested flop of hair would have combed back jauntily from his rake’s profile, still cocked for a fight beneath the perished rubber of his face? With a gold ring on his left hand and a wallet in his draining jacket, the vegetable materials of his papers and his money—if she had left him his money, God knew he had taken enough of hers—long since pulped by the acids of the peat? I knew what I would find if I knelt and worked the ring off his finger and the watch off his wrist, the small initials I would read there incised in the gold. I had seen the photograph on her dressing table, hand-tinted so that I knew the color of his brilliantine hair before the bog stole into it. Other men had seen him alive.

“Christ, it’s Morgan.” Jimmy’s voice had a thick, disbelieving sound; his eyes were dark as doors. “So she did it after all.” He had spoken more easily of human sacrifice.

Sean hacked into his handkerchief and I could have kissed him, because it was louder than the noise of my breath. He said uncertainly, “He left her. With her savings, everyone knew that. Said he was off to look for work in London and good riddance to him.”

“And changed the money for stones before he went?” Dan’s voice was raw, his face flushed as if someone grappled him. “Lost his way in the bogs, instead of catching the bus to Tullamore and taking the bloody train? Is there anything you don’t believe, MacMahon? Desmond Morgan drowned himself and God save the King? Jesus, but you’re a fool—”

“And the coroner’s coming.” For the first time all summer, I heard Sean MacMahon laugh, a clear pealing snicker at himself or the circumstances, like something out of a detective magazine or a play on the stage. “Tomorrow. Oh, Jesus. Me and my museums. That’s all of us fucked, then,” and even somber Jimmy snorted at that, standing over a corpse.

“Aye, Rafferty’ll love two investigations for murder on his land.”

There was a beat of silence, just long enough for me to hear as clearly as if we were all thinking it, Maybe we should just roll the old bastard back under his pool, maybe we’ll tell Rafferty the ground was too wet for the turf-cutting, maybe in a year we won’t be lying when we say we don’t know what became of Desmond Morgan, who’ll say we ever did? Who knows what becomes of a body once the bog has hold of it, before I heard someone speaking and I knew it was me, because the rest of them looked like I was talking French.

“We’ll have to tell Mrs. Morgan.”

There was another silence, and I could not tell what any of them were thinking at all. Jimmy said carefully, finally, “A woman sends her man off with that much weight in his pockets, she’s not looking to see him again.”

“Sure, but she didn’t foresee us digging him up like a pack of bloody dogs.” Angry at myself, knowing there was no reason for it, “She has a right to know.”

“If she wants to turn herself in?” The anger had gone out of Dan as abruptly as it had blown into him; he only looked as young as he was, and sickened, and hollow with thinking, as we all must have been, how calm-eyed Katharine Morgan, so coolly composed, could have killed her husband. Poison, maybe, if she had left no mark on him. Or she had cracked his skull, stabbed him, shot him, even, and the bog had soaked the wound away, run itself through him in place of blood until there was nothing to see but the split and swelling of decay and who could say when that had happened? I saw no noose in the slack of his puffball throat, no crushed bones under his ochre-stained shirt. Perhaps she had only drugged him and left the bog to do the rest. I could not imagine her dragging a body out of the house, mile by patient mile, each hardworking breath loud in the bat-flickered night and no one in Croghan noticing. “Out of her hands now, isn’t it—”

Heavy as bog iron, Jimmy broke in, “He used to beat her, Danny-boy, did you know that?”

She had not told me. Those bruisy hands wilting at his sides, snapped bladderworts with the knuckles barely visible in the soft wet skin—dead as they were, I wanted to break them, twist the fingers like chicken bones until they cracked, maim him in the afterlife like the mutilations Jimmy had said our ancestors cursed their failed kings with, so that even if his ghost came staggering home down the wet roads of Allen, sleek-haired, shark-grinning, it would paw helplessly at every door with blunted sockets of bone that could never again put their pain on anyone.

I thought of Katharine in the half-light of her bedroom, saying, There wasn’t an inch of me he wouldn’t touch, and I had misconstrued her, jealousy-flicked as I knelt to prove there was nowhere I would not go for her pleasure. She had not misdirected me.

I said again, hoarsely, “She’s a right to know.” Not caring what they knew or guessed or had known already, which way I was giving myself away as I dragged my gaze away from Desmond Morgan to stare at all their faces, tight as rope around a woman’s neck: “Even if it’s just so she can finish drowning the fucker herself.”

That night I dreamed of the peat girl walking through Croghan, one foot in front of the other as carefully as though she walked a tightrope on the beaten road. She carried her heavy-braided head with the pride of a coronet and her hands closed at her sides, the color of a well-thumbed shilling beneath the blood-bright hem of her shawl. She held an iron knife in one, a glinting break of white quartz in the other; I could see them as clearly as if she had opened her palms to me. In the bright grey day, the amber in her eyes shone like a cat’s in the dark.

Far away down the paths into Móin Alúine, I saw a man walking, so small against the cloud-pearled horizon that I could have blotted him out with a blinked eye. He moved like a sleepwalker or a puppet on sticks, unwavering as machinery. He was hatless, his stiff hair wind-snatched; the swing of his pockets clacked with each step like a creel of stones. He stepped from the hummocky, heather-edged ground and was gone.

I saw Katharine Morgan, a dry-eyed weeping girl, with the sloe stains of bruises around her cheekbones and her hair hanging half-plaited as she knelt beside a man’s body, the oil-light glimmering on the dark pool that haloed him, smooth as a mirror of spilled ink. I saw his bursting face and his stone-blue tongue, his torn shirt and his slashed, empty hands. Reflected by the lantern, Katharine’s own face eddied in her husband’s blood, a marsh-fire fetch from the other side of death’s glass. Her hands left bog-black smears on the knees of her nightdress, her bare shoulders set as taut and fragile as wings.

The peat girl stopped beneath my window; when she looked up at me, her neck made the quizzical tilt of her body wrung by the weight of compacting time. At her feet lay Desmond Morgan, dead without decay, his head flung back on his broken neck and the knife-cuts on his arms gaping bloodlessly as bread slices, his heart’s blood stiffening on his shirt like tar. He had been blue-eyed before his sight clouded like Roman glass; his butter-gold hair was darker than his picture and flecked with chaff, grass-seed, flower-heads of meadowsweet. I called down to her, I heard my own voice echoing from the street, but I could not remember the words as they left me, only the taste of her, myrtle-sharp, moss-dank, spade-cold. She laid down the knife, its clean blade pointing east; she put the white stone in the dead man’s hand that could not grip it. Already the earth beneath them was hollowing with water the color of beech leaves, the sticky-tipped red hairs of sundew curling around his bare ankle. Quick and gently, she smoothed a hand over his flower-stuck hair; she laid his shirt open, the skin beneath as white and bruised as violets, and with her sharp thumbnails, red as roe deer, she cut the nipples from his chest.

We reburied Desmond Morgan with Katharine watching, the wind roiling out strands of her hair like a signature on the streaky speedwell sky. It was unceremoniously done, and unchristianly, but I had begun to think it would not have mattered if we laid him out with candles at head and foot and said Mass for his soul every Sunday of her widowhood: he was damned as far as the bog was concerned and I was not going to gainsay it. None of us said much, not even Dan, who had surely not expected to find himself at arm’s length from a murderess and the lover she rested her shoulder against, her white-sleeved arms folded within a shawl of green and black squares I had not seen before. Sean reached to take off his cap before he thought better of it, straightened it more firmly instead. I thought of a mouth filled with black soil, the quaking illusion of ground slumping and settling under the scant weight of the dead until it had folded itself over the body more conclusively than any headstone. Finally, Jimmy pushed the last soft wedge of turf down, tamped it with the back of his spade, and looked faintly embarrassed, as though he had been thinking loud enough to overhear. He cleared his throat; Sean’s head came up anxiously, hound-scenting for interloping authorities—Michael Rafferty, Gardaí, the coroner from Tullamore, looming large as a judge of legend by now. A wren shrilled and checked in the moss somewhere, the little bird-king.

As accurately as if he pronounced a benediction, Jimmy Connolly said, “Rest in peace, you spawn-hearted bastard, if that means you never trouble another soul more. May God not remember where he put you and the Devil never forget.” And then we piled a green footing of well-spread sods over the damp seam in the earth and Sean MacMahon started talking about the coroner again and Dan Wall stood longest of all over the grave and I could not read a thing about him. Behind them, Katharine lingered, and I went to catch up with her, not knowing if she wanted me to.

Her stride would have been nearly as long as mine, if not for her skirts. We were nearly off Rafferty’s ground before she said, “You promised to show me your queen of the bog. Before the police and the doctors came for her.”

“Aye. I will. There’s still time. Didn’t you hear Sean, fretting he wouldn’t be there to see her unveiling? She’s this way.” And I should have said nothing more, nothing that was not the weather or the time or the scholarly speculations of Jimmy Connolly, but her face was sky-silhouetted beneath mine and she looked younger with her arms crossed in their knot of plaid, her hair wind-loosened on her shoulders, and it was not her fault that I had seen her weep in dreams: “You didn’t tell me.”

“What should I tell you, Roddy Mathews?” She did not glance upward at me, as coolly as her voice lifted; she did not even slacken her pace. “Where I was born? The names of my parents? How I came to my marriage and what happened after I was wed? What did you ask me when first you came to my door that I should have told you anything?” A beat of silence, the ankle-brush of tussocks of sedge and bell-pink heath. How slender her shoulders had felt within my arms, how she had tongued my fingertips and the sun had fired red lights in her undone hair the first time we met by day. “What did you tell me of yourself?”

I bit back, No more than you didn’t want to know; I said finally, “Not enough, it seems.”

Her mouth flicked up at one corner. Her eyes were a ruddier green when the sun scattered out of its clouds, paler when they slid over it again. “There was a woman,” she said at last, very quietly. “What she was like, it doesn’t matter. It mattered that he found us. He didn’t… God’s truth, I believe he didn’t understand at first what he was seeing. When he understood, he broke my ribs.” Her voice was as clear as a clerk in a court of law. “No one would tell me if she died.”

“Was it after that you killed him?”

She looked at me then, with the plumy heads of bog cotton caught in the folds of her skirt and her eyes the color of moss. I could see her hands tarnished silver if I tried, a halter of leather about her crushed throat, her dark hair bleached to bog-rust and her face folded to the peat as if to a long-aching rest, but Dan had been wrong about who ended up in the pools of Móin Alúine, and maybe Jimmy had, too, for all his care and erudition, and I had been wrong about the reasons Katharine Morgan would not touch me. I could still feel a dead woman’s fingers inside me, unafraid as time. If I had opened myself as fearlessly to the living woman beside me, would it have changed anything? Nothing but the summer, I thought: and that might have been enough.

“Is this her, your peat woman?”

Katharine’s hand went out to my arm, stopped me mid-stride. Sean had been as good as his word, laying a mosaic of damp sods from half-hidden ribcage to hairline so that the familiar peat covered her everywhere, molded itself again to her metallic skin like water filling to its own level; when I knelt to unbury her, I felt uneasily as though I was pulling a coffin-lid from a face, not showing off an archaeological find. Her eyes were still closed, her lips curved by their last thought or the workings of the bog. The red of her hair was startling as a wound, penny-bright at the wreck of her throat. Even the gleam of her bones was graceful. I could not answer; I heard Roddy’s sweetheart, your lass, and I knew she had ceased to be anyone’s with the break of her neck.

“She came out of the peat. She’s no more mine…” I said it finally: “She’s no more mine than you are, Katharine Morgan.”

Her smile was an odd, sad crease in her wind-flushed face, very like the silvery expression wried at our feet. Like she was saying a vow back to me, “No more than you’re mine, Roddy Mathews,” and I had never expected anything else, but for a moment I could think only of her mouth opening to mine, the salt heat and slick of her body, the way her fingers gripped briefly and hotly in my hair. The tannin-cold tongue of the girl from Móin Alúine, dead years before Christ and closer to me than the Church had ever been. She had loved me, or I would never have dreamed of her. She had loved Desmond Morgan, too, and shown him to me as a love-gift, to ease my other lover’s mind, before taking him in again for the last time. It was not my place after all to lie beside her all the long, hungry centuries. It never had been.

“Aye,” I said, and it hurt less than I thought it would. Her hand was still on my sleeve; I put my own over it, just as if we were walking out together, and took a breath as deep as if I was going to ask her for an hour of her time after church. “You’d have made a fine queen of the land in Connolly’s ancient days, do you know that?” And before she could make any answer or I could lose my nerve, I added, “A fine king of the land, too, and not the dying kind.”

Her hand was warm under mine, not eel-cold silver, and she was not pulling away. Around us the bog stretched away to the sky, rust-green and tawny and engulfing as time, the thin moment we stood on that at any moment could give way: a kiss, a knife, a new road at the end of the season. The mirror that showed me myself, not just the two misapprehensions I was meant to choose from. The coroner from Tullamore. Rafferty himself would be here soon, and like as not the Gardaí and a trail of sightseers with him. But Katharine was still studying the calm dead face beneath us, and the peat girl still lay half in the wet earth that was hers more than any museum cabinet could be, and I cared less if Rafferty found me idling than if I walked away, this time, before I was ready to be gone. The murderer and the sacrifice, nobody’s victims. We waited for history to find us.

Sonya Taaffe’s short fiction and poetry can be found mostly recently in the collection Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press) and in the anthologies Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom, and An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables. She edits poetry for Strange Horizons, lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats, and once named a Kuiper belt object.

Other Influences

Palingenesis, by Megan Arkenberg – The thing is — and I’m finally starting to admit this to myself — I don’t believe there’s a puzzle here. There’s no way to turn these jagged pieces into a smooth picture of something that makes sense. First you’d have to crack off the extra material and file the edges down, like you’re shaping a mosaic from pottery shards; you have to break away more and more to even get the right shape. This story is like a vase made from other, broken vases. And maybe it will hold water when you’re finished, but probably it won’t.

Red Mask, by Jessica May Lin – Before she jumped, Feng Guniang used to tell me about her suicide, during our cigarette breaks when we danced at the Green Dream, her white-lacquered nails trailing against the web of her fishnet tights. We smoked in the shadowy corners behind the opium dens on Jiameng Street, where the lights from the neon advertising boards couldn’t touch us. The new opium dens are all styled like the old red mansions of the Ming Dynasty, complete with heavy doors twice as tall as we were.

Only Their Shining Beauty Was Left, by Fran Wilde – On her second day studying in the Monteverde, Arminae Ganit stared at damp sky framed by beech leaves and fiddleheads and wished she could photosynthesize. She touched fingertips to the thick loam at her feet. Moist air slicked her cheeks and dampened her t-shirt so her pack’s straps rubbed at the skin beneath. The forest’s shifting clouds dappled Arminae’s hands dark and light. She imagined her fingers exuding roots; her hair, fruit and leaves.

Asterion

The difference between you and the humans, when it comes right down to it, is not in the protrusions of gnarled bone and horn that jut from the apex of your skull, or in the coarse fur that contrasts so spectacularly with the other parts of you, the parts that are mere human skin, or in your roar, or your pain, or their avarice.

The difference between you and the humans is that they all of them think they are deserving of something merely by fact of being born, while you understand existence does not equal right.

You can want until the end of your days; that does not make the wanted thing inevitable, or deserved.

But who cares about humans, anyway? You wouldn’t ever think of them except they keep calling on you. As much as they fear, their fascination is greater. Some of them think of you as a holy thing. Some of them think of you as an evil thing. Some, rarely, think of you as both at once. But always the thing. The object.

They never let you be the actor of your own life. And if you opened your mouth full of blunt teeth, if you told them, I am me, I am aware, I am here, well, then that would only make them more afraid.

And you are so tired of fear.

The King’s Ugly Daughter

My mother never told me she resented me for what was not between my legs, but I knew it all the same.

It was written in the way she sewed my clothes tighter than they needed to be because I was so much bigger than the other girls, never once in my life the right size. It was in the way she tugged ferociously at my dull, limp hair as she tried to dress it to fit the vagaries of fashion. It was in the way she looked at the women in our village who had sons—with a greedy, hollow hunger. It was in the way she drank clear liquor and threw small stones into the sea on many nights when she thought I was asleep, and the way she screamed at the moon to bring him back, bring him back, she would try again a thousand times if only he would come back.

On the day we learned of the king’s wedding, my mother beat me ten strokes across the shoulders for letting the bread burn.

On the day the news came that the queen had borne her first son, my mother threw a jug of oil at my head, and I slipped in the shards that littered the floor as she chased me out, and I slept out of doors for three nights until a neighbor sent me home and my mother smiled wanly with tears in her eyes and hugged me close.

On the day I first bled, she told me who my father was.

I already knew. I had known for a very long time. But still I ducked my head low, and though she never said “Oh, child, if only you were a son,” I heard it all the same.

Asterion

They send you their beautiful ones, the ones they think are most worthy, and you always wonder why.

Not why they send them. That motivation is easy enough to parse. They think the sacrifice will appease you, keep you from the rage and destruction and the evil of their own hearts that they see reflected in your beastly skin.

But why the beautiful? Why do they think you would have any use, or any desire, for these quaking children with their symmetrical features and their pale, unblemished skin? They come to you reeking of fear, their eyes bright and white in the darkness, every seven years. And what are you supposed to do with such burdens?

The answers spill slowly from their mouths, the bravest of the boys and girls stuttering and stumbling over words you only ever half-learned. Those above, the humans, they think you will eat these lovely sacrifices. As if fourteen small bodies could sustain you for so many years. They think you will rape and ravish them, that you will draw amusement from their torture in your tangle of underground caves.

It would be insulting, if you cared.

Anyway, you are an herbivore.

You cannot speak the human tongue, the language you half remember hearing from inside your mother’s womb. Your throat and tongue and lips will not form the sounds. So you teach the pretty children to respond to your gestures, and as each group grows older they remain to speak to the new arrivals, to teach them, and every seven years things get a bit easier.

You do not eat the children. But there are unspoken rules. They can never return to the light and the day. That is the way of the world. This life has been chosen for them despite their will, and so they must live it.

You teach them to cut tunnels into the soft earth. You teach them to carve art into the walls, whatever art they please. You teach them to survive on the mundane sacrifices that fill the long stretches between seventh years. Grain and wine and grass and air. And when the newest have settled, you go apart from them once more, because you generally prefer to be alone.

The King’s Ugly Daughter

My father was a young man sowing his wild oats when he had my mother. But he was very drunk, and he claimed to catch my mother cavorting with a wild man after she had left him sleeping off his winesick head in her bed. He would only claim me, he told her and everyone else who would listen, if I was a son.

For proof of paternity, he buried his cloak and his sword in a secret place that he said only a male heir could find. As if a penis were to prove a dowsing rod. At least then it would have some use, I suppose.

I found the secret place when I was seven.

It was a quiet glen, green and dense and wild. I used to go there, sometimes, when I needed to sit alone with my thoughts. Even wild girls sometimes need a place to be still.

As a further challenge, my father had buried his hoard beneath a large rock, one that only a man in his full strength could lift.

I managed the feat when I was fifteen.

Understand, I did not want the king’s inheritance. He had sons now, legitimate ones, and I cared nothing for the mythical man who dodged questions of paternity by burying trinkets under rocks.

But I wasn’t very good at being a girl, not the way it was spelled out that I should be. I was tall, and broad, and brash, and loud. I would not be the object of any man’s lust, even were he blind, and I would not be a gentle mother. So I took the cloak, and I took the sword, and decided I would be a hero.

My mother begged me not to leave. She did not want the shame of it, her ugly child running around the world in search of glory.

Her tears were too selfish. They came far too late.

I headed east with nothing but my feet to guide me, in search of other monsters.

Asterion

You wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to be part of a pair, a couple, a set.

If there were another being like you in the world, could you find peace in their presence?

Or would the two of you hate each other for being reflections of one another, forcing you each to confront your ugliest parts?

Sometimes, the pale, symmetrical children try to come to you, offer up their bodies. They have convinced themselves that you have a need, and they can fill it. Or they want to be special, elect among their peers. Or they want to know what it’s like to be loved by a beast, soft flesh trembling under hard, callused skin.

You turn them each away, gently or roughly as the case calls for it, but still, sometimes, you wonder.

Your mother once loved a monster, even if it was under guise of a wicked spell, a caprice of the gods for revenge against a foolish king. Even if it was only for a moment.

In your world below, the offerings age and grow. They form a community, pair off with each other. Sometimes, you hear them gasping and begging for release in the dark.

There was even a baby once, although you aren’t sure what happened to it. Babies aren’t very adaptable, as far as you know. They would find it difficult to live in this world below, subsisting on air and wine and darkness. Even you, you once had a cradle far above. You once had a blind nurse who rocked you side to side, and fed you milk, and sang beautiful human songs. Before you were dragged down here in chains, imprisoned alone.

You should not remember these things so clearly, but you do.

In the world above, when you are close enough to it, you can hear the next batch of sacrifices being prepared. Children, presumably as beautiful as all the rest, being taught to sing, to paint their faces in the ritual ways, to not ruin themselves with tears.

You wonder, how long will it go on? How long will they want to appease you in ways you never asked for? When will they decide instead that you should be ended, that the gods have forgotten about you and that it is finally time to cut you down?

The King’s Ugly Daughter

The wide world contained countless monsters, some even worse than me. I stormed mountain strongholds and snuck down ravines. I cut off heads and made a necklace of terrific and terrible teeth. My skin grew hard and brown from wind and sunlight. And I hungered.

Oh, I hungered.

Not physically. At least, not the way you might imagine. I had my fill of feasts in every village I saved, I had plain fare for the road that stuck hard to my ribs, I had good hands and eyes and scavenging skills born as child, when I hid from my mother. Though my labors refined my shape into something lithe and quick, I was still large, still voracious.

What I really hungered for was glory and fame. Whenever a community had a problem with serpents that spoke in riddles, or two-headed fish with fangs, or dogs who walked like men, I wanted them to call for me. I wanted the entire world to see what I was, and beg for me, and only me, to save them.

I defeated the Mistress of Stone and released the spell on her statuary prisoners. I cut down the fire-breathing chimaera. Eventually, I made my way to the court of my father.

He knew exactly who I was, and not only because of the presence of cloak and sandals and sword. We shared a look, the king and I. And though I had no power, I had strength and courage, and I could have demanded many things of that man. I could have demanded riches, a husband, a crown.

Instead, I approached him politely and asked him for more monsters. I had cut a swath across the world, and there were fewer and fewer to destroy.

The king told me he knew of a land to the south, where a bull-headed demigod terrorized the people. I think he hoped that I would seek the beast and die. Instead, I planned to seek the beast and prevail, adding ever more fame to my tally.

The man who was my father reached a shaky truce with me, and gave me many instructions on how to carry myself upon my return. I did not plan on ever returning, but I let him go through the motions all the same.

I went south.

They had a ritual there. Beautiful boys and beautiful girls, the best assets that they had to offer, sacrificed to the beast to keep their world in order.

But while I was not beautiful, my reputation preceded me. They hoped that if I killed the beast, their curse would be lifted forevermore. Whatever I wanted, they would lay at my feet, if I only did this thing.

On a bright day in spring, I inspected their sacrificial youths.

The task ahead did not need beauty. It needed bravery.

I chose for broadness of shoulder, I chose for strength of arm. I chose for fleetness of foot and for loyalty and for ardor. The limp, pallid beauties went back to their homes, reprieved. I built up a war party, ready to slaughter the beast below for no other reason than that I could.

Asterion

Night and day are distinct, even down below. You were named for the stars, though you have never seen them. Your mother, when you floated soft inside her, told you stories of the stars, and you think, even now, that you can imagine them. What they must taste like in the world above.

One of your humans carves constellations in their piece of wall. Maps of the infinite sky. You like to imagine them glinting, glowing, warm.

Another seventh year has come to a close. It is night, and tomorrow will come, and with it, fourteen more beautiful children to feed and soothe and teach. You make your way back to the company, as close to the surface as you can ever get in these tunnels. Something feels different, this time. You are not ready for different. Change means an ending, and you are not ready for the end.

But there is nothing to do but wait. And so you hunker down with your human children, some of them not so young as they once were, and you sleep, and you dream, and you wait.

The entrance to the caves is a small hole covered by uneven boards. You could break through it anytime, if you wanted to. If that were the way things were done. But it is not, and you do not like to be closer to this doorway than you need to be.

Morning comes, and light stabs through the boards, brighter than you are accustomed to. You sniff and snarl, the way you are supposed to. You wait.

You can hear the songs above. They are the same as they ever are; some of the children beside you, remembering, quake and sway.

But then the boards are opened, and everything is different.

This is a new type of sacrifice, led by a woman who screams as if she would eat your heart raw.

The King’s Ugly Daughter

We wore the blood of a sacrificial bull on our faces, on our bare arms.

We ran toward the beast, our eyes adjusting to the dark.

Attack him at once; no way could he manage fourteen blades, fourteen pairs of fists and feet.

We had not expected that there would be anyone else alive down below.

We had not expected the children, fierce and feral, running at our weapons with their empty hands outstretched.

It was a slaughter messier than any of us had bargained for, as our blades punched through soft flesh, ripped at pale eyes. They tore at our skin, but they were small and lovely where we were large and hard. Bones cracked and blood flowed. I thought the terrible scream came from my own throat, until I realized that it came from the bull.

He was enormous. The dark gave extra shadow to his shape. Hot breath fogged from his muzzle. But I looked into the darkness and I could see his eyes. They were human eyes. Bright blue, like the infinite sky, and wet with tears.

The monster screamed. And then he ran.

My heart leapt in my chest. I had no light, I had no knowledge of these caves, but also no choice but to follow.

“Wait!” my confederates called after me. “You’ll be lost. We must block off each tunnel one by one.”

There was no time. I was not built for waiting. And his eyes had been human eyes.

So I ran after him, the blood and gore on my left hand marking a trail against the wall. I could not see well in that dark, but perhaps the blood would suffice to save me all the same.

Asterion

You run because you cannot bear to watch your humans die for you. No, you want to tell them. Do not do this thing. Your fate has been changed. Let these warriors save you, let them take you back to the world above, where you will finally live free.

You run because you are a coward. You never claimed to be anything else, no matter what your outside form.

You run because the leader, the woman who did not look like any other woman-shaped creature you have ever seen, sent a pang through your unexpected heart.

Deeper and deeper into the maze. Past the constellations and the figures of kings and queens and gods. Down, down, into the dark center of the earth, where you can be alone. Finally, forever, alone.

Except she follows.

Except she stands there mastering her breath, and then says, “What are you, truly?” and you have no answer to give that she would understand.

The King’s Ugly Daughter

Sometimes I look back on my life and see all the points where I diverged from the path, where the story took a turn it was not supposed to.

It goes back to the very first point of my life, where I slithered out of my mother missing the only part she valued.

If I had been a son, I would certainly still have been a warrior, but I might also have been a king. I would have dispatched this monster as I did all the others, and then could have gone back to my father’s house, waving the wrong sails, watching him die for my mistake. I would not even have been sorry, would have done it intentionally, and then I would have displaced my young half-brothers and then I would have had my crown, and a name for the ages.

But I was not a son.

If I had been a proper daughter, small and silent, I might have given my life in service to the gods, or I might have turned to domestic pursuits and kept house for some average man, bearing him average children in quick succession until I died of it.

But I was not a proper daughter.

I was in-between, outside, and it struck me, looking at the monster in front of me, that we were in that way the same. He was in-between too.

His back was against a wall; there was nowhere further to flee. I stood before him, breath stabbing through my lungs, and I saw my future splinter into two distinct paths.

In the one, I took his head, sawed through the thick stem of his neck until it filled my hands, and dragged it by those incredible horns, inch by inch, back to the surface. I became the hero I’d always wanted to be. I had lovers at my beck and call, gold and jewels and wine and song. My name was spoken for generations, in tones of hushed awe, and in people’s imaginations I lived at the level of the gods.

In the other, I stayed in the dark and looked into those sky-blue eyes and tried to understand what this thing I felt was. What would come after, if anything came at all, was less clear.

I had no reason to want the second path. But I did. Oh, I did.

In that dark place, I dropped my weapon, and held up my empty hands, and the paths of the past and future collapsed in on themselves until there was only now.

Asterion

You never knew you could feel loss, because you did not know you had anything worth losing. But your humans, your family, they laid down their lives for yours, and it cuts, sharp.

Now the monster stands before you, the leader of the massacre that has taken away everything you ever had.

She is beautiful, and she is terrible, and she is opening her bloodstained hands.

You want to ask her for the stars; that she will let you have this one bright thing before your empty death.

But you cannot form the words, and your voice is nothing more than a low, broken bellow.

She comes to you with open arms, and everything changes. Something ends, and something new begins.

Heather Morris is a cyborg librarian living in North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. You can find her on Twitter @NotThatHeatherM.

Other labyrinths:

Extinctions, by Lina Rather – After your mother went to prison, you stayed with your grandmother, and after she died in her sleep, you went to the city. Odd girls on their own in the city come to bad ends, but you come from a long line of people who made their livings fixing and killing, and that sort of work never goes out of style. These days you have work that suits you better, in a tattoo shop in the low-rent part of the city where you spend most of your days doing flash and sweethearts’ names.

Hic Sunt Leones, by L.M. Davenport – It’s true that the house walks. It’s also true that you can only find it if you don’t know about it. Once, a boy in my high-school art class drew a picture of it, but didn’t know what he’d drawn; the thing in the center of his sketchpad had ungainly, menacing chicken legs caught mid-stride and a crazed thatch roof that hung askew over brooding windows. I knew it was the house right away because his eyes had that sleepy, traumatized look that people get once they’ve seen the house. I was used to seeing this look, mostly on my mother’s face.

Spirit Tasting List for Ridley House, April 2016, by Alex Acks Welcome, honored guest, to Ridley House; the acquisition of this charming 18th-century Palladian Revival villa has been something of a coup for our club and we are beyond pleased to present a wide array of tastes for your pleasure, if for a limited time. Take a moment to enjoy the grounds, particularly the stately elms with their attendant garlands of Spanish moss, and the mist rising from the ponds and nearby irrigation canals.