Appetite
A Small and Scary/ Big and Beastly Horror Story
photo by Simon Berger, Unsplash
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Winter, 1840
My husband says I must eat. The baby must live.
“My son will not die again in this godforsaken waste,” he says, and he takes the hatchet from beside the stove.
In the dead house, bodies lie awaiting the thaw and burial, shrouded and stiff like cured sides of beef.
They are not beef. Must my lips touch such dreadful flesh? My husband says two babes lost in blood and grief are payment enough for a living child. This first year as a trapper’s wife has been a hard education. If I cannot bear children, will I be cast out? God help me, will I join the corpses in the dead house? My body cries out for rest and sustenance; the baby trembles in my womb and I clench my will around it.
My husband says the settlers at the trading post care nothing for the ones they send across the river for him to bury; drifters, criminals, whores, and ne’er-do-wells. There are always such, roaming this wild land like beasts. He says the unwanted dead must pay their way; the single coin that comes with each of them hardly counts. Where else will they find such charity as they do here? I wash their hard-worn bodies; I say a prayer. My husband shakes his head in disgusted amusement and buries them as he has always done with a blanket of lime.
“I ain’t building no coffins. Digging’s hard enough and more than they deserve,” he says.
Some sleep several to a grave, all rolled into the same convenient pit. No headstones, no names or dates. No one will ever visit. And when the ground is frozen, my husband points out, there is the smokehouse.
I shudder and ask, “Why do not the settlers make their own rough plot for the undesirables? Why do none but the ferryman come here, and he reluctant and surly?”
My husband spits and says they are superstitious fools. “They don’t dare keep them dead ones near. Can’t trust themselves, when the winter closes in. Most of ‘em head for easier camps in the fall, like the Ojibwe do. The ones that don’t…we’ll be seeing them on the spring ferry, what’s left of ‘em.” He leans close and whispers, “The trick is to keep your hunger small. Nurse it. Give it just enough and no more.”
He touches my swollen belly and tells me what will be done.
“How do you think I’ve survived so many winters?” He grins with his fearsome, white teeth. “The dead will make you strong,” he says.
This winter is like nothing I knew in the east. My first in this savage place, it came like a great, ravenous bear. It ate everything. It squats at our door, gnashing its teeth. It has driven away all the game and turned the river to stone. The child within me is hungry. It gnaws my bones. Hunger within, hunger without, and only one source of succor. Through wild, white lashings of snow, I see my husband returning from the dead house, pulling the sledge behind him. It is stacked with the meat of the damned.
The New Year and Late Winter, 1841
The pain of birth. A woman’s pain. My husband cursed and paced the floor, but he could neither understand nor lessen it. I feared I would be torn asunder, broken and gutted as though by wolves. He caught the child as it thrust its way into the world. Not a son, but a daughter, white and silent as frost. He cleaned her long body of blood and laid her on my breast, his eyes wary.
“She has a tooth,” he said, and it was so.
One sharp sliver of bone like the tip of a cat’s fang protruded from her gum. It would cause me more pain as I nursed her, my blood mixing with the milk. She was a greedy baby, always hungry, always demanding to be fed. Yet, she never cried. She only made a gurgling growl when it was time to nurse, and her long-fingered hands would beckon in the air.
“Something ails the girl,” my husband said. “She grows too fast. She is too quiet. Look how she drains you.”
His words were accusatory, but his face spoke of fear. It is true, the baby is a strange, bony creature. She is not affectionate; she does not cuddle. Feeding her exhausts my strength and wastes my frame. But she is mine, this girl who overflows my arms with her long limbs, piercing my breast with her tooth. While she suckles, I will continue to eat what I must.
Spring, 1841
The thaw has begun. It is a treacherous season. Winter is loath to release its hold. My husband went to the river to cut a hole in the ice for fishing, and now he lies drowned beneath it. I can see him if I sweep away the snow, his lips pressed to the ice like a lover’s, his hands still trying to lift it from him. I cannot mourn him. Perhaps, when the Ojibwe people return to their summer lands, I may go to them. I cannot go to the trading post settlers, for they despise us even as they use us.
My girl, Una, is tall and strong. I do not question the miracle of her. I will not offend the God who made her with my weak fears, for her purpose must be divine. Already she is a help to me in my diminished strength.
Her skin is the white of winter, her hair moonlight on snow. Only her black eyes have color, and her scarlet lips. These she nips and sucks, shaving thin wafers of flesh from them with her sharp teeth. This flesh she chews with relish, never seeming to feel the pain of it. I have taken to dressing her poor lips with a gloss of honey, a pinch of salt in it. The salt is hateful to her, and so, I have a hope of breaking her of this awful habit.
Summer, 1841
We begged asylum among the Ojibwe, but they will not have us. Even the mothers among them turned their backs to us, and the men threatened to set the dogs upon us. A trapper making trade there followed us when we were driven away.
“You’d be wise not to try them again,” he said. “You could come with me, if you cared to.”
I saw the interest in his eyes. I have no wish to be another trapper’s woman, but if it meant my girl and I could leave this place…
“You would take us away from here?”
He shook his head and his eyes became hooded. “I’ll take you. But that,” he thrust a finger toward Una, “stays here.”
I took my daughter’s hand, nearly as big as my own, and turned to walk away.
“Did you understand any of what they said to you back there?” He stalked along beside us for a few paces. “Woman, they know what your husband did. What you did, too, I’m guessing. It’s a disease they can’t allow among them. And they know what that thing is that you call a child. Even I know.”
I stopped and faced him.
“Wiindigoo,” he hissed.
I flinched, but my heart was hardened to anything he could say.
“Una is a gift of God. If she is different, it is because she is an angel upon the earth. Shame upon you for believing otherwise.”
He flung up his hands. “It ain’t no gift. A curse is more like. Already, the folk back there are making plans to abandon this place. I don’t care what you done to survive the winter, but that thing ain’t coming with me.” He could see that his heathenish spouting left me unmoved, and he stepped back from us, defeated.
“Remember this,” he said in a low voice for my ears alone. “Silver might hold it down if you got any. Or just cut out its damned icy heart and throw it in the fire.”
Autumn, 1841
The goldenrod and asters have bloomed. There is color blazing in the trees. It is a glorious warning that winter approaches, always sooner than one is ready. I have put up preserves and pickle, laid in stores of flour and cornmeal. There is rabbit and venison, both smoked and potted. There is smoked fish. I fear it will not be enough. Una is always hungry.
She is as tall as me now, a miracle child, and strong as a mule. I must believe that the purity of this God-touched place, be it ever so harsh, has created my magical girl. An angel, indeed! Although she has no language yet, she shows me in a thousand ways the depth of her understanding. She brings the game from the forest, the fish from the cold river. Some she eats, but some she shares for our winter stores. I am content, for I have taught her to keep her appetite small.
The ground freezes. In the deadhouse, four bodies lie waiting. They will wait through the winter with us unmolested, for I am determined never again to fall upon such meat. The ferry will not cross again until spring. The native people have left for their winter camps and will not return. We are alone, my daughter and I.
Winter, 1841
Last night, as Una lay sleeping, I crept to her bed and plunged a silver hat pin into her heart. She did not stir, but a soft growl issued from her throat. I crept away again and sat by the low fire watching my girl dream, feeling as though I had broken some unspoken pact.
Earlier, I found her in the dead house, standing over the undraped corpse of a stout prostitute, her jaw working. The crunch of bone gave away her purpose there, and I rushed to the table. The woman’s toes had been plucked like grapes, and Una had grown until she had to stoop in the low-ceilinged room. The dim light painted the gaunt angles and hollows of her face into a fright mask.
“Ma,” she said, her first word. “Hungry.”
I guided her back to the cabin and tucked her into bed. Her feet, long, broad, and bare even in this frigid weather, stuck out from under her quilt. Her longest toes had each sprouted a hooked claw.
“All is well,” I whispered to her. “You’ve only nibbled like a mouse. You are my good girl.”
But her eyes upon me were flat and cold, and I returned later with the silver pin.
Sleep overtook me, and I dozed in my chair. The icy touch of the air woke me. The door hung open and Una’s bed was empty. I bolted to my feet and, snatching up a lantern, ran out into the blustering night. The door of the dead house lay in the snow. I ran to it, but I did not call out for my daughter. Inside, the dead lay tossed about, gnawed ribs and skulls, long bones cracked for the rich marrow. No flesh remained to tell one body from another. The light from my lantern struck a glint from something that lay upon the grisly table. I picked it up and turned it about in my numb fingers. My silver hat pin. I went back into the storm and raised my lantern high. Something moved through the snow-laden trees, a shape as tall and skeletal as the saplings.
I staggered to the cabin and built up the fire, my hair crackling and dripping with ice-melt. Here I sit, wrapped in a quilt and shivering. It is a beastly night, much like the night of Una’s birth. The wind howls and the snow erases everything familiar. Atop the screech of the wind I can hear a wailing voice, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away.
“Ma,” it shrieks. “Hungry.”
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Jeez Liz. This was a masterpiece, pure and simple. See, I *knew* you were underselling it. You are one of the most powerful voices here. It's unbelievable your name isn't decorating a dozen spines on one of my shelves.
Breathtaking! Horrifying and grisly, but equally sad and beautiful. You always manage to strike that perfect balance. I just love your writing!