Rachel Savage | Issue 2.5
Lacey planted her baby in the family grove, nestled between Granddaddy’s chestnut heavy branches and Granny’s delicate, bending willow tendrils. The ground there was rust-belt clay, bloody and hard to dig up. The air was muggy, August’s thick heat sliding across her skin like glue as she placed the tiny, blue-tinged body into the earth’s yawning crevice. Darkness swarmed in the Woods-That-Weren’t-Her-Family, faceless onlookers she couldn’t name.
Lacey wished, not for the first time, that the dead could have something with them, there in the dark. But anything other than flesh and blood and bone and hair made the flora sprout awry. At the edge, the oak tree grew—scraps of denim falling like leaves every fall. That was Great-Uncle Sam. . . . He was the first to die in the After. The first to be buried there, in a backwoods clearing on the backside of a mountain by the broke-back curve of the creek that rested at the half-forgotten crossroads of the Appalachians and the footpath to hell.
The rest of the world had erupted into chaos and death decades back—the byproduct of a million sinful hearts. Led by Great-Uncle Sam and Granddaddy, Lacey’s family—pious as Noah right before the Flood—had fled then; back, back deeper into their mountains. So deep that when everything else was gone, they remained. A fractured valley that floated in between dimensions of things that were, things that might be, and things that never would—undulating like a dragonfly on a blade of grass.
Lacey and her kin weren’t the only ones to survive. There were others: black bears, and coyotes, and bobcats that prowled the small circle of foothills and peaks. And some darker things . . . things even older than the Earth-That-No-Longer-Was. Lacey hadn’t ever been able to see them fully. They always flickered at the edge of her vision like smoke blown by the breeze. Shadowed, fluid things that seeped between trees and over rocks—oil pooling on verdant grass.
It wasn’t a bad life, not really. Not till Zeke died. Her brother had been sickly from the start, their Mama had called him a kindling-boned boy. But the snakebite back in May is what did him in.
“I’m sorry, Lacey,” he’d whispered, dirty fingers leaving mud trails across her cheeks as he wiped at her tears. “I hate I ain’t gonna be here for you when the baby comes.”
“Shhh,” Lacey said. “That baby’s gonna need both of us when it comes out. I can’t do this by myself.”
But in the end, Fate ignored her and her brother’s whispered promises and she was left alone.
The birth had been long, bloody, exhausting. She’d screamed her throat raw begging for her Mama, for her Daddy, for Zeke. But there was nobody left to answer—just thirty trees quivering in the wind.
The baby came out wrong, shriveled organs outside instead of in. Where her eyes should have been were bloody knots—stitched-up wounds left unhealed. Her mouth was a gaping cavernous thing. And her ears were elongated—loose, useless bits of flesh.
But still, the baby was hers and Zeke’s, and Lacey’s heart filled with an aching bone-deep flood of love.
“Mine,” Lacey said. Though there was no one left to hear her. “Mine.”
Further in the trees, the shadows thrummed.
The cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, a mother’s-made noose squeezing the breath from her unborn lungs days before the quickening ever began.
Lacey unlooped the thread that had joined them, her and her daughter—two forgotten, empty things at the end of the world. And she cried, angry swollen sobs that seemed to set her veins aflame.
The shovel had broken last winter, when they’d tried to uproot Jesse’s tree, his needle-teeth gnashing poison with every storm. Lacey dug into the clay with clawed hands, the red earth mingling with her blood caking beneath her nails. The hole wasn’t large, but it was deep enough to keep the baby.
“Eve,” Lacey said. “Eve, who never knew anything but the light of God.”
Lacey’s bleeding started in earnest as she covered Eve with dirt, a gut-shot doe dripping on the ground, desperate to keep her baby hidden.
By nightfall, Eve was planted, and Lacey was feverish—sweat-slick skin sliding against the bloody ground as she dragged herself towards her mama’s tree.
“Mama,” she whispered, leaning against the poplar’s slim trunk, “Mama, I’m scared. I don’t know what to do. Who’s gonna plant me, Mama?”
—
Two years later, a handful of lost hikers stumbled into a clearing—thirty old-growth trees, flourishing in a valley. An elm sapling shot up between a chestnut and a willow. And there, clambering up a poplar trunk, a pile of yellowed bones and piecemealed flesh. Like a child crawling into its mother’s lap.
—
Rachel Savage is an overgrown hobbit living in a kudzu-choked crevice of North Carolina. Her stories tend to lean toward the Southern and strange. When she’s not wrangling her offspring, you’ll likely find her curled up with a horror novel.
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