Well, I was half right. The devil, he wasn’t behind me, but Mae was and I don’t know when she got my shovel, but I caught sight of it right before it connected with my face.
I woke to the night. Crickets and frogs talked to one another like they always did. My head hurt like I had spent the night drinkin’ Cousin Billy’s moonshine up in the mountains. My shoulders ached and when I tried to move my arms, I couldn’t. Mae had tied them over my head, the rope around a tree, much like I had done her. I was spread out, my legs opened and all my clothes missin’. I tried pullin’ free, but you know, Mae, she’s a country girl and she knows how to tie them knots so nothin’ can get away.
She come through the trees all quiet-like. I caught a glimpse of her in the moon that broke between the trees. She was as naked as the day she was born. Scratches and bruises covered her body and she was dirty like she ain’t never had a bath in her life. She held somethin’ in her hands—a tiny somethin’.
“Cyrus,” she whispered, drawin’ out my name like a school girl teasin’ another one. “Today’s Mother’s Day.”
“Mae, you let me go now and it won’t be all that bad, yah hear me?” She stood in the moonlight, her eyes on her hands and when she looked up I saw all the crazy on her face.
“Did yah hear me?” she asked and took a step forward. She knelt down beside me. The stench of shit and filth got all over me and I felt my stomach jerk. “I said it’s Mother’s Day.”
“I heard yah, Mae, but that don’t mean nothing—you ain’t nobody’s mother.”
She laughed, a haunting sound that fills my ears even now. “But, Cyrus, I am a momma. And you are a poppa. You just ain’t never met your son.” She set that thing on my chest, its dead body dry like a leaf and stinkin’ of water and rot. “We’re gonna celebrate, Cyrus. Our first Mother’s Day together.” She giggled, this time the craziness surfacing from her throat.
That brings me to where I am right now, all tied up, a dead unformed child on my chest. Mae, she walked away a few minutes ago, back through those trees toward Ma and Pa’s house. She’s comin’ back. I can hear her howlin’ at the moon. She’s gettin’ closer and closer and she’s wantin’ to celebrate. And, yah know, we’re out here in the country and nobody’s gonna hear me scream…
EVERY DAY IS A HOLIDAY
by Steve Lowe
Junior slipped up behind the bastard in silence, but that didn’t matter. The guy wouldn’t have heard him anyway, with his face buried in the rear of his whore. The bastard slurped and grunted and the whore moaned, a sound more akin to the sad lowing of a cow in a pen than one of ecstasy. Their musk filled the hovel, crudely scratched out of a limestone wall of the underground city, and caused Junior’s stomach to buck.
He stood for a moment behind them and watched, absently hefting the reassuring weight of the Polack in his hands. The bastard pushed so far up the whore’s bony backside his eyebrows disappeared into the gray flesh of her buttocks. Positioned on her hands and knees facing a blank wall, her back and her head sagging, she coughed and spat on the filthy ground before continuing her moaning.
Junior lined up his target on the gyrating back of the bastard’s filthy bald head. He practiced a couple half swings with the Polack, aiming the filed-down point at the base of the bastard’s skull.
The Polack had once been a Pulaski, a tool used in a time lost to history by smokejumpers to fight wildfires, but Junior had made some modifications to it. He shortened the wood handle by a foot for easier range of motion in tight quarters, and wrapped it with leather strapping for a better grip. With a wood-chopping axe head on one side, a normal Pulaski had a broad, flat opposite end that was useful for trenching the ground when cutting fire lines, but Junior had set the edges to a grindstone, shaping it into a murderous point. Plenty of bastards had screamed for mercy beneath its killing strike, but not this one. His life ended the moment the Polack pierced his brain stem.
The point entered the soft spot just below the skull at the top of the spinal column. The force drove his head further into the whore until the point struck the inside of his jawbone and stopped. The whore let out a sharp cry from the sudden pressure and turned to look at Junior through strands of mottled hair.
Junior pulled the Polack back, bringing the dead bastard with it, still affixed. Blood spurted from his mouth where the Polack had pushed through the back of his throat, severing his tongue, which remained in the whore’s backside, twitching and squirting red down her thighs. She screamed and clenched, and the tongue disappeared inside of her. She scrambled away on her hands and knees to the far corner of the room and huddled into a ball, shrieking and squirming against the foreign object inside of her.
Junior put his foot to the back of the bastard’s head and pulled the Polack free. He wiped it clean on the bastard’s pants then reached behind his back for his canteen. After a long swig of warm water, he screwed the cap back on and tossed it at the hysterical whore.
“Shut up, Marie,” he said. She immediately did so, her eyes wide with shock that he knew her name. “Take that and go clean yourself.”
JUNIOR STOOD WITH HIS back to her as she tended to her mess. When he turned back, she was wrapped in a torn, stained afghan. Junior recognized it as one that had once been draped over the back of their couch at home. She gave the bastard’s body on the floor a wide berth and sat on the stack of cardboard boxes that made up her bed, knees tucked up against her chest, arms wrapped tight around them. After a long moment of rocking and staring at nothing, she seemed to return to reality and looked up at him.
“Junior?”
He scanned her face, shrouded by shadow and twisted strands of hair. “Yeah, sis. It’s me.”
She looked back and forth from him to the bastard on the floor to the doorway, the only exit from the dank hole she called home.
“Why are you here?” she said.
“Why you think? I come for you.”
“No you didn’t.”
Junior leaned the Polack against an earthen wall and squatted on his haunches. “I did. For you and for information.”
“What information?”
“Like where Big Karl is.”
She didn’t answer at first, just watched him with huge round eyes that glittered in the low light. “What do you mean to do?”
Junior laid a hand on the Polack. “Just what you think. I mean to kill that son of a bitch with this.”
“You’ll never get close enough to him.”
“Watch me.”
She began to rock again. “Saying you do that. Then what?”
“Then nothing. I ain’t thought that far ahead.”
“His people won’t let you live, even if you do carry out the deed.”
“That don’t matter to me. All that matters is the deed be done.”
More silence. Both of them lost in their thoughts.
Finally, Marie said, “What is today?”
“I make it to be Friday, seventeenth of June.”
“No, I mean what holiday?”
“I believe that’s Metallurgist’s Day.” One of the new holidays invented after the so-called Great Awakening. Just another farce of a holiday. There was one for every day on the calendar now.
“Oh.” She fiddled and looked down at her hands. “So tomorrow is Appreciation Day, right?”
Appreciation Day, to show their deep and unending appreciation for being “liberated by the benevolent freedom fighters of the Hallmark Society.” Nothing but a bunch of psycho pseudo-anarchists parading around; essentially what every other day was. The holiday really didn’t matter, except for one. Junior spat on the ground in disgust. “Yeah.”