Daddy was driving us home. Just two of us in the backseat and Esther, who was Daddy’s favorite, in the passenger’s seat.
Esther cried, Oh, Daddy!—look out!
A dark-furry creature was crossing the road in front of Daddy’s car, legs moving rapidly. It might have been a large cat, or a young fox. Daddy did not slacken his speed for an instant—he did not turn the wheel or brake the car to avoid hitting the creature, but he did not appear to press down on the gas pedal to strike it deliberately.
The right front wheel struck it with a small thud.
There was a sharp little cry, then silence.
Oh, Daddy, please. Please stop.
Esther’s voice was thin and plaintive, and though it was a begging sort of voice, it was a voice without hope.
Daddy laughed. Daddy did not brake the car to a stop.
In the back, we knelt on the seat to peer out the rear window—seeing, in the broken grasses at the side of the road, the furry creature writhing in agony.
Daddy—stop! Daddy, please stop, the animal is hurt.
But our voices were thin and plaintive and without hope, and Daddy paid little heed to us but continued driving and humming to himself, and in the front seat Esther was crying in her soft, helpless way, and in the backseat we were very quiet.
One of us whispered to the other, That was a kitty!
The other whispered, That was a fox!
At the bridge over the river where there’s a steep ramp, Daddy braked the car to a stop. Daddy was frowning and irritable, and Daddy said to Esther, Get out of the car. And Daddy turned, grunting to us in the backseat, and Daddy’s eyes were glaring angry as he told us to get out of the car.
We were very frightened. Yet there was no place to hide in the back of Daddy’s car.
Outside, Esther was shivering. A chill wind blew from the mist-shrouded river. We huddled with Esther as Daddy approached.
In Daddy’s face, there was regret and remorse. But it was remorse for something that had not yet happened and could not be avoided. Calmly Daddy struck Esther a blow to the back with his fist that knocked her down like a shot, so breathless she couldn’t scream or cry at first but lay on the ground, quivering. We wanted to run away but dared not, for Daddy’s long legs would catch up with us, we knew.
Daddy struck us, one and then the other. One on the back, as Esther had been struck, and the other a glancing careless blow on the side of the head as if in this case (my case) the child was so hopeless, he was beyond disciplining. Oh, oh, oh!—we had learned to stifle our cries.
In long Daddy strides, Daddy returned to the car to smoke a cigarette. This had happened before but not quite in this way, and so when a thing happens in a way resembling a prior way, it is more upsetting than if it had not happened before, ever in any way. On the lumpy ground in broken and desiccated grasses, we lay sobbing, trying to catch our breaths. Esther, who was the oldest, recovered first, crawled to Kevin and me, and helped us sit up and stand on our shaky stick legs. We were dazed with pain and also with the sick sensation that comes to you when you have not expected something to happen as it did, but, as it begins to happen, you remember that you have in fact experienced it before, and this fact determines, in the way of a sequence of bolts locking a sequence of doors, the certitude that it will recur.
In the car, Daddy sat smoking. The driver’s door was open partway, but still the car was filling with bluish smoke like mist.
Between Esther and Daddy, there was a situation unique to Esther and Daddy, as it had once been unique to Lula and Daddy: If Esther had disappointed Daddy, and had been punished for disappointing Daddy, Esther was allowed, perhaps even expected, to refer to this punishment, provided Esther did not challenge Daddy or disappoint Daddy further. A clear, simple question posted by Esther to Daddy often seemed, to our surprise, to be welcomed.
Esther said, with a catch in her throat, Oh, Daddy, why?
Daddy said, “Because I am Daddy, whose children must never give up hope.”
The Corpse King
Tim Curran
From the fields of the dead, the harvest was brought forth.
Tended by resurrection farmers with grubby fingers, cold hearts, and greedy minds, the fields were worked with shovel and spade and sweat. Beneath a pall of thin moonlight, the crops were plucked from the moist, black earth, torn from wormy boxes and mildewed shrouds like rotting corn from corrupting husks. The harvest of cadavers was piled in the beds of muddy wagons and taken to market, sold to the highest bidder to supply dissection room and anatomical house. The farmers worked their bone fields night after night, thinking they were alone in their grim harvest. But there was another who worked the graveyards and mortuaries, another reaper whose cultivation reached back to antiquity.
Moon-faced and skeleton-fingered, he was the grand lord of the charnel harvest, master of graveyard harrow and yield.
Long after the mourners and weepers sought the higher, drier ground of the city, Samuel Clow stood in the graveyard, his narrow face latticed by shadow, his grubby hands gripping a short dagger-shaped wooden spade. Somebody had slit open the leaden, fat underbelly of the heavens and its blood poured earthward. It fell and became a rain that washed the color from the world until it stood shivering and dripping in a dozen hues of gray. It turned the graveyard into a bog of yellow, sucking mud, creating rivers and creeks and finally, a great inland sea of slopping charnel muck.
“A lovely night it is for such work,” Clow said, water dripping from the brim of his John Bull top hat. “What I’ll do for a pint sometimes even amazes me.”
“Aye, but you cannot be blamed for your choice of occupations, things being what they are,” Mickey Kierney said from the open grave, grunting and puffing, throwing out clods of wet earth onto a canvas sheet heaped with sodden dirt.
Clow was tall and narrow, his hair long and greasy, falling over a sharp, bony face in strands like wet straw. Kierney, on the other hand, was short and thick and muscular, his face bovine and streaked with dirt. He had once been described by his father as looking like “a silly pig.”
Rain washed Clow’s face like tears and a cold drizzle seeped down the back of his neck. The sky above was a roiling firmament of swollen clouds, black and gray, backlit by struggling rays of moonlight. The graveyard below was slowly filling like a drum, rainwater creating pools and swamps from which the leaning tombstones jutted like rotting teeth. Crosses, steeple-shaped markers, and stone angels were tangled with ribbons of shadow. Crumbling slabs had drowned and high, weed-choked sepulchers were sinking into that mud ocean like the masts of ships.
Clow looked out across the dire, funerary landscape, on guard for those who would take an interest in the work of resurrectionists, but on such a night the storm had driven the pious to bed and hearthside. So much the better.