Kin

The screaming stopped.

He hesitated at the door, listening. The silence in the wake of her scream seemed bottomless, and unsettling. After a moment, he gently gripped the handle of the door and eased it open.

“Miss?” he asked quietly, like a bellboy afraid of disturbing a guest, which was, now that he thought about it, not all that inaccurate, for until she decided whether or not to live or die, he was bound to serve her.

He stepped into the room.

She was awake.

Steel gleamed just above the covers.

Her body convulsed, just as he saw the scalpel in her hand, just as he noticed the fresh blood on the sheets.

Rain sprayed the glass as he hurried to her side.

She looked at him, frowned slightly, her face the same shade as the pillow beneath her bandaged head.

“My name is Doctor Wellman,” he said, struggling to keep calm as he sat down on the bed and gripped her wrist. He was relieved to see that she had not had the strength to make more than a superficial cut, but it was bad enough. “I’m here to help you. You’ve been badly injured.” A quick inspection of her other wrist revealed a deeper wound. It was from this the majority of the fresh blood had come. Still looking at the dreamy puzzled expression on her face, he reached blindly out and tugged open the nightstand drawer, fumbled inside until he found the bandages, and began to unwind them from the roll. As he wrapped her wounds, a flicker of pain passed briefly over her face.

“Am I dead?” she asked him in a whisper.

He summoned a smile. “You’re going to be fine.”

“I shouldn’t be. Don’t touch me.” The struggle she put up was child-like, and not hard to restrain without causing her further discomfort. After a few moments, the strength left her.

“Hush now,” Wellman soothed. “I’m a doctor. I’m not here to hurt you. I want to help you.”

“Are they here?”

“Who?”

“Those men. They took the skin from Danny’s hands. And his face. They pulled it off like it was a Halloween mask.” Her breathing caught. Her face contorted into a grimace as a tear welled in her uncovered eye. “They hurt me. All my friends are gone. Everything is dead. Make it quick.”

His smile faltered. “Honey, I’m not one of them. Listen to me now.” He gently stroked her hair. “I’m a friend.”

“All my friends are dead.”

“How many were with you?”

She didn’t reply. At length, she seemed to drift off to sleep, but whispered, “I have to die now. If I don’t do it, they will and I can’t let them.” Her eyelid fluttered. Wellman did not panic. She wasn’t going to die. He knew that. Her pulse, though weak, was constant. Her breathing was fine, her pupil no longer dilated. Unconsciousness was probably her only solace from the pain and the horror, and he permitted her the escape. While she slept, he wrapped her wrists and injected her with a dose of morphine in the hope that it would ease her dreams and numb the pain, at least for a little while. Then he set the tray with the instruments against the far wall, pulled a chair close to the bed, and listened to the rising wind trying to drown out the sound of her peaceful breathing.

He would wait a while for the bleeding to cease, before he sewed her up again.

Until then, he would pray.

And when he was done, he would take the girl to his car and head for Mason City.

We’ll get you home, he promised.

-7-

Her room was in darkness.

Luke stood by the door, fists clenched so she wouldn’t see them trembling, because even in the dark he knew it would not escape her attention. The room smelled of sweat and bodily fluids, but he did not mind. It was his mother’s perfume to him, and ordinarily soothing.

But not this evening.

Now he craved the smell of cooking meat and kerosene, of wood smoke and sizzling fat that would soon permeate the air outside as his brothers burned the bodies. It was a ritual he had been a part of for so long he had ceased to appreciate it. But he appreciated it now, would rather be drawing that pungent mixture of aromas into his nostrils than the smell of shit and piss and vomit that hung in the air in the small squalid room his mother called her own.

From the wide bed, shoved into the corner farthest from the window, where the darkness was thickest, he heard the sound of her moving, just slightly, maybe raising her head to look at him, to peer at him through the muddy gloom. The bedsprings did not so much creak, as whimper.

“Momma?”

“Boy,” she responded in her bubbling voice, as if she was forever gargling.

“Momma I—”

“Come ’ere.”

He pretended he hadn’t heard because it was safer by the door, and that in turn made him feel guilty because he knew if he stayed here she would not rise up and come get him. She couldn’t. In over two years she hadn’t left that bed, not once, and in daylight, when the clouds covered the sun and the flies obscured the window, it was hard to tell where Momma ended and the bed began. It was all darkness, with lumps of paler matter here and there.

That bed, like the woman in it, dominated the room. Papa-In-Gray had told them in the same reverential tone he used to begin their prayers every night before supper, that their Momma was a saint, a suffering martyr not yet found by the grave. Wires’n springs’n flesh’n fat, he told them, like it was the opening line of some long forgotten nursery rhyme. There was no Momma anymore, he said, not the way they remembered her. Now she was a mass of suppurating bedsores, fused to the mattress where old wounds had healed and the torn flesh and pus had hardened to form a kind of second skin around the material and bedsprings beneath. The mattress, once plump and soft, had been worn down by her weight to almost nothing, a wafer thin slice bent in the middle, pungent, soggy and stained by the fluids that had soaked down from her corpulent body over the years. The boys took turns washing and tending to her wound, grooming her, scooping out the large quantities of fecal matter that gathered between her enormous thighs, then giving the remaining stain a cursory, half-hearted scrub before leaving her to wallow in the vestiges of her own waste.

She complained endlessly, spoke to herself day and night, sometimes sang little songs in a voice barely above a whisper, and was quiet only when they brought her food.

Waves of stink rolled from the crooked sagging bed. He had long ago stopped suggesting that they let some air into the room. He didn’t even know if the windows would still open. Some kind of putrid brown grease had started climbing the foggy panes, like corrupted spirits risen from the heaps of dead flies, and had gathered in the cracks like glue.

But God, how he loved her, despite the fear she instilled in him, and despite all she had done to make him sorry for his sins. He loved her more than life itself, quietly believed that he loved her most of all, more than his brothers did, though he would never say so. He believed himself the favorite, even when she challenged that belief by hurting him.

“You hear me boy?” she said, and he licked his lips, felt his tongue rasp against the lack of moisture there, and when he drew it back in, he tasted something foul, something he had tugged from the air into his mouth.

“I hear you Momma,” he said, and took a few steps closer to the bed. Beneath his boots, the floorboards creaked and breathed miniature puffs of dust into the air. Shouldn’t be no dust, he thought, staring down at the dissipating clouds. Floor’s well traveled. And it was, but like the intricate but drooping black cobwebs that hung like dreamcatchers from every corner of the room, he knew