NO FLESH SHALL BE SPARED
By Thom Carnell
First Digital Edition Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2010 by Thom Carnell
'Death closes all;
But something ’ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.'
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
'When the dead walk, Senores…
We must stop the killing…
Or lose the war.'
Motherhood
Cigarette smoke swirled in the bright beams of light pouring in through the windows of Kathy Mae Gilbert’s trailer home. The smoke danced like willowy strands of ether within the pillars of luminosity that stabbed their way through her thin, Kmart curtains. Inside the trailer, the air was a dank, cough-inducing fog bank that never seemed to go away, satisfied just to hang in the air and whirl over the faded velveteen couch. Next to the sofa, a worn, faux-leather La-Z-Boy roosted, the sheen of its fake hide rubbed off in the spots where it came in repeated contact with human skin. The furniture sat like squatters in front of an old, wood-veneered Motorola television set. Against one wall, half a dozen boxes from a move made six months ago waited to be unpacked. The place was a shit-hole, but for Kathy Mae it was home, a squalid fortress of solitude to come to and rest her bones after working double shifts at the Hog & Dog diner and do exactly what she was doing now: sit and smoke and pretend for a moment that her life had gone a different way.
Kathy Mae had been a smoker since she was twelve and never once did she consider quitting. Her Daddy taught her to smoke when she was little. It had been one of his parlor tricks when guests came over to drink beer and work on cars. 'Watch my li’l girl… she’s so damn growed up… she even smokes!' But even before that, she’d always thought smoking was cool. People in the movies smoked and they looked cool. Daddy smoked and he was also cool. These days though, Daddy was also dead and buried. Throat and lung cancer claimed him several years ago. Kathy Mae could still remember seeing him sitting on the porch of his house, smoking through the tracheotomy tube in his neck.
Before she knew it, nicotine had its hooks into her and she was fully addicted by the time she hit high school. Her smoking was like a lethal legacy handed down, just one of many bad habits given to her by her parents. Hell, she’d even smoked, despite her doctor’s warnings, through the entire length of her pregnancy. And why the hell not? She never wanted kids and would have been all too happy to have left her womb a barren landscape. Unfortunately, Billy Ray Beaumont saw to it that was not to be.
Billy Ray had sweet-talked Kathy Mae at the Leslie County Swap Meet and wined and dined her on a spectacular buffet of frozen pizza rolls and Mad Dog 22. Theirs was a union made in hillbilly heaven, but from the start it had been destined for failure.
One dark and stormy night, when he informed her that he’d forgotten to bring a condom (a 'jimmy,' he’d called it), she was just liquored up enough to say 'What the fuck.' Billy Ray didn’t have it in him to drive straight, what were the odds that he could shoot straight?
Pretty good from the sound of the screaming brat in the other room.
'OK, you little shit dispenser!' she shouted. 'I’m comin.’'
She stalked into the other room and lifted the screaming baby by one arm out of the laundry basket where he, more often than not, spent the day sleeping and crying and swimming in his own shit. The baby wailed loudly and kicked its legs in the air, to little effect. The child, Johnny Garth Beaumont by name, had been brought into the world with a criminally low birth weight a little over a year ago and he’d gained precious little in the way of body mass. The little shit had been colicky for the last week or so and Kathy Mae’s nerves now bore the stretch marks of his foul mood.
'Jeezus H… Will you shut the fuck up!?!' Kathy Mae screeched into the baby’s wailing face.
Johnny continued to blubber loudly and flail his spindly limbs.
Kathy Mae slapped him twice sharply across the back of his legs and tucked him into the crook of her left arm. She unbuttoned the front of her grease-stained waitress uniform and hauled one of her pale breasts out from the sweat-sodden depths. Roughly, she pushed the nipple into the baby’s mouth, hoping he’d nurse or, at the very least, quiet down. Either one would have been just fine for her. She looked down, annoyed, and sighed in frustration when he didn’t. Johnny didn’t seem to want her nip, he just continued kicking and crying like a banshee. His lone tooth, sticking up from his gum-line like a headstone, glimmered dully in the dim light.
'Fucking kid…' she said. 'I cain’t give you what you want to make you stop cryin’ if’n you don’t tell me what it is you fuckin’ want!' The last word sounded like the desperate cry of someone at the end of her rope.
Johnny spit the anemic areola from his mouth, threw his head back, and let out another ear-splitting wail. The baby’s eyes were full of tears, the corners caked with a gummy sludge. A high fever raged like a fire within his little brain and nothing Kathy Mae did or could do would stop it. The baby had lain for far too long in the cold trailer; his body rife with a combination of the flu, colic, and rampant malnutrition. Kathy Mae’s breast milk was pitifully inept at providing the nutrients he needed in order to fight off the host of viruses that now coursed through his system. All his mother’s body was able to give to him was a lethal mixture of nicotine, alcohol, and cheap diner food with just a splash of methamphetamine.
'Gawd damn ya, ya ankle biter, eat will ya!?'
Kathy Mae propped up the child’s head and pressed his face against her breast with all her might, thinking that she could make the baby eat with a combination of brute force and strong will.
The child managed to pull back from her far enough to catch a quick breath and let out another wail of pain and frustration. Kathy Mae took the sides of his head in her hand and pressed his face back to the meat of her breast.
Johnny’s mouth and nose were smothered by the drawn flesh that surrounded the fatty tissue of Kathy Mae’s breast. He tried in vain to move his head in order to pull some air through his turned-up nose, but Kathy Mae’s grip was too strong and his underdeveloped muscles were far too weak. His little hands beat against her chest futilely. Saliva coated both the nipple in his mouth and his face, but still Kathy Mae pressed on.
'Eat will ya, goddamnit? Eat!'
Johnny’s lungs screamed out for oxygen, but his mother, either in apathy or anger, ignored his plight. His tiny fists beat with less and less force against her bony chest, his strength draining from him like water through a colander. The smell of tobacco and speed sweat was the last thing to flit through his diminishing senses before Johnny Garth Beaumont died in his mother’s indifferent arms.
After a few minutes, Kathy Mae drew the baby from her breast and roughly wiped his mouth of spent lactate with the back of her hand.
'You done?' she asked, not registering in the sparse light the child’s slightly blue tinge. 'You just lay here for a minute and I’ll change ya just as soon as you shit that out.'
She laid Johnny down on the tattered, yellow sofa and went off to fetch herself another cigarette.
~ * ~
An hour or so later, Kathy Mae had damn near forgotten about Little Johnny and his crying. He’d been so quiet since she’d fed him last that it was almost like he wasn’t even on the planet. She figured that, by now, it had
