by Tiffany Morris
(575 words)
There is always a price for safe passage. Coins on forever-closed eyes for the ferryman, a shining bribe to the guard at the gate. On the last day of harvest, a time to sow: as the sunset was about to turn to gloaming, three drops of blood upon a jack-o’-lantern mushroom. Her only chance to die without dying.
Evelyn cupped the cold metal of the jack-knife in her palm before opening it, dancing the edge of the blade along her skin. She paused, then drew a quick, sharp breath as she pressed down. Pain shot through her hand, into her wrist, as blood started beading. She sliced across her fate line, life line, heart line. Three forces joined in one.
She placed her hand above the mushrooms. Their orange skins grew livid with each drop. The day continued its death rattle, coughing light between the black branches. Evelyn closed her eyes. The petrichor smell of damp soil mixed with the metallic tinge of her blood. It kicked up with each step as she spun three times.
She opened her eyes: a new horizon. The bioluminescent glow of the mushrooms wound a jagged path to a field, tall grass blowing in the places where the trees did not meet.
She walked forward, deeper into the sicksweet smell of decay. She didn’t look behind her, she knew the myths, to look back meant death, and, for once, it wasn’t death that she wanted. This was something else: a chance to leave behind the disappointment of the year, the failure of her marriage, the fifty-hour workweek where she lived invisible in the endless rows of cubicles, dreading the atonal beep of each call to the customer service line. This was salvation: the promise of the field, its secrets, its voices that carried on the wind.
“Leave,” a dry rattle whispered. “Leave this place to whom it belongs.”
She ignored it. More voices joined, forming an insistent chorus, chimes and rustling leaves and the whimper of a stifled cry.
“I’ve paid my price,” she said. There was nothing else to say.
Tall dead grass stretched through the field. Silhouettes marked the periphery. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought they were trees.
She approached the small clearing at the centre. A tall scarecrow loomed there, its ragged clothes gleaming with rot, mushrooms and worms and lichen overtaking the fabric and hay. It stood, impassive, watching over its kingdom, its sackcloth face splattered with blood. She knelt beneath it. A small dark sack sat there, black as the dead pupil of a gutted fish. She plucked it from the ground. As she examined it, its abattoir smell grew stronger. The sackcloth wasn’t black, but was, she realized, darkened with the blood of those who came before her.
Evelyn looked to the edge of the field. The last viscid orange slice of daylight clung to the silhouettes. She pulled out her knife once more and paused, the failures of the year heavy in her hands.
A time to sow.
She tried not to retch as she placed the sack over her head. The blade opened her throat in a quick slash. A shouting of crows erupted in the distance.
In the field forever fallow there is nothing to scare or protect. There are only the witnesses of time, the watchers of forever, limbs outstretched in embrace.
Evelyn stood among them, her new face gazing skyward, into the sunset eternal.
END
Tiffany Morris is a Mi’kmaw/settler writer of horror fiction and poetry from Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia. Her work has appeared in Vastarien, Uncanny, and Apex Magazine, among others. She has a full-length horror poetry collection forthcoming from Nictitating Books in 2022. Find her at tiffmorris.com or on twitter @tiffmorris.