by Dixon March
(980 words)
She skipped lunch for all the work she had to do, and by the time she ran to the Grocer’s she was ravenous.
That afternoon the sky turned the color of old whalebone as a storm blew in from the sea. Around her the village houses squatted in the pines, pale and ornate constructions with crooked wood frames and peaked roofs like the hats of medieval popes. Their windows glowed as yellow as eyes.
She stepped out of the tallest crooked house and locked the door.
In the glow of the tall house’s windows, the shadows of her employers wandered back and forth, hungry. They skulked and prowled about with their backs hunched and their fingers curled in the pantomime of predators, monsters from a silent film too terrible to be seen directly.
They opened their jaws to smile and show silhouettes of teeth.
The woman did not look behind her and walked down the hill to the Grocer’s on Market Street. Her heels clicked on the sidewalk awkwardly, as if her sensible pumps caused her discomfort. Her stomach grumbled, and she placed her hands at her waist to quiet it.
When she reached Market Street she found it empty. The shop fronts of the white-washed buildings appeared to be abandoned, but within the yellow windows she made out shadows that wandered back and forth with hunched backs. Beside the pharmacy, across the street from the department store, there was the Grocer’s.
Before she stepped inside, she pulled from her uniform pocket a scrap of paper with a single word scribbled on it:
Supper.
She stood on the street and read the word. Her hands shivered. The wind threatened to snatch the paper from her grip.
She could let it go, she thought. Open her fingers and let it sail off into the pale sky.
Her stomach churned.
The Grocer had no customers but her so late in the afternoon. When she opened the door, the bell clanged abrupt and sharp in the quiet.
The Grocer stood listless behind the glass display case, white shirt and bow tie, a depth of shadows beneath his eyes from how many sleepless nights she didn’t know. More than hers. He looked hungry, too. A narrow white man with cheekbones sharp in a sunken face. She wondered if he were really dead.
But the dead lived in the display case. She looked down at them. There under glass were rows of decapitated human heads one after the other skinned and preserved on ice. She didn’t know who they belonged to. (Her employers’ last employees, she guessed.) Their red meat faces grinned without lips. The teeth would be knocked out before the head went into the pot, she knew, but the eyes would be left in. A delicacy, her employers said. The eyeballs boiled would be placed between the teeth until they popped.
Her stomach growled.
She handed the paper to the Grocer who took it and examined its single command in silence.
After a moment she pointed to one of the heads in the case. A big, meaty one with milkblind eyeballs as round as pearls. The Grocer wrapped it up in brown paper and twine and handed it back. A crack of lightning flashed outside, followed closely by thunder. The lightbulbs flickered as though darkness may soon to swallow the world, and she snatched the head and hustled out again.
She raced to beat the rain. Her heels clicked quickly. As she struggled up the hill, she grew winded. The clouds above coiled as though full of eels and sharks that wandered back and forth and she huffed until she couldn’t go much further. She stopped on the sidewalk, bent over, out of breath, the head under her arm.
Supper.
With sudden energy she tore the paper off and left it in the gutter. When the head was free of its packaging she bit into it, ripped a chunk of glossy red meat from the bone. Tossed her head back and worked it down her throat. The first morsel nearly choked her. Lightning flashed overhead as dark clouds approached. She chewed the next bite, a shred of delicate muscle ripped from the forehead, moist and foul. The pine tops whispered as she stood on the street among the wood frame houses and cleaned the head down to the bone.
The skull she dropped into the street. It tumbled down the hill, hopped along the gutter slowly, then picked up speed and vanished.
She stood on the curb for some time before she dropped, a dead weight, face first into the grass.
Night fell and the rains moved back and forth across the village in sheets that pummeled the peaked roofs.
Her cadaver lay in the grass. Her skin had turned mottled purple as the blood settled into stiff limbs. The sharp rain impaled her flesh and little puffs of gas escaped from the wounds. Upon her sensible shoes crawled beetles and spiders and all manner of insects still brave enough to remain in the village when they knew what walked there.
When her corpse shuddered, the insects fled.
Her skin split first, a fissure that cracked open in redblack edges and spat forth a foul discharge. The cadaver spread open like the shell of a wet purplish egg.
From the fissure emerged a head, two crooked elbows, shoulders in carbon black. A hunched back, long curved fingers. Rain and darkness obscured the creature’s toothy face and when lightning struck barely a flash could be seen of its hideous dimensions.
Its teeth were crooked.
It stepped out of its rancid cocoon, loped to the tall house on the hill, and tore the door off the hinges. The shadows in the yellow windows scrambled about in terror.
The creature howled. Supper’s here. Then it went in to dine.
END
Dixon March is an undisclosed person. At no point has she hosted a midnight radio talk show and/or intercepted dark messages from the stars. There are rumors she may operate out of Omaha, Nebraska, US.