The harsher the trial sent by God, the more he valued the servant. And he never gave his servants more than they could bear. That morning’s sermon had reached the congregation, but Mrs. Mitchell felt certain, from the few times the preacher’s eyes accidentally met hers, that God spoke to her.
The kitchen door creaked open, cutting violently through the farmhouse’s empty stillness. She listened to the heavy tread of her husband’s boots as he wiped the worst of the mud on the porch, a bear standing his ground. “Supper ready yet?”
The old crank got caught, and Mrs. Mitchell rolled up her sleeve a little more, braced the bone of her elbow against the counter, put her shoulders into the effort. “Yes,” she answered to the swirl of spinning ice cream.
He creaked through the kitchen, and she glanced up to watch him observe the set table, the food lining the counters, her progress on dessert. “Hurry up, he’ll be in from the barn soon.”
She nodded, shoulders high, and Mr. Mitchell pulled out his chair, groaning with the effort of sitting. Fiddled with his pipe but didn’t light it.
Such a bitter man, that Mitchell, people whispered when she went into town alone on Sundays. No life but his work. No love for his neighbors, or for his Maker. Mr. Mitchell, she’d heard from his own lips, thought he didn’t have a Maker. And if I did, he’d grinned, I can’t see what business he’s got with me.
The silence returned, save for the creak of the aged ice cream maker and minor readjustments in Mr. Mitchell’s chair. After twenty-six years of noise, she never could have imagined how much she’d hate silence.
“What’s taking that boy?” Mr. Mitchell muttered. There was no malice in his tone, his gray-flecked mustache almost quirked into a smile.
She’d only just hid the completed dessert in the ice box when the kitchen door opened and shut gently, swallowing the whisper of footsteps.
“Don’t you look sharp,” Mr. Mitchell said.
Davy’s hairline sat slightly damp from cleaning up for supper. “Cleaned my ears and all.”
Mr. Mitchell chuckled, and Davy’s ears went redder. Glancing away from the farmer, the young man’s eyes accidentally met Mrs. Mitchell’s. He quickly looked down to the floorboards.
“Food’s ready,” she told him, laying the fixings.
“Need… need some help?” he shifted weight in his lanky legs, ready to bolt.
“Sit down,” Mr. Mitchell ordered lazily, and Davy obeyed while she set supper.
She considered the grain of the table as they ate, wondering what type of wood Mr. Mitchell had made it out of. She knew at the very least he did craft it; he bragged often enough at his construction of the house, over a decade ago, from the floorboards to the windows. She only wished he hadn’t decorated it himself. The whole house was lined with animal skins and furs and antlers; eerie trophies from his hunting days.
When his plate was clean, Mr. Mitchell excused himself by ruffling Davy’s hair, and saying “I’ll be right back” before leaving them.
His sudden absence startled his wife and hired hand enough that they accidentally made eye-contact again. Davy, naturally, looked down first.
Then muttered “supper’s good, ma’am.”
“Oh. Thank you, Davy.”
He focused upon his plate, the Davy Travis she’d come to know. It’s just his nature, Mr. Mitchell had explained early on, you gotta prove you won’t bite.
“It was an excellent service this morning,” she nodded.
Davy nodded back.
“Would you like to come with me next week?”
He glanced up, a smile reaching his nostrils. “Thank you, ma’am, but I don’t reckon it’s the life for me,” he repeated, same answer as always. From what she’d heard from town, he hadn’t been in a church since his father’s funeral four years prior. When she’d looked in his closet, the nicest things he owned were for a Davy four years younger.
“I could take out your clothes, Davy.”
“Leave him alone.” Mr. Mitchell’s weight creaked the floorboards behind them. Davy’s head popped up, and her hands tightened in her lap. “I said you could go to that damn place, didn’t ask you to convert nobody.”
She held her breath, but his focus wasn’t on her. He was passing Davy his parcel.
“Oh, Mr. Mitchell-”
He waved a hand, sitting again.
A pair of freshly oiled leather boots, a surprise to no one after the cobbler visit. Davy tried on the boots, thanking Mr. Mitchell, who merely grinned.
“Glad you like them; why don’t you go back for a moment?” he suggested, raising his eyebrows.
Suspicious, Davy rose. “Oh don’t tell me there’s more. Soon they’ll call me spoiled.”
Mr. Mitchell laughed, and Davy was very close to giggling, until his eyes caught hers again. He excused himself from her table, hurrying to his bedroom.
Once he’d gone, she cleared the table to make way for dessert, while Mr. Mitchell lit his pipe. “You’ve made ice cream before?”
“Sometimes. Takes up a lot of milk and sugar.”
“Eh, still not much of a birthday present,” he muttered to himself. “’Specially for nineteen. I’ve gotten better- four years ago, I took him hunting.”
Mr. Mitchell watched smoke rings float to the ceiling.
“My pa had done the same for me, but Davy’s pa… well, they were never close. He shot a squirrel, just one squirrel. Wasn’t a clean shot, we had to put it out of its misery. I… I never thought he’d be able to stop crying.”
Mrs. Mitchell glanced through the parlor doorway, to the deer-head over the fireplace, hanging above her husband’s seldom-used shotgun. It collected dust on the mantle, only ever used to slaughter supper. “Is that when you stopped?”
His startled expression quickly went dark, reminiscence turning to smoke as his pipe puffed. “What? Whatcha on about?”
“Nothing,” she whispered, knowing better than to curl up or show fear. Much better to stay still and unnoticed. Back when she was a daughter and not a wife, she’d spent years blending into walls until she chipped with paint. But it was so hard in this empty house.
He rolled his eyes, muttering about “useless women”. She’d only become readjusted to the silence when he exhaled a solid puff with an “ah.”
“Never thought I’d marry,” he mused, as if they were having a conversation, “but things were getting tiresome ’fore I put out the ad. The farming, planting, harvesting, year in, year out, nothing ever changing. Couldn’t sleep one night, on account of realizing that when I was gone, it would all be for nothin.”
He’d never said it aloud but, given the frequency of their passionless lovemaking, she knew he wanted children. A baby would help break up the silence. And he’d be a good father, she supposed, Christian or heathen, if his treatment of Davy was anything to go by.
She’d set three bowls on the table and had hauled dessert back out of the icebox when Davy bounded back in, asking “can I have a hint wha-” and caught sight of the prize.
Mr. Mitchell laughed.
“Oh God!” Davy cried, scurrying towards the kitchen. “Oh my God- Mrs. Mitchell, did you make this? Thank you!”
She nearly jumped out of her skin; Davy was standing two feet away, hands on the counter, beaming ear to ear, and more than that, looking her in the eye. He was practically vibrating with excitement, uneven teeth exposed, laughter swimming in his irises.
Her hands closed around the side of the bowl. “I- you’re welcome-”
She pulled it from the counter, but there was sweat on her palm, probably from the sudden lightening that had shot down her spine. The bowl slipped from between her fingers, and crashed, fresh ice cream falling to the floor with a squish.
A horrible second as the huge lump melted, pooling into the wood. Mrs. Mitchell gasped, Mr. Mitchell stood, but worst of all, Davy’s eyes and mouth were wide in horror. She could only imagine how he’d looked upon that writhing squirrel.
“I- it just slipped-” she began to apologize. “I- Davy-”
Mr. Mitchell pushed Davy aside in his haste to strike her. As she hit the floor, she just missed the ice cream.
“You stupid cow,” Mr. Mitchell snarled. “Don’t just lay there, clean it up!”
Mrs. Mitchell gathered her bearings, a rag, and scrubbed. She could already feel a bruise forming on her cheek. She kept her eyes down, listening as the house creaked with Mr. Mitchell’s footsteps, his barked apologies to Davy, and the whispered replies.
By the time she’d finished, Mr. Mitchell smoked his pipe in the parlor, angry swirls hitting the ceiling.
Davy watched her from the doorway, pale as the rabbit hanging on the wall behind his head.
“I’m sorry,” she mouthed, not daring remind Mr. Mitchell she breathed.
He shivered.
#
Davy Travis was, according to the town, a bit slow. She couldn’t be sure if there were no Travis’ left in the county, or if none wanted to claim him, given his four years of association with Michell.
But Mr. Mitchell, despite all his bitterness, had the right of the boy. He was quiet, but he wasn’t dim. He was shy, but he warmed up.
He showed it through a fire kept for her, or vegetables peeled without her asking, or even rarer, a spot of conversation. She loved listening to Davy when he got comfortable enough to prattle about nothing while she baked or hung laundry. It killed the quiet.
She hadn’t realized what his attentions meant until the evening she dropped the roast chicken into the firepit.
She shrieked. Fell to her hands and knees, ready to grab it with bare fingers, before Davy pulled her back. “Don’t- Mrs. Mitchell-”
She crouched on her heels, vision blurred with tears as the boy managed to haphazardly drag the charred bird out of the coals, watched it smoke and simmer against the floorboards.
“Mrs. Mitchell… ma’am? Ma’am….”
He was at her side, freckled face pale and gaunt, his hands uncertain on her shoulders as she tried to breathe.
“What’s all the racket?” Mr. Mitchell boomed, fists already curling against his sides as he stormed in.
Davy bounced to his feet, halfway through his sentence before even turning his chin up, “I was taking the chicken off the spit and dropped it, startled Mrs. Mitchell clean out her skin.”
She tried to make herself small and unseen. Mr. Mitchell’s mustache twitched as he chewed the lie like tobacco.
“Well get up, you stupid thing,” he spat to her. “Try and salvage it. And you-” he pointed at Davy’s freckled nose. “Keep a grip on those goddamn butterfingers, you hear?”
Davy’s shoulders were straight, his jaw locked, and eye-to-eye with a bloodthirsty predator, he scarcely flinched.
Apprehension coiled deep in her gut when they sat down to eat a hastily made chicken soup, because that couldn’t be the end of it. Not when a perfectly good supper was so perfectly spoiled, and the silence was so loud it was bursting her eardrums, and Mr. Mitchell glared, Davy ignoring him like a saint on a cross.
“Soup was very good, ma’am,” Davy said, pointedly, helping her clear the dishes.
She nearly broke a plate on top of everything else. “Oh. Thank you, Davy.” She shivered unexpectedly from the mischief in his eyes.
But then he turned to Mr. Mitchell, and the prickle left. “It was very good, wasn’t it? Mr. Mitchell?”
With a long scrape of chair legs against wood floor, Mr. Mitchell hauled himself up, and shook his head at Davy. “Don’t start.”
Davy backed from Mr. Mitchell’s full height. But when the man moved to the parlor, Davy kept at his heel. “It takes a sharp mind to think fast under pressure,” she heard him impress upon Mr. Mitchell.
“If you hadn’t been so eager to help, she wouldn’t have had to.”
As they left her line of sight, she washed the dishes, shoulders tense, fingers wrinkling.
“What?” she heard Mr. Mitchell ask, after a sharp silence.
A long pause. “The- I wanted you to look at the… feeding trough. Remember?”
“Not now.”
“But- you said-”
“Why don’t you go help my wife with the dishes, hmm? Make a bigger fool of yourself.”
“You go help her! She’s your wife after-”
Her sudsy hands slipped against the pot as palm against skin echoed through the small house. Still wet to her elbows, she ran to the kitchen doorway, peering into the parlor, not believing it had happened.
Davy twitched against the parlor fireplace, fingers to his cheek. Mr. Mitchell, to his credit, stared at his hand like it dripped blood.
He curled and uncurled his fingers, then pushed Davy off the mantle. “Grow up, will you?”
Davy said nothing, but maintained his balance, silhouetted by the deer head. Mr. Mitchell turned on his heel, fingers shaking as he made for the stairs. Mrs. Mitchell finished up the dishes. Shuddered to hear soft hiccups from the parlor.
They died out by the time she finished cleaning. But she stepped out of the kitchen the moment Davy left the parlor, trapping them in the hallway.
His eyes were puffy, tears dried just around his thin nose. His cheek was slightly pink against its freckles. “Mrs. Mi-” he hiccoughed, mortified, scrubbing at his eyes with his shirt sleeve. He ducked his head, about to retreat to his room.
“You shouldn’t have lied to him.”
Davy turned back, squinting. She ate at her lip. He awkwardly rubbed his palms against the hip of his pants. “It’s all right.”
“I-”
“I know-” Davy rushed out. “I know he seems a hard man… but he’s good. He’s just… I don’t know.” He scratched the back of his neck.
Her eyes locked on the soft, exposed skin of his collarbone. “Aging poorly?”
Davy chuckled faintly, and she quickly leaned against the wall as its’ warmth vibrated all the way to her knees.
#
His personal ad had read: “Ernest Mitchell, 36, farmer, looking for a wife: Hard-working, straight-forward, good-natured.” In the year they’d been married, she believed she’d upheld all three points, as was her Christian duty. But from their vows in the courthouse to their negotiations over her church attendance, their relationship remained a business transaction.
Save the summer afternoon when the doctor confirmed her pregnancy. There’d been such warmth in his body when he lifted her in his arms, spun her about the room, laughing. She’d laughed too, the first time ever in his presence. But all it had amounted to was, when he’d set her down again, she experienced the full absence of him.
To Mr. Mitchell, the news was akin to a good crop, or an expensive colt broken in.
“Have you thought of any girl names?” he asked, opening a bottle of hard cider.
“Wh-what?”
“If it’s a girl. I haven’t any.”
To Mrs. Mitchell, the news put the full weight of a human life in her stomach. “Agatha. For my mother,” she responded passionlessly.
“Mmm. Agatha Mitchell. Hopefully not,” he smirked, passing Davy a glass. Davy gripped it shakily, eyes to the floor. He hadn’t said a word, hadn’t looked up since the doctor left.
The guilt roiled in Mrs. Mitchell’s stomach. “What… if it’s a boy, then?”
She hadn’t been asking about a name; but Mr. Mitchell supplied one, without hesitation. “Travis Mitchell.”
Davy started, nearly spilling cider.
Mr. Mitchell smiled, gently mussing Davy’s hair. The man was oblivious, but she saw every nervous tick in Davy’s jaw, the chewing of his cracked lips.
Don’t baby him, she chided herself. He’s not a child.
Mr. Mitchell picked his gun up off the wall to shoot the “fatted calf” for supper (their old sow). She and Davy were left smothered in the silence of the kitchen.
By the time she’d found the courage to draw in breath, say “Davy-” the shotgun blast interrupted her. They both flinched as if it had shattered the window, Davy going green.
“I… firewood,” he muttered, staggering outside.
It was an unfairly hot summer day, the kind that might usually find Mr. Mitchell out in the dusty field, trying to grow crops by willpower. While she hung laundry in the backyard, and Mr. Mitchell kept in the slaughterhouse, Davy chopped wood. She watched the ax-head pierce the log, and the timber splinter. Trailed the flex in Davy’s forearms as he brought the ax up again.
That Sunday’s sermon had discussed gouging out your eye to keep from sinning. Without even realizing it, Mrs. Mitchell’s eye fell on Davy’s hair as it clung to his forehead, the shirt molding his chest, the curve of his arms.
Her husband stomped out of the slaughterhouse, whistling, happy as a fiddle, the dead pig slung over his shoulders. She imagined it sounded how a bullet felt.
“Yessiree, we are going to feast tonight!” Mr. Mitchell grinned to Davy, carrying the butchered animal into the house. He didn’t stop to look at his wife, didn’t notice the infidelity of her rabbit-fast heart.
“Ma’am?” Davy asked, setting down his ax. “Are you all right?”
Mr. Mitchell had gone in, but her fingers gripped the sheet so tightly she nearly tore its threads.
She sucked a breath between her teeth, and indulgently considered Davy’s soft, sunken eyes, his slight nose and lean shoulders and frayed hair. It wasn’t that Davy was handsome, at least by the standards of men in moving pictures. He wasn’t like any man she’d ever known. He smiled and fidgeted and grew ill at the sight of blood. Yet with a pig carcass in the kitchen, he worried over her.
“Fine.”
#
Mr. Mitchell celebrated her pregnancy until he passed out drunk in the parlor. She and Davy were left awake, she on her sofa, him curled up tight to the fire, staring into the flickering flames.
It was getting late, but neither of them moved to retire. Normally, it would be Mr. Mitchell who would stand, stretch, and say “early day tomorrow”. They were rather helpless without his direction.
Eventually, she heard Davy begin to sniffle into his arms.
She knew it wasn’t her fault, there’d been nothing she could do as a Christian wife to avoid pregnancy. It didn’t help her conscious.
She slipped off the sofa and threw her arms around him. “Oh, Davy! I’m so sorry!” she choked, trying to keep her eyes dry.
Davy went rigid. “M-ma’am?”
“I won’t let him forget about you,” she promised. “You’re not being replaced, you understand me?” Mrs. Mitchell pulled back slightly, to meet his eye.
He struggled to, tears dragging over his chin. “I know. He- says the same. But sometimes… I don’t… don’t know what I am to him.”
Mr. Mitchell snored, but she stared at the deer head. Its beady eyes met hers, and if she looked deep enough, she and Davy were reflected in the lifeless depths.
#
Their farm wasn’t the only one slowly decaying; dust was continuing to rise everywhere. But on the cusp of winter, as the preacher led a prayer for crops, Mrs. Mitchell wished she could grab it and pin it to her husband’s soil. God would likely pass over the heathen farmer.
She sat alone in her pew, head bowed, stomach round. A few months ago, the congregants had congratulated her. But all the attention to mean Mr. Mitchell’s unaccompanied wife felt more like a slap in the face.
If only she’d persuaded Davy to come to church with her, at least once.
The sermon that Sunday was adultery. One of the worst carnal sins a man could commit was straying from his wife. More unspeakable, a wife disregarding her husband’s authority.
“….And let’s not forget,” the preacher warned. “It is a command from our Father in heaven for wives to obey their husbands. Not only when their husbands buy them new hats or take them to pictures, but to submit-”
Mrs. Mitchell gripped the pew in front of her as she dragged herself up. The congregation gawked, and her head swam, like she was being churned into ice cream, or melting into the floor.
To stay solid, she clambered out of her pew, and left the building as quickly as her round stomach allowed.
#
Mrs. Mitchell ran into the kitchen, tore off her hat, and glanced around. “Davy?”
Neither he nor husband were in sight. She knew Mr. Mitchell didn’t keep Sabbath, yet the fields were empty. She wandered to the parlor, catching her breath, a cramp in her stomach. Save for the animal skins, empty. The barn? Of course.
She drifted through the silent house, pulse racing, uneasy to be back so soon. She usually took advantage of Sundays to stay out as long as possible. Never in her life had she been eager to return home.
She’d always understood that love was a feeling. You felt it to your father, to your mother, to your husband, who gave you a roof, life, purpose. You expressed it by shouldering the burdens they placed on you. You gave back.
Davy was the first gift she’d ever truly received. Even if accepting him would keep her from God, she couldn’t imagine a greater reward.
The silence of the house was cut by a humming sound. She stilled for a heartbeat, and then the sound repeated, deep and throaty.
She followed the foreign noise as it grew. It led her to Davy’s ajar bedroom door, which she pressed open.
Davy groaned again, almost sobbed. “Oh, God…!”
She couldn’t see Mr. Mitchell’s face, only the back of his shirt. His graying hair stuck up in odd places, his fists clenched tightly into the sheets as he knelt forward, a man at prayer.
He was praying to Davy, who lay naked as a cherub. Davy’s head was dipped back against the headboard, toes curled up in the sweat of her husband’s shirt, fingers locked in curls of her husband’s hair. His chest quivered with each gasping breath, moan, and scream.
She started screaming tool, staggering back into the wall, and Mr. Mitchell untangled himself.
Mrs. Mitchell’s remained intent on Davy, who caught his breath, limp. When he came back to himself, their eyes met, and she watched the pleasure pool out of his freckled face. “Oh God,” he whispered.
#
Mr. Mitchell acted first, as expected of the head of the house. “Well someone’s home early,” he quipped, the springs of the mattress straining as he pushed off the bed, off Davy. Davy, sprawled stitch less on his dirtied bedspread in the middle of a Sunday morning.
“Stay there,” Mr. Mitchell ordered, tripping over his trousers as he dragged them back on.
She’d taken a step back. “How long?” The words didn’t taste real.
With a creak of bed springs, Davy sat up on his knees, flushed and shivering. “God… oh good God….”
“I s’pose you think this changes things,” Mr. Mitchell snapped, securing his belt. “But not from where I stand.”
Black and white as his ad in the paper had been.
Her Sunday shoes squeaked against the sanded floorboards as she scurried back down the hall, Mr. Mitchell barking at her.
“Oy! Get back here! Where are you going to go, eh?”
She meant to go into the kitchen, and out the door, and then…. But her husband’s hand closed around her wrist in the hallway.
“Let… let go of me!”
Mr. Mitchell panted over her, his breath musky as he shook her, rattling her teeth. “Listen-!”
“I’ll tell the police! They’ll- they’ll hang you!”
She wasn’t sure what would be done to him. She’d vaguely known about this sort of thing, but Sodom and Gomorrah had seemed as far away as Jerusalem or Bethlehem.
“And what’ll happen to you?” he hissed, pressing her into the wall, two feet below a fox skin. “What about the child?”
She struck him, with her palm, with all the force built into her hundred-pound body. She sent his head lolling, for half a moment. The skin on his cheek went a pitiful pink.
He let go of her wrist, and her blood ran cold. But when Mr. Mitchell met her gaze, he was even-tempered. Almost amused. “We wouldn’t want to make a widow of you.”
“I’m not a wife now,” she hissed, wishing he would just hit her already. Hard enough to bruise, knock her to the floor, maybe damage the cancer growing in her stomach. “And-”
“Why else would he want you here?”
The Mitchells both flinched towards the hallway, where a hastily dressed Davy stood, arms wrapped around himself. She searched for his softness, an apology in his eyes, a tremble in his lips. Maybe if she’d seen it, she’d be able to believe that lewd, writhing creature had simply been a bad dream. But his eyes were narrow, glaring.
She might have borne it if not for that glare. It stripped her to her bone. It saw her exposed heart, chewed it, and spat it into the dirt.
“You disgusting maggot,” she hissed, meaning it. She lunged at him, and Mr. Mitchell pushed her back, finally angry.
“Hey!” Backing away, he put an arm tightly around Davy, the two of them blocking her from the kitchen. Davy shivered into Mr. Mitchell’s shoulder, and her husband tenderly considered the boy, rubbing circles into the back of his neck. The worried line between Mr. Mitchell’s eyebrows, the tremble to his lips, the damp of his eyes, all combined to a tenderness she’d never imagined.
She ran past them into the parlor, and wretched.
The parlor was strange by day, sunlight casting itself across the deer head and gleaming off the rarely used gun. Bile dripped from her lip, and she clutched her stomach, trying to stay her trembling.
“Get upstairs.” Mr. Mitchell stepped into the doorway. “You need to lie down-”
Fighting the nausea, she put her hands to her ear, screamed, “you’re the devil!” He was still worried about the baby, about his little Travis–
“Oy!” he barked. “You stupid-!” he marched into the room. He was ten feet away when she ran towards the mantle, and her fingers curled around the shotgun.
That made him stop, at least. She hoisted it onto her shoulder and aimed at his chest. She could see the white of his wide eyes, his flush of temper receding, the gray in his mustache twitching at her.
“Put it down,” he said evenly. “’Fore you hurt yourself.”
She knew what to pull to cock the gun. Knew which trigger would send the bullet flying. If it was loaded. Dear God, let it be loaded.
“Damn you,” she whispered.
“Hey-!”
The force of the bullet knocked her off-balance, the echo of the blast ringing her ears. In ten seconds, she recovered, and saw her husband choking away plaster from the hole she’d shot in the wall.
“Damn it, you bitch!” he coughed.
“Stop!” Davy screamed from the kitchen, scurrying over as she frantically raised the gun again. “Mrs. Mitchell, wait-”
The gun was bulky and hard to aim with. Not to mention poorly maintained. Mr. Mitchell only used it for slaughtering animals. She pulled the trigger again and found that God had blessed her with not one, but two bullets.
As she reeled from the blast, she slowly heard Mr. Mitchell’s scream.
Gathering her dizzy self, she blinked at the doorway, as Mr. Mitchell fell to his knees, face contorted. Pain. Agony. Blood, thick on his hands. She hoped she’d shot him in the heart, if he had one.
“No! God… no!” the man croaked out.
He knelt over Davy, who was shivering. Convulsing. Like a rabbit shook by a fox over, and over again. Sweat beaded upon his thin brow, his chapped lips parting vaguely.
“Davy!” her husband screamed.
Mr. Mitchell’s hands were clutching the boy’s stomach, blood slipping between his thick fingers. The thin shirt Davy had pulled on was already thick with red, and Davy’s hand twitched awkwardly towards the mess.
The gun slowly slipped from Mrs. Mitchell’s sweaty palms.
“No, no, come on, don’t,” Mr. Mitchell whispered, keeping pressure on the wound, propping up the boy’s head with his other hand. “Look at me. Davy.”
He stopped twitching.
#
The squirrel Davy had put down must have twitched like that. Which was worse; a slow, painful death, or a sudden nonexistence?
When Davy had absolutely stopped twitching, or blinking, or anything, Mr. Mitchell’s hand slipped off his stomach. Soft, deep breaths shook his back, finally ending in a deep wail.
Mrs. Mitchell fell to her knees, unable to feel them.
Ignoring the smearing blood, Mr. Mitchell cradled Davy’s body. “You… bitch,” he choked at her. “You stupid, stupid….”
She stared at the hole in the plaster. Mr. Mitchell couldn’t stand the first three times he tried, but then he managed, staggering against the lintel.
He didn’t even look at her.
A step over a body, and a slammed door later, Mr. Mitchell had fled his silent house. She wondered where he was going. To tend stagnant fields? To sob in the barn? To town and the police?
None of it would make Davy start twitching again.
She crept toward the body, dragging herself on her knees. The blood was everywhere; staining his shirt, the floorboards, his cheek, his hair. And every other drop was marred with Mr. Mitchell’s fingerprints.
His smile was almost a silent laugh.
The barrel against her throat, she pulled the trigger. The empty gun jolted in her palms, barely making a dent in the crushing silence. She’d been too greedy, taken too many things; why should God give her herself?
Lying beside Davy in the doorway, wanting to hold him but still not daring, she pretended he was smiling at her.
Hannah Beairsto hails from the Poconos in Northeast Pennsylvania, home of ski resorts, waterfalls, and family fun. She spends most of her days holed in her room writing. She has no pets, spouses, or children to brag about, and would like everyone to remember her first name is a palindrome.