MicroHorror

Kristina planted bulbs in the mesh-bottom manure bucket she kept behind the greenhouse. After covering the tender bulbs with burlap, she sang half-remembered hymns her mother once sang, sitting on the front porch steps, shelling butterbeans last August. With a blank stare into the grain of the redwood fence, Kristina remembered her mother’s driftwood fingers with green bean gunk crammed beneath the nails and cowbell breasts weighed down with milk for the infant sleeping in a basket by the broken rocking chair. She recalled her mama’s sweet voice and the rusty squeak in her upper register as she strained for the soprano notes.

Kristina blinked back fond memories as she snaked a garden hose through the wide cracks between fence pickets. She turned on the spigot–so she could wash up before supper. Her father was a stickler about having a hot plate of food to come home to and since Kristina was now the lady of the house, all the cooking fell on her shoulders.

Aunt Thelma had taken the baby four days after Kristina’s mother was found, hanging from the arbor where the headless climbing roses made a nest of thorns like some gothic interpretation of a rainbow. Her body swayed back and forth with gingham dress billowing and scuffed black boots protruding from the hem. She resembled a bell with tiny cast iron skillet handles for a tongue that clanged. Kristina heard that morbid imaginary clang in her head–night after sleepless night, but she had no time to dwell on those thoughts. Her pa would be home soon and he wouldn’t take kindly to excuses of daydreaming.

She ran up the hill to the log cabin with holes in the mortar big enough for rats and took the front steps two at a time, careful to skip the bruised sagging bellies where the wood was infested with termites, but her boot went through the top step and she fell straight through to the crawlspace beneath the crumbling porch. As she clawed around trying to dig herself out of there, she uncovered an old tin she remembered Granny keeping her jewelry and mad money in, years ago, before she went crazy from the poison in her well water–according to the doc. Kristina pulled off the lid of the tin, expecting to find some old costume jewelry and a coin or two, but she found labels off rat poison boxes and cleaning supplies, like her pa kept in the barn.

Folded into an origami swan, as only her mother could do, was a letter written in her mama’s crooked semiliterate way. It told how Kristina’s pa had poisoned Granny, expecting her mother to inherit some money. When he found out Granny had given all her money to the church before she died, after discovering she was deathly sick, he turned on Kristina’s mother and threatened to kill her. She’d managed to keep him satisfied enough to avoid his wrath for over a decade, but since the birth of the unwanted child, her mother was becoming increasingly concerned her husband might have enough hate built up inside him to go through with it. He had begun to speak of it more and more and hinted he would give up the infant–the moment she was gone.

All this time, Kristina thought her mama hung herself, without once questioning how she could have climbed up that flimsy arbor and tied the noose without something to stand on to be kicked away. Everything came clear as melted snow trickling off the mountain. Kristina knew exactly what she would feed her pa for supper and it wouldn’t matter if it were hot or not, it’d knock him off his feet for sure.