God’s Creatures
Early evening bleeds pink behind my parents’ house. Nate, my son, reaches for a squirming caterpillar with his fat fingers pinching open and shut like a pair of pink forceps. With a squeal of delight, he hoists the writhing thing from the sidewalk, holding it in front of his eyes for a closer examination.
“Boy, you’d better set that fella down.” Grandpa, face stretched like taffy and wrinkled as a three-hour swim, leans forward in his lawn chair. “God’s creatures don’t need none of us poking around, givin’ them hell. It ain’t right.”
“He’s only five, Dad.” I smile at Nate; he drops the caterpillar and scampers off toward the chipped door over Grandpa’s root cellar.
With a cough, Grandpa turns to me, smashes his face, and huffs. “No matter. Rules are rules, boy.” His arms fold across his chest.
Katie, my wife, turns to me, eyebrows extending as if in a question. I grin and shake my head. Dad’s losing it, I mouth. She rises, takes my empty glass, and starts for the house.
“Want anything?” she asks Grandpa before scooting inside. He shakes his head.
We sit in silence for a few minutes, enjoying the rising rhythm of the cicadas in their nightly dance. Nate hops on the cellar door with a hollow thump, and Grandpa shrugs his shoulders and straightens in his chair.
“You remember that boy from down the street?” he asks with his gaze on a bit of purple sky. “That little bastard that always tore legs off them grasshoppers?”
My brow furrows, remembering. “Yeah. Yeah… his name was Wilkins or something. He was a mean kid. I remember when he cut the whiskers off Susie Ramberg’s kittens.” The sky works into a rich, bloody burgundy. “Whatever happened to him? Did they move or something?”
Grandpa chuckles at some private joke.
Just then, Nate hops off the cellar door, stumbling backward while his face drops all its color. He glances at me, eyes like billiard balls, wondering if I heard it, too–the sound like rattling chains and a low moan, muffled by the cellar door.
My stomach flops. “Dad…”
The door shakes, like something heavy ramming against the other side. Another moan, longer, more mournful. I can almost hear a human voice trying to form words. Nate runs behind my chair and hides.
“You just might want to keep yer boy away from that cellar, is all.” Grandpa turns to me, smiling with a face full of broken teeth and seventy years of tobacco stains. “That Wilkins boy was never a creature of God, anyhow.”
