MicroHorror

In the dark, Annabelle Dubrois felt along the bathroom wall. Her trembling hand switched on the overhead fluorescent bulb. It showered harsh candescence onto her head. She gazed in the mirror at her splotchy countenance and cursed her thinning hair and mousy mouth. Bruised shadows pooled beneath her eyes, hurt by what they witnessed. She had never been beautiful and with each passing year she became less attractive and more invisible to men.

“No wonder no one wants me; I’m hideous.” She smiled a fake camera-cheese-grin and examined her yellow teeth, grabbed the toothbrush and squeezed minty-blue paste onto its bristles then scoured her teeth until her gums bled. She spat into the basin and watched liquid, crimson flowers bloom and swirl in a ballet down the drain.

Her pet lab, Beaux, nuzzled her bare calf. She kicked him away without a glance. “Leave me alone, Beaux, get.” She heard him whine as he retreated to the hall and sat as if waiting his turn for the ladies’. She looked down at him. “I’m sorry, boy. Mama’s just upset.” She went to him and crouched down, nose to nose. “You’re a good boy.” She stroked his head with one hand and wiped her tears away with the other. He lifted his snout and licked her cheek. “If you didn’t love me, I wouldn’t know love at all.” She buried her face in his furry neck and wept.

Prozac had not managed to roust her out of this depression. She’d been taking it for two months and didn’t feel any better. None of the antidepressants worked. They were ploys for pharmaceutical companies to make money off people who were in a desperate state of mind. The only effective drug the doctor prescribed was a sleeping pill, Ambien. Annabelle relied on those pills to lure her mind away from self-hatred and lull it to sleep. She enjoyed sleeping. She wished she could sleep forever. It hit her. Mabye I should sleep forever.

With renewed energy in her step, she scurried to the bathroom medicine cabinet and retrieved the Ambien. Beaux trailed after her and whimpered by her feet. She dumped the entire bottle of candy narcotics into her palm and counted. There were eleven pills. That should be enough. She slapped all eleven to the back of her throat and filled a glass with water, gulped them down, then turned her head and said, “Ahhh, it’s done.”

She sat on the bathroom rug and leaned against the tub. Beaux curled up beside her and rested his head in her lap. She petted him gently until she fell asleep.

A slurping tongue lapped her cheek. She heard Beaux whimpering loudly in her ear. He pawed her mouth and barked. She couldn’t respond. He dug his nails into her skin and ripped her lower lip. She tasted blood and felt the hot fingers of pain pinch her lip. Beaux licked the blood from her mouth and growled. His licks were followed by teeth, biting into the pulpy flesh of her pout. She was paralyzed. She wanted to scream out as Beaux’s canine incisors tore pink, living tissue away. She heard him smack and swallow as he devoured her silent lips. When will I die? I should be dead already!

His drooling hunger moved to her nose. The stench of his dog-breath filled her lungs as he gnawed the tip of her nose. She didn’t know why he was attacking her face. She thought maybe he knew how much it had offended her. Dogs were sensitive and perceptive. Her cheek burst into flames of excruciating pain and then her mind went blank.

Annabelle awoke in the hospital with bandages covering her wounds. Doctors gathered around her bed and discussed her options for a face transplant. They said she would be the first person to undergo such a procedure. In her mind, she thanked Beaux as she watched her hand sign the surgery permission forms.

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.

An Appalachian apple bitten to the core rested in the palm of Percy’s pretty teen daughter, Missy, who wore a pink party dress and blue flannel shirt. She sat on a discarded sofa, using a cushion for a boot-rest, while his three boys searched for bonfire wood. They were gonna burn it all at sundown–cremate their Mama’s memory with a blazing mountain of broken remains, until the preacher walked up the path leading to their two-room crippled shack, slumped in the dimple on the hill–like it was ashamed.

“Howdy, Percy.” Preacherman tipped his sweaty straw hat, half expecting to catch expletives spat from the drunkard’s mouth, but Percy had a morbid mellow malaise holding his tongue in check and he just grunted, “Hey,” with a back throat growl.

Missy tossed the apple to the ground and a worm slithered out onto the pine-straw path. She moved closer to the chopping block, finger-combing her dirty hair ‘til her palms were greasy, then rubbed her bare knees, making them shine like her Daddy’s bald head. She didn’t make eye contact with the preacher, but she didn’t take her eyes off him neither. She studied his muddy loafers and frayed tweed trousers, looking for signs she was too young to read, but her Daddy knew what lies were embedded in the man of the cloth’s clothing. He’d smelled the odor of her Mama on the preacher many times before; this day was no different. Missy caught the scent as well and one whiff was too much.

“I come to talk to you about Bonnie. She’s worried sick about the younguns and wants to see ’em, if’n you say it’s okay. It ain’t right to deny children their mother’s love. Even if she ain’t all there, she’s still their mother. Can’t change that.”

“I know she birthed those babies, but that don’t mean she’s their mother. She ain’t fit for mothering; you know that better than most.”

“Now, Percy, I came up here and tried to shake those demons loose, the one’s that got hold of her, but she was too far gone by the time you called me. She’s doing some better these days and she calls for her kids every evening, as soon as the sun goes down.”

“She does a lot of thangs soon as the sun goes down. That’s why I don’t want these kids around her. She needs to be kept under lock and key, like you promised.”

Preacherman took a deep breath then turned his attention toward Missy. “Missy, wouldn’t you like to visit your Mama?”

Missy sat silently, choking her shiny bald knees with her bare hands, digging her nails into her pale flesh until it looked like teeth marks, then she raised one eye brow and said, “What d’you thank?”

“I don’t know; that’s why I’m asking you.”

She looked over at the chopping block and had a flashback of her mother decapitating a chicken, grabbing up its feet, while it flapped bloody feathers ‘til its blood drained out. The next vision she had was of her mother holding up her baby sister by the feet, while her lifeless head sat on the block staring at Missy, who had been the one to sharpen the blade.

Percy turned up a jug of moonshine to his mouth and chugged a big swaller, then said, “Might as well take Missy to see her; she’s just as sick as her Ma.”

That’s when Missy’s eyes rolled back. She sprung up from the sofa, gripped the axe, and split Percy’s skull like a pumpkin. At the scent of blood, her brothers scurried out of the woods, arms loaded with twigs, eyes like boiled eggs–glossy and white. Preacher saw the family resemblance for the first time.

Missy grabbed Preacherman by the ankles. The boys tied him to a pine log and hoisted him over the fire. At sunset, they roasted his marshmallow ass singing Appalachian campfire songs their Mama taught them.