Page 333 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

The wind intensified and began gusting from all
directions. Quickly, I found myself in the stormed-tossed
waves of a grain field, and no less steady for the solid
ground beneath me, as it seemed to be deliberately quaking
and twisting, trying to steal me from my feet. I was lashed
by wind-whipped stalks and buffeted by monsoon-strength
squalls. Even some of the pockets of denser shadow began
to uproot and tumble towards me. The gelatinous patches
struck me and spread like clots of spiderwebbing, entangling
me in a sticky fabric of tangible darkness.
From close beside my ear, I heard my father roaring into
the wind for me to take him up. I did just that, raising him
high into the twisting, perpetual dusk. I swung him without
reserve or design, allowing my benefactor’s hunger to
deliver him where he wished to go. The satisfying crunch
of failing bone occurred in tandem with a brief interruption
to my father’s momentum. The wind died immediately,
and my rageful ancestor lay on the other side of what was
once a whole clown, now only a dead thing that lay in two
pieces among the flitting stalks and pooling shadows, a gray
balloon still clutched in its hand. Fascinatingly, the clown’s
innards consisted of little more than a fragile scaffolding
of cartilaginous-looking plant matter and a smattering
of transposed decaying human parts—finishing touches
perhaps, to make the whole thing marginally believable. As
I drew closer to the false clown, I observed the multitude
of corpses scattered all around its booth of drab inflatables.
The bodies were honeycombed with feasting roots—even
the soil seemed to be leeching blood directly from the pores
of the reposed husks.
I had just turned to leave the killing field to its strange
business, when I heard the gentle sound of soil being slowly
displaced. Something in the likeness of a towheaded little
girl was being methodically pushed up through the topsoil,
her dirty hair barely catching the honeyed glimmer from the
remaining fragments of daylight. At the very moment the
336 | Mark Anzalone