“Vern, no, please. Lis—”
Vern disconnected the call and slid the phone back to the barkeep. What a strange sadness, to be done with the woman who’d made you.
5
THE FOREST LIT UP dimly as the sun rose. The woods were hauntingly quiet this morning. Vern should’ve felt relief returning to her babes, but she felt only dread. She was back now in the world of the fiend, of the drownt child, of Howling and Feral, who were so full of wanting and need for her she disappeared under the weight of their desires.
Vern walked faster once she reached the river and could follow it back toward her camp. A cool breeze, uncharacteristic of the season, blew against her until the skin over her arms prickled. It felt like a warning.
What if the fiend’s intention had never been to burn the woods down but to lure Vern away from her children? Or what if he’d been peeking through the trees and seen her go off on the bike with Ollie and taken his chance to track down her camp? It wouldn’t be hard. He’d had to have seen her campfires before.
Vern picked up the pace until she was jogging, breaking into a run when she was near enough to her camp to know the surroundings by heart. She slowed once she could smell the scents of her home: old woodsmoke, burnt blackberries she’d stewed into compote, dried fish. All seemed well, except for a disturbance in the shelter. The coverings of leaves and branches had been tossed to the side. “Howling, Feral!” Vern called. She dove into the shelter, ready to swoop them both up, but neither was there.
“Howling! Feral!” Nearby, a short, sharp cry pinged the air, and Vern ran.
There they both were, laughing hardily as they munched through stores of dried plums. They’d crawled out of the shelter by themselves. “Oh, babes,” she said, crushing them to her. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Both of them cried, straining out of her embrace.
She kissed them on their heads and stroked them gently, but their cries didn’t calm until she put them to the breast. “I love you. I promise I do,” she said, as much for herself as for them.
Vern resolved never to leave them again. She was a mam now. Not some little girl who could get carried away with dreams of women on bikes.
With the babies tethered to her, a rope around her waist, she fixed herself breakfast, humming merrily to Howling and Feral as they chewed mud, chewed sticks, chewed rocks, chewed leaves. The babes giggled, smiled, and squidged dirt and dandelions between their fingers and mashed overripe fruit onto their mosquito-ravaged thighs. All the while, Vern watched over them, dredging every bit of love and attention she could out of herself and pouring it over them. This was how their lives would be from now on, she’d make sure of it, perfect and quaint.
Vern’s fantasy lasted a day.
The next morning, bruises appeared on the babies’ backs. Feral’s were easy to spot, gulf-water blue and splotched like crumpled tissue paper, reeking of violence. Howling’s marks were dark shadows, the faintest navy color hinting toward twilight. In her zeal to hold Howling and Feral close yesterday, she’d split their blood vessels open.
Vern was a strong girl, but no stronger than anyone else who grew up on the compound. Life at the Blessed Acres required endless manual labor. Before breakfast there was milking, shoveling and raking manure, feeding and watering animals. After breakfast: mending, patching, sewing, weaving. School came next, which offered respite, but depending on the time of year, the practical life rotation might involve heavy exertion. Smithing, trapping, and midwifery took a physical toll.
Squeezing a child hard enough that they had trauma to show for it was a different level of strength, however.
Howling, naked, poured water from a hide pouch into a ditch he’d dug. Feral, freshly dressed in a frock to save his skin from burning, dutifully ate breakfast. The accidental beatings the children had taken had not dampened their joy. They were themselves completely.
Had it not been for this fact, Vern might have spent the morning sulking uselessly. Instead, she grabbed a rock about the size of her palm from the ground. Summoning all her might, she squeezed it and waited for the solid gray mineral to become dust in her hands.
No such miracle occurred. “Damn it,” she said, and threw the failed experiment out of her hand. Vern waited for the sound of a thunk against the ground or the trunk of a tree but paused when there was only an alarmed squeak.
“Da?” asked Howling.
Until now, Vern thought feh, fish, was the child’s first spoken word, but knowing that he had it in him to talk, the single syllable Howling had often before blurted became suddenly intelligible. Da meant that. He was asking, What’s that?