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A Kind of Hunger

A Short Story

By C. B. BlanchardPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
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Nothing but the wind and the sound of the sea. Nothing but the cliffs, and under them a pebble beach. Sometimes people find fossils on the beach. Sometimes they find bones.

Once there was a house. It burned down a long time ago, and no one talks about it, not even those descended from the men and women who crowded around the fire and listened until the noises stopped.

Nothing there now. Even the soot-marked stones are gone; fallen into the sea.

-

Oh but the calls of seabirds, oh but the sky so huge and heavy, oh but the water silver-flat and shining.

Oh, but the things done here, on quiet desperate nights. On bright sunny days.

-

Here is the memory of a house. Small and neat and pretty-pretty, clothes hanging outside on a washing line. Sun shining on flint walls.

The wind rises, the clothes billow. Inside the house, something delicate-sounding breaks.

Does someone scream? Or is just the gulls above?

-

Seagulls can sound like they are laughing at you. Seagulls can sound like they are screaming. They have sharp hooked beaks to tear apart flesh.

-

Five days it took for people to come looking. Five days. By then, the flies were thick in dead eyes and open mouths. By then, the blood was black. By then, the clothes had been soaked by rainfall. By then, the sun no longer shone.

They made conclusions, based on the mess. They made choices, based on those conclusions.

The seagulls wailed, and the sea washed the stones, and the skeletons of creatures long dead slept in the rocks.

And they dragged someone(thing) our of their(its) hiding place and...

-

It's not, perhaps, the least obvious story. A thousand times told. The disabled or the mentally ill child does a monstrous thing, and people are monstrous right back. And ghosts are born in blood and kept alive by guilt and justification. Only...

That's not actually where this is going.

-

There is a legend in these parts of a great black dog. It walks the coastal paths, they say. Taller than a man, with flaming eyes. If you see it, you'll die within the year.

Maybe, just maybe, a young woman walked out with a friend one night and maybe in the fog she saw two bright lights like lanterns and maybe she was faced down by a dog large enough to crush her sweet little head in one bite, and maybe instead of running, she swallowed her fear and held out her hand to the great and awful face.

And maybe she was given a choice.

-

Here is the memory of a house. Here is the memory of a girl. She has delicate hands, musician's hands, but no one ever bothered to teach a girl like her music.

When she was very small there was a storm, and fishermen died in it, and she found a body on the pebbles. She crouched down and rested her arms on her thighs and looked at it, looked at the damage done by rocks and sea creatures and hungry gulls.

-

Choices. Choice. A small life tight around her shoulders. A small bed that she shared with a sister. Small chances, small options. Marriage, maybe, and knowing what that meant. A life no different, the same drudgery, only now with wanting, hungry mouths at her ankles and a man who expected her body alongside her obedience. Or working at the big house, and drudgery there, and no marriage maybe. Only she knew the rumours well enough. Knew about the girl who tragically fell off the cliffs.

Think what you like. I know that she laughed, when she made the choice, and that she never regretted.

-

Sometimes you need to grow teeth. Sometimes you need to use the teeth you already have.

-

There's a church where you can see a burn mark on the doors. Supposedly Black Shuck, the black dog himself, tried to get in and was driven back by the holiness of the location. Or maybe it was the Devil. Or maybe Black Shuck is the Devil’s dog.

Or maybe it was a lightning strike.

-

In the close darkness of a lonely flint house, a young woman buries her face under bedsheets. Her sister snores beside her. The sea, outside and far below, remains the sea. She will grow and live and die and it will still be the sea, and all the mark she will ever have made will be the one above her grave.

-

The villagers buried the messes they found in the house. They saved up money in a collection for some simple stones that have long since worn down. Prayers were said over them. No one remembers them, their faces, the things that made them laugh or frown, how they felt about wind or rain or snow or mist, their favourite colours.

Even their names are gone. Maybe a record somewhere has them, to be found by curious genealogists, but who would be researching them? Their family line died on a bright sunny spring day, nothing left of them at all.

-

Teeth and claws in the dark. A certainty. You have to destroy what keeps you close. You can be something else.

-

Only—the work is done in the light. This is not a thing for darkness and secrecy. It must be clear and sure. Do it in the bright shining. Do it where the sky can see. Do not hide.

A certain self, a wild and honest hunger, kept chained down for oh so long. Teeth aching to meet in flesh. Hands wanting to be claws.

Laughter, in the little house by the sea. Birdsong in the air. They laugh when they work, they sing sometimes, too. But the work is still work, their hands are old. They, too, will have claws before death, but these won't be things to cut and rend and tear and make the world red. They will have bodies bent by pain and age and overwork and no thanks but the cold dictates that it was their duty and I will not have it, I will not let it be this way, I will not die in childbirth or of fever or poverty or cold, I will not mean nothing...

Oh, but you already knew. This story is about me.

-

I will tear myself out of this place, I will be a monster if I have to be.

-

I murdered the ones I loved the most. Simple as that. But not so simple, when you look closer, down at the guts and the bones of my choices.

I.

Ah, well.

-

A memory of a house, but this one stained in blood. Still no regret. Would you be happier if I did? It was a nice house. I was never hurt, not in the ways that might mean you'd forgive. I just...

-

There is a kind of love that is all hunger and consumption. There is a kind of love that is about destroying things to keep them safe.

My sister drops a cup when she sees my face.

-

There was the sea, and there were the cliffs, and there were the seagulls, and there was me, and I was something else and apart and I always knew it

And one day there were lanterns in the mist.

-

Black Shuck is the Devil’s dog, but I am not the Devil’s daughter. There is blood on my hands, but here I am.

I can't say I wouldn't pay that price again.

-

They burned the house, and they burned me in it and oh, but I screamed and screamed, but when it was done and I was bones, there was still the I.

-

You can kill me and burn me again and again, but still I live, still I'm here. I'm alive, and I will shout it to the sky, to the dark moon, to the stars. I am alive but never alone. I am alive and the blood of the ones I love is on my teeth.

-

They find fossils on the beach. Sometimes they find bones.

fiction
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About the Creator

C. B. Blanchard

Queer, disabled writer of lots of stuff, including fantasy and horror fiction.

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