RESURRECTION CONTESTANT

Broken filaments of light shone through the stained glass windows of the old church on Brumwick Road.  The sun was setting fast over the small town of Shutterglade and inside the abandoned church Charlotte Kellan and Sylvia Hanover huddled against one another in the back of the pulpit, a dirtied brown rucksack resting on the floor in front of them.

“Won’t be long now,” Charlotte said, gnawing on a hangnail and looking up to the colored glass figure of Jesus haloed in patches of light.

“That’s a disgusting habit,” Sylvia said rolling her eyes.

Charlotte looked at her fingers, gnawed and frayed as if she’d been digging herself out of her own grave.  They were awful to behold, but she shrugged her shoulders and continued chewing away at the stubborn nail on her right pinkie.

“I’m nervous,” she said through her teeth.

“You’re nervous?  What about me?  I’m the one who’s up the creek if this doesn’t work.”

“It’ll work,” Charlotte stammered ripping the nail free.  Blood bubbled to the surface from the quick.  “Now look what you made me do.”

“Ewww!” Sylvia shrieked scuffling along the floor to get away from Charlotte’s bleeding finger.

“Hush,” Charlotte said motioning to the windows.  The sun was lost on the horizon, the colored glass shrouded in dusty hues of evening afterglow.

“Come on,” Charlotte said reaching for her backpack.  “Time to get to work.”

***

They placed the rucksack into a circle of burning graveyard dirt.  Charlotte opened the door on a small cage and pulled out a baby rabbit, snaring the creature by its ears.  She pulled a small dagger from her back pocket and offered its hilt towards Sylvia.

“No, I can’t do that.”

“Sylvia, it has to be you, remember.  That’s how it works.”

“This goes one step beyond Fatal Attraction you realize.”

“Syl, just do it.”

“Fine!  Okay!”

Sylvia withdrew the blade from its sheath and in one quick motion brought the blade streaking across the rabbit’s throat.  Blood shot from its wound hitting Sylvia squarely on the lips as the rabbit’s body quaked in Charlotte’s grip.

“Oh my god,” Sylvia yelped, wiping her mouth.  “You promised it wouldn’t be messy.”

Charlotte smiled, wrestling the rabbit with both hands, rearing its slit neck back so that the blood flowed over the rucksack.  “I lied.”

“I swear to God, I don’t know why I’m friends with you.”

“If we weren’t friends we’d probably have killed ourselves by now.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Lighten up.  You wanted to do this.”

“Um…I had no choice in the matter.  No real alternative.”

Once the rucksack was appropriately soaked in the rabbit blood, Charlotte shoved its limp and dead body back into its cage.

“Okay, your turn.”

Sylvia looked at the blade in her hand and then at the rucksack.  She shuddered.

“I don’t know why it needs my blood.”

Charlotte sighed.  “It’s got to be your blood.  ‘The blood of nature; the blood of one’s life, communed in the circle…’”

“’Restores the soul’s light.’  I know, you don’t have to remind me.”

Sylvia took the dagger coated with the rabbit’s blood and slid the blade across her palm.  She held her hand out, allowing her life-force to rush from the gash onto the encircled heap on the floor.

As the blood fell, Charlotte retrieved her witch’s grimoire and began reciting the incantation.

***

While Charlotte got her mystical mojo up and running, Sylvia thought back to how she’d come to the point and time when the forbidden art of necromancy was required to make her problems go away.

She’d always been so responsible.  And then her parents needed a break from their mundane family life, leaving her in charge of her baby brother, Owen.

She’d only been on the phone with Charlotte for ten minutes when she heard the crash in the kitchen.  She dropped the phone in response and rushed into the room only to find little Owen pinned beneath his high chair, blood collecting under his head.  He’d somehow managed to slip out of the seat and landed on the floor, and the chair toppling over him.

Mortified, she did the only thing she knew to do and asked Charlotte to come over right away.

***

Within the hour, the ritual was done.

“We can’t just leave him here,” Sylvia contested as Charlotte gathered her things.

“We have to.  The dead must absorb the blood and must reside in a holy place for two days.”

“Two days?  My parents will be home Sunday evening.”

“Not nearly enough time if you want it to work.”

Sylvia shook her head and began pacing.  “This cannot be happening.”

“Whining about it is not going to help.  If it makes you feel better, the fact that he’s recently deceased might help speed up the process, but not sure by how much.”

“But there’s a chance.”

“A slight window.  Maybe.”

“Hopefully,” Sylvia said biting her bottom lip.  “That’s all we’ll need.”

After they had gathered their things, Charlotte opened the door on the rabbit’s cage and slid it near the circle of burning dirt.

“Why are you leaving that behind,” Sylvia asked observing the dead rabbit still and blood soaked as the rucksack motionless in the center of the circle.

“Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“He’s hungry when he wakes up.”

***

Sylvia’s parents arrived home promptly at ten o’clock Sunday evening.  Sylvia was asleep on the living room sofa when her mother entered the room and gave her slumbering daughter a gentle shake.

“Honey, we’re home.”

Sylvia opened her eyes groggily and peered up at the beautiful face of her mother.  She could hear her father in the front hallway grunting as he hauled several of her mother’s bags up the front steps like a pack mule climbing up a sharp inclining hill.

“Hi, Mom,” Sylvia groaned through a yawn.

“Long day, huh?”

Sylvia rubbed her eyes and smiled.  “You could say that.”

Sylvia’s mother crossed the room to Owen’s play pen.  The active tyke had his arms slung over the top of the pen, his chubby little legs bouncing jovially.

“Hello my beautiful boy,” her mother said kissing the boy’s forehead.  The child squealed with tiny bursts of laughter.  “Did you wear out your big sis?”

Again he squealed, drumming his feet against the bottom of the pen.

“How was your brother?” Sylvia’s father called out, craning his red, out of breath head from around the corner.  “Everything go okay?”

“He was fine,” Sylvia said, the smile on her face melting as she looked over to Owen staring obscenely at Mr. Squiggles, Sylvia’s big orange tabby cat.

Owen’s small arms lunged out clawing at the air, nearly hurtling his body over the side of the play pen.  His soft, innocent eyes turned fierce as a lion rearing to pounce when Mr. Squiggles brushed his furry body against the border of the pen.  A green trickle of drool oozed from the corner of Owen’s pout lips, and a fly buzzing around the house landed on the side of the young boy’s head, crawling around to the cavern of his ear and crept inside.

“More or less.”

_______________

©2010 D.A. Hernandez

David Alan Hernandez is a native-born Texan currently working on his bachelor’s degree in creative writing/education.  Writing has always been an important facet to the author’s life, starting at a young age, and that ambition and drive to create continues to flourish.  His work can be found published in various online horror and fantasy Ezines including, The Harrow, Sonar4, Flashes in The Dark, Microhorror and also the college literary journal, The Rio Review.

I’d never seen a dead body like that before.

Daddy always tried to get me to go hunting, but I never much cared for shooting up the forest just for a good kill.

“You’ll never be a real man till you get your hands dirty,” my daddy would tell me packing up his truck and gear.

He was a sturdy man, a brick shithouse most folk called him.  ‘Course never understood why anyone would want to be built like anything like that.

Instead, I’d sit at home with Mama or go to a buddy’s house till Daddy got home with a fresh kill.  He’d make me watch as he’d string it up in the garage and split the animal’s belly.

Course, he’d never brought anything home quite like the kill he scored in the woods that day.

He hauled it by its heels from the bed of the truck.  I’d just gotten in from playing touch football with some boys down the road.  I had no interest in helping Daddy with his new prize, but then I’d never seen wings on anything so beautiful.

Piqued like an anxious virgin on prom night I crept up behind Daddy and offered to help him carry it to the garage.  Daddy did the initial work in there because of all the mess.  He’d take the skinned body to the walk-in freezer later and carve the meat.

Laid out on the worktable, its body was perfect; a divine symmetry that only the Lord himself could have carved from smooth, polished alabaster.  I ran my hands over its cold legs, up along the curves of its muscular haunches.  Heat flowered under my skin and I hadn’t expected the rush of blood to quicken so.

My eyes and hands wandered up along its firm abdomen and the bend of its torso.  There was something overtly sexual about the sensations roused in my frame.  I’d never been so close to something so terribly beautiful and though it was a corpse and its meat would nourish my growing body, I was in love.

Daddy eyed me from afar, and smiled amiably.  He busied himself shearing the beautiful beast’s coal black hair.  I wanted to bury my face in pelts of it.  I imagined myself naked in front of a warm fire, laid upon a carpet made of the black waves.

In my art class the teacher showed us famous sculptures, one of which, “The Dying Gaul” stuck out in my mind as I ran my hands over the taut, sinewy flesh.  The sculpture was of a dying warrior, so magnificently formed it was often thought to be alive.

I could appreciate their amazement now, for here I was looking upon such awe and splendor.

I was touching God.

My heart fluttered when he flipped the body onto its stomach.  I ran my hand up over the snowy white hills of its rump and traced my fingers along a river of dried blood that coursed down the path of its spine.

“Gonna help me skin it, son?”  Daddy asked offering me a newly sharpened pair of shears.

I took them, but didn’t quite know where to start.  Part of me was disenchanted by the thought of the cold, sterile shears mutilating the perfect flesh.  It was an affront to nature to separate this wonderous work of art from its skin.

“In the end, son, it’s just a shell,” Daddy would say.  “Underneath is where all the magic happens.”

“Give me a sec son, I’ll show you the best place to begin.”

Once the beast’s head was balder than a bowling ball, Daddy gathered the hair and placed it in a wicker basket.

Daddy fetched a hefty hacksaw from his tool box and came around the side of the table where I stood holding the shears.

“First, we got to hack off these blasted wings.  It’ll make maneuvering around the shoulder blades so much easier.”
Daddy set the saw to work, grinding it hard against the bones of the creature’s wings.

“We are so blessed, sonny,” Daddy said gritting his teeth as he drove the blade deep into the marrow.  “So very blessed.”

Blood trickled over the sides of the body as the teeth of the saw nicked the porcelain skin.  I reached out tentatively and blotted my fingertip in a sweet red jewel.  It was slightly sticky, like Mama’s cherry pie.  I pushed my finger to my lips and suckled like a wee baby.

Heaven on my tongue.

With a great application of strength, Daddy cracked and twisted the bone, jerking the creature’s wing free like a stubborn switch from a tree.

“There it comes, tough old bird,” Daddy said shucking the white feathery appendage onto the plastic tarp on the floor.  The underside of its feathered sails was dripping candied apple red.

“You boys still at it?”  Mama asked stepping into the garage.  Her hands were dusted in flour.

“Won’t be long now, darlin’.  Sonny boy here is gonna get his hands dirty and help me skin it.”

“You sure now, honey?”

I nodded absently, head still swimming with the intoxicating blush of the blood on my tongue.

I wanted to get my hands dirty now.  I wanted to explore this gorgeous creature’s flesh.  My anxious hand exercised the shears, parting the blades slowly and bringing them back together again.  Soon those slender blades would savor its skin, and when Daddy carved the meat from the bone, so would I.

“Maybe next time around you’ll join me, eh sonny?  Make a man of ya yet.”

“Can we hunt down another of these,” I asked eagerly.

“Certainly give it a go.  These things rarer than a unicorn I’d wager, but time and good fortune.”

I felt the heat rush into my cheeks again as I beamed at the prospect.  I’d be ready, oh so ready.

“Save the feathers, will ya,” Mama said dusting flour from her hands onto her apron.  “I’ll knit ya some nice new pillows.”

_____________________

©2010 D.A. Hernandez

David Alan Hernandez is a native-born Texan currently working on his bachelor’s degree in creative writing/education.  Writing has always been an important facet to the author’s life, starting at a young age, and that ambition and drive to create continues to flourish.  His work can be found published in various online horror and fantasy Ezines including, The Harrow, Sonar4, Flashes in The Dark, Microhorror and also the college literary journal, The Rio Review.