Transcription (3 page)

She picked up speed as she walked down the hall. Her hands had already begun moving at her waist, getting ready for the morning’s chores. When she came through the doorway to the dim kitchen, she stopped and grabbed the doorframe for stability.

Her husband was there, sprawled out on his back on the kitchen table. His head was raised and equal parts panic and concern were written on his brow. The morning light through the window was pink and orange. It filled the kitchen with a beautiful glow. The warm light made her husband’s naked skin appear rosy and healthy. It usually appeared white and translucent, like a thin-sliced potato.
 

She took half of a step and saw the rags securing his hands and feet to the legs of the table.
 

Her brain had automatically labelled the sight of her naked husband as “PROBLEM.”

With the added information of the rags, the sight moved to “DANGER.”

She stopped and thought. There was someone in the house. The person was strong and dangerous. Based on the look on her husband’s face, the person was still in the house. She looked at her husband’s eyes. They darted towards the pantry door, which was around the corner and on her right.

She backed up, but not in time. The man came at her with startling speed. People just weren’t supposed to move that fast indoors. Something flashed pink in the morning light and she jerked back her hand. She’d been cut. She ran.

As she passed the telephone table, she clawed at the edge with her hand. She pulled and supplemented her speed, sending the table back into the legs of the man chasing her. It was either the legs of the table, or the cloth-covered telephone cable that tripped him. Whatever it was, the man’s legs tangled and he crashed to the floor of the hall as she rounded the banister. She was halfway up the stairs before she stole a glance. The man was pushing to his feet in a tangle of splintered furniture.

She thought quickly and made her decision.
 

She could get her two boys out the front window, and onto the porch roof. Then she could yell for her oldest while she stayed to protect the baby. Her husband was on his own.

She threw open the door to the room the boys shared. It was empty. Both of their beds were unmade and their pillows on the floor. The window—the one she’d intended to shepherd them through—was already open. The curtains billowed in on the morning air. This wasn’t the first time they’d snuck out. They would be behind the barn, trying to catch rabbits as the animals returned to their warrens.

She heard bashing and breaking from downstairs.

Across the hall, the baby was still sleeping peacefully.
 

She threw open the window and began screaming.

#
 
#
 
#
 
#
 
#

James tightened his grip on the pen.

He resolved to stay closer to the original text. There was something a little more distant and sterile about his father’s prose. It was a skill that James was still trying to perfect. Somehow his father could describe
 
terrible events but still give himself enough room to breathe and move around. James tended to get sucked in to the stories. If he wasn’t careful, James would veer from his father’s narrative and describe gory details that might be easily glossed over.

James didn’t have the advantage of newspaper training. That was surely where his father had picked up his objective reporting skills. Then again, at his age, his father had probably only written a tenth of the text that James had produced.

He flipped the page and kept his hand moving at its slow and steady pace.

#
 
#
 
#
 
#
 
#

“You can’t kill them,” the littlest boy said.

“We have to,” his brother said. “Either we do it, or he will.”

“He will what?”

Their oldest brother backed down the ramp from the back door. He coaxed the wheelbarrow out as he backed down to the ground. It was overfull, and he was careful to keep it level so it didn’t dump manure into the lawn. When he got the wheelbarrow to the ground, he lowered the handles until it sat on its own. He walked over to his brothers.

They were both crouched next to a deep, tin pail.

“Ma will kill you guys if she catches you out before dawn again,” the oldest said.

In the bottom of the pail, four baby rabbits were huddled together.

The smallest boy looked like he was about to cry. “Henry says we have to kill them. I don’t want to kill them. Why can’t we just keep them?”

“Aw, Ray, Don’t cry about it. You know what Pa will say,” John said. “He’ll say, ‘They ate my crops, now they’re going to feed my family.’”

“Then let’s just let them go,” Ray said.

“No sir,” Henry, the middle boy, said. “Pa will find out, and then we’ll get switched. I’m taking the pail to Ma.” He picked up the handle and stood up. Ray grabbed the other side of the handle and sat down. Henry tried to drag his brother. When he was unsuccessful, he jerked at his end of the handle.

Ray began to cry. He didn’t make a sound, but fat tears rolled to the curve of his cheeks and then fell.

“Hold on a moment,” John said. “What were you doing out here if you didn’t expect to catch rabbits? And what did you expect to do with those rabbits if not eat them?”

“We were trying to catch big rabbits. Like that,” he removed one of his hands from the pail to point.

Henry pulled at the same moment and gained sole possession of the pail. He nearly fell down for his effort.

John followed the pointing finger and saw a fat brown rabbit on its side in the grass. A little blood was crusted over the rabbit’s eye.

“Say, now that’s a different story you’re telling,” John said. “If you’ve got the big one, then you
can
let the little ones go. Just take the big one to eat and the others don’t have to die.”

“But that’s the mother rabbit,” Ray said. “The babies won’t live without their mother.”

“You never said…” John began. He stopped at the sound of the rooster crowing again. “What was that?”

Henry looked confused. “It’s the rooster. What are you talking about?”

“Not that,” John said. “
That!
”

All the boys heard it that time. It was their mother screaming from the house.

John led the way in the sprint through the barn and across the dooryard to the house. Ray and Henry carried the pail between them as they ran. Their fight about the bunnies had been forgotten.

#
 
#
 
#
 
#
 
#

While he listened to the woman scream, Snake-man found a glass jug of lamp oil in the pantry. He took that and a box of wooden matches to the stairs. In the kitchen, the old farmer was rocking his fat, naked body back and forth, trying to tip the table over. It would never work. The table was solid and sturdy. The old farmer was weak.

Snake-man upended the jug, dousing the stairs, banister, and walls liberally with the oil. A decent amount splashed back on his pants and shoes, but he hardly seemed to notice. When he’d poured most of the bottle out, he used the rest to make a trail down the hall. He threw the empty bottle at the old farmer. The glass said DINK as it bounced off the farmer’s skull. The old farmer swayed back and thunked his head back to the table after the blow. He was still.

Snake-man crouched and struck a match.

He fed it to the puddle of oil.
 

The effect was better than he’d hoped. The flame leapt down the trail of liquid, swerving back and forth to trace the path that Snake-man had drawn. When it reached the doused area, the air said, “Whoomph!”

Snake-man smiled.

He heard an answering call through the screen door. It was the son. Behind him, two smaller boys ran.

“Ma!” the oldest yelled. He pulled to a stop and looked up at the second floor of the house. The woman was yelling something that Snake-man couldn’t quite make out.

Snake-man returned to the kitchen table, where the old farmer was regaining his wits for the third time that morning.

Instead of yelling unintelligible sounds into the rag, the old farmer seemed to be trying to say individual words. Snake-man plucked at a corner of the rag. He pulled it from the old farmer’s mouth.

“Please. I’ll give you whatever you want. Just please don’t hurt my family.”

Snake-man considered that and then leaned in very close to give his response. “How could I ask for anything more when you’ve already given me so much?” Snake-man used his open hand to slap the old-farmer’s genitals. It was a savage smack, and the old farmer nearly doubled-up, despite the restraints. While he was still trying to gasp in a breath, Snake-man stuffed the rag back into the old farmer’s mouth.

Snake-man used his knife.

#
 
#
 
#
 
#
 
#

John pulled to a stop when his mother yelled down to him.

“John, don’t go in there. There’s a madman in there. Get your brothers in the barn and get the rat gun,” she said.

John turned to follow orders. His mother disappeared back through the window. He cut off his brothers in the door yard and crouched down to their height.

“Boys, there’s trouble. Mom wants you both to climb up into the top hayloft and hide. Don’t you come out for anything,” John said.

“But I want to help,” Ray whined.

John took him by the shoulders and shook him. Ray lost his grip on the pail and it spilled from Henry’s hand. The baby rabbits ran from the bucket as it rolled away.

“You go now, Ray. Do you hear me?” Jonathan asked.

Ray nodded. Henry took his hand and the boys ran towards the big door of the barn. They weren’t big enough to slide the door open on its track, but they knew how to wriggle their way past it.

John ran for the other door—the door to the milking shed, where his father kept the rat gun. It was an oily old shotgun.
 

He stopped when he heard his mother scream. John turned to see her hanging from the window again. She had the baby in her arms. Smoke billowed through the window around her. John ran back for the house.

“Climb up here, John,” she said. “Climb up here and take the baby.”

John nodded and ran for the porch.

He stopped again as the man came through the back door.

In town, John might have mistook the man for a banker, or a lawyer. His clothes were neat and expensive. They were things you wore to sit behind a desk, not to do an honest day’s work. The cuffs were rolled and buttoned. The vest was buttoned. The glasses were high up on his nose.

When he moved, John saw something different. This man slipped through the door like smoke. A long, sharp knife danced in his fingers, catching the morning sun in bright flashes as it spun. The man leaned against the very post that John had been about to climb.

“You can climb up and save that baby,” the man said, as he slipped down the stairs.

John backed up a step as the man turned and moved towards the corner of the house.

“You might even save your Ma. Or, you can run into that kitchen and save your dad. He’s lost a lot of blood, but if you get a tourniquet on him right this instant, he’ll live.”

#
 
#
 
#
 
#
 
#

James kept writing as the alarm went off. The alarm meant he had five minutes left until dawn. He hated that the stories still sucked him in. He hated that he always lost track of time and was surprised by the alarm. More than any of that, he hated that he
needed
to see where the story would go. Even if the story didn’t finish by the final alarm, he would probably keep writing. How could he not?

#
 
#
 
#
 
#
 
#

John could hear the fire crackling away at the front of the house. He could hear his baby sister up in the window, warming up to begin crying in earnest. And, beneath it all, he heard a low moan from the kitchen, where he imagined his father dying from a knife wound.

John’s eyes twitched left and right, as if his brain was spinning off-balance and his eyes had picked up the vibration.

He made the only decision that he could live with.

John ran, grunting and screaming as he did, and he caught the strange man in the middle of the back. He meant to knock the knife from his hand. It should have been easy—the man wasn’t really gripping the knife. He was still twirling it.
 

John didn’t account for how quickly the man could move. Nobody could move that quick.
 

With John’s impact, the man spun in his arms and turned to John before they were even halfway to the ground. The knife did not bounce from the man’s loose grip. Instead, the man flipped the knife until the blade pointed down. The man drove the knife in to John’s shoulder. When they hit the ground, the man used the force of the collision to drive the knife even deeper.

John screamed.

He reached up to grab for the knife. The man caught John’s arm, and used John’s momentum as a weapon. He spun John around and pressed his face into the dirt of the dooryard. A rock shattered John’s front tooth as the man pulled the knife from his shoulder.
 

The strange man made quick work of John as he tried to curl up to protect himself.
 

The knife flashed and cut John under each armpit, incapacitating both of his arms. Next, before John even saw the man turn, he had cut the tendons on the backs of John’s legs.
 

John groaned with pain as he rolled over.

The man was already walking away.

Flames licked up the side of the house from the window at the bottom of the stairs. Smoke puffed from the back windows, and from the slats on the side of the house that vented the attic. His mother crawled across the porch roof with the baby clutched tight against her chest. She tried to swing her legs over the side and slipped.