David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

“Why, you lyin’ deceitful parson!” hollered swamp witch. With her other hand she reached for her pebbles, intending to enunciate peroxide or some other disinfectant canticle. But the pebbles were gone — of course. Annabel and perhaps her brother Tommy had leaned down from the top of stilts and pulled them from her pocket while she slept in the Reverend’s church. “You’re in league with him!”

Annabel leaned forward now, and when she spoke her Papa’s lips moved with hers: “You ought never have been, swamp witch. You ought never have come here and shut the world from this place. You say you are protecting people but you are keeping them as your human toys, like a she-devil in a corner of Hell. The angel will drive you from here, madame! Drive you clear away.”

“Take your fingers off’n my dragonfly’s air holes,” she said. She was most worried right now about her dragonfly. For blinking and recollecting conclusions, she saw that she would not be spending long now in the Reverend’s company. But her dragonfly wasn’t with her either, and that caused her to suspect that the poor creature would soon suffocate if she didn’t do something.

The Reverend, to her mild surprise, moved his finger up. Or perhaps it slid. No, she thought, looking up, he meant to. His face twitched and his lips opened.

“You should never have come,” he said. In his own voice — which swamp witch had not heard in many years now. And behind her, the breeze died and slivers of moonlight dissolved in the shadow of the tea-drinking man.

The Reverend stood up then, and Annabel cried: “A miracle!” and the Reverend took a step toward the edge of the porch, where the yellow-suited tea-drinking man stood, smile as large as his eyes were sad.

“O Angel,” Reverend said, his eyes a-jittering with upset snake venom, “I have delivered her!”

“You fool,” said swamp witch. And she stepped behind the Reverend, took hold of the jar that held her dragonfly, and said to him: “Carry me to Albert.”

That was when the tea-drinking man bellowed. At first, she thought he was angry that she was getting away — trying to sneak behind the Reverend, climb upon her still-groggy dragonfly and sneak out through a hole in the porch screen. If that were the case — well, she’d be in for it and she braced herself, holding tight on dragonfly’s back-hair.

But as she swirled up to the rafters of the porch, she saw this was not the case. The tea-drinking man was distracted not by her, but by Reverend Balchy’s sharp, venomous incisors, that had planted themselves in his yellow-wrapped forearm.

Reverend Balchy stopped hollering then, on account of his mouth being full, and Annabel took it up.

“Gotchya, you lyin’ sinner. Think you can use me? Think it? When swamp witch come to town she took away most of me — you’ll just take away the rest! Well fuck yuh! Fuck yuh!”

Dragonfly swung down, close past tea-drinking man’s nose, and swamp witch could see the anger and pain of the Reverend’s ugly mix of rattler venom and mouth bacteria slipping into his veins. There’d be twitching and screaming in a minute — at least there would be if tea-drinking man had normal blood.

Tea-drinking man didn’t seem to, though. He opened his own mouth and looked straight at Annabel:

“What,” he said, “if you spoke up for yourself? What if you walked the world your own girl, flipped—” he grimaced “— flipped your old Papa the bird, and just made your way on your own-some.”

Annabel looked at him. Then she looked up at swamp witch, who was heading for a rip in the screen where last summer there’d been a fist-sized wasp nest.

“I’d never be on my own-some,” Annabel said. “Not so long as she protects me.”

And then swamp witch was gone from there, escaped into the keening night and thanking her stars for the Reverend’s poison-mad inconstancy. The tea-drinking man bellowed once more, and then he was a distant smear of yellow and the stars spun in swamp witch’s eye.

Was it cowardice that drove swamp witch across the rooftops of her town, then up so high she touched the very limits of her realm? Was she just scared of that tea-drinking man? What kind of protector was she for little Annabel, the Reverend, all the rest of them? Maybe when the Reverend was faking out the tea-drinking man, when he said “you should never have come,” he was right. For when she’d come hadn’t she stolen away the Reverend’s faith and the comfort of self-determination from her people and hadn’t she just kept them like she wanted them? Had she ever thought through what it would be if it come to this?

— Why’d you take me there? she said. Were you in league with the Reverend?

Dragonfly didn’t answer.

— Did you know about the Reverend’s double cross?

They flew low through a cloud of gnats, who all clamoured — yes! yes!

— Can I trust no one? swamp witch despaired.

— Hush, said dragonfly. It swung back through the gnats, and swamp witch could see the mists of her home, the Okehole Wetlands, rising from amid the stumps and rushes. Now let’s go home.

Swamp witch thought about how comfortable that would be. And with that, she realized she wasn’t scared of the tea-drinking man. She was scared of something else entirely.

Swamp witch dug her knees into dragonfly’s thorax and yanked at dragonfly’s hair to make a turn.

— Uh uh, she said. After all that, I’m not lettin’ you make any decisions. You know where we got to go.

Dragonfly hummed resentfully, and together they flew down — down toward the business section at the east end of town. There, the smoke and book waited for her, orange flickery light from its sign illuminating a patch in front like a hearth fire.

She reached to the ground by the road, and picked up two pebbles that seemed right, and stuffed them in her jeans, then in she went.

Albert Farmer sat in the front of the store, which was the nice section, all scrubbed and varnished and smelling of fresh pipe tobacco. The not-so-nice section, with the girly magazines and French ticklers and the cigars from Cuba — that was in the back, and this part was nothing but nice. Just some cigarettes and old-fashioned pipes in a display case, and a magazine rack that held nothing to trouble anyone — Time s and People s and Archie comic books, Reader’s Digest s and a lot of magazines about guns and cars and fixing up houses. Albert sat behind the counter, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and sipping at a glass of dark wine he made for himself.

“Sweetness.” He smiled in his way as swamp witch slipped through the mail slot and sat at the counter. “I thought you mightn’t come.”

“The town is under attack,” said swamp witch balefully.

“I know,” said Albert. He pinched off the end of the cigarette, and stepped around the counter. “Come here.”

He looked guilty as hell. But swamp witch stepped over across the floor anyhow. Dragonfly, traitorous insect that it was, flew in back to sniff cigar-leaf and browse pornography.

Swamp witch said: “You know anything more about that?”

Albert smiled. He had an easy smile — teeth too white to have smoked as much as he seemed to, half a dimple on one cheek only. It broke swamp witch’s heart every time she saw it. So when he just stepped up close to her and held the palm of his right hand forward, so it hovered over her left breast, she just let her broken old heart bask in his heat. Her arms fell upon his shoulders, and then crept down his arms, over the shortened sleeves of his summer shirt. O Lord, she thought as he pressed hard against her middle, wasn’t this what a Saturday night was for? Couldn’t it just be forever?