Lee Klein: Jrzdvlz

Another child was soon inside her. She told her husband’s brother about the soldier and what he had said. Daniel Leeds told others and soon word passed through Estellville and beyond. She was jeered for falling for this soldier’s tale, succumbing to a loyal militiaman.

A pale pastor appeared who threatened her, who could not make her dispel her belief in the unseen, who scoffed at the idea of an enormous beast, who when cursed by Mowas informed her that the child she carried would be born a devil. The beast the soldier mentioned, his words would manifest inside her as artful manipulation transformed into terrible fact.

“End the life of this child now,” the pastor said, “and your own life, too, before we do it ourselves.”

My mother’s eldest son, Japhet, was armed with an ax. At her brother-in-law’s house, they related the pastor’s threats. Titan, Daniel’s son, composed a tract against this righteous man who sought to replicate the witch hunts of Salem, who blurred the distinction between church and occult, his belief in both too strong to champion integrity or strength of mind, a purveyor of impossibilities all honest insight must reject.

What mattered most was protection of Mowas, abandoned by Daniel’s brother, manipulated by a crafty soldier of the Crown. Fears he instilled in her mind as he discerned her weaknesses and worked on them, as wicked as any devil. They agreed to unite against iniquities perpetrated by representatives of colonial oppression.

A squadron of the humblest sort guarded Mowas’s home. They surrounded it in a brambly obstruction so any evil seeking entry had to breach what now seemed a fortress. Those who supported the extraction of Mowas Leeds and her unborn child, those loyal to no force beyond their fear, heard of this armed formation and decided to wait and see. Perhaps those around her compound would beat back the devil she delivered, the militia protecting the colony from Mowas Leeds herself.

All remained stable until an October night when a cruel nor’easter forced the men guarding the house to seek shelter, abandoning their post despite imminent entry into the world of the cursed child Mowas carried.

The midwives saw in the candlelight my mother suffering as never before, shrieking so each in attendance remembered the tale of that beast in the pines. They thought the soldier perhaps had only heard a woman giving birth, cursing, even forming sounds that seemed to say Let this thirteenth child be born a devil if I am released from this pain.

Her last newborn had slipped from her with no more than squinted eyes. But now poor Mowas would not survive if this continued. So much breath escaped with each scream it must have emptied her, the atmosphere charged with passion, expressions so contorted they sent currents of cruel air bursting off the walls as the gale hammered the shutters and daggers of rain pierced the roof.

My mother pushed and prayed and cursed and bartered for release from the force inside her. Midwives squeezed her soaking hands as I breeched. My voice joined my mother’s cries. The midwives cleaned me and placed me on my mother’s chest.

Nothing is more traumatic than the first moments of life. Everything ahead. The shock of first light. Pushing, pulling, no control. Heartbeat quickens, hysterical birthing body, wailing far off, muted. Snip of the cord, blurry vision, senses opening, first breaths.

My mother’s expression transformed from relief to horror as my shape shifted: softest skin turned scaly, long leathery wings burst from my shoulders, a tail extended as long and as hairless as a rat’s, my cute little newborn face elongated and nostrils flared as gummy black jowls like a retriever’s formed to imperfectly conceal the sharpest teeth.

My wings spread to shade the room from candlelight. My claws entered the midwife who first touched me. I consumed her, as well as her colleagues, before I feasted on the body that had made me. As sentimental as a rampaging warrior, I flew down the steps toward my brothers and sisters. I devoured every last one until carnage was all there was.

I eyed the chimney and shot into the storm.

Need for comfort insulted by a howl into my newborn face. Reasonable post-partum terror, I now suppose. What was there to do but use claws and consume the entirety of their insides? These Leeds so liquidy fresh. Each heart a still-beating delicacy surrounded by lungs so light on the tongue. My first tastes.

One, two, three, four, I lost count, so many, each smaller than the last, easier to open and devour, and then into the open air, rain-washed clean, leathery wings responding to winds, firing me away, but where?

I soared to see how my body responded, above the clouds, a universe of stars, unbridgeable distance, breathing difficult, flying upward, up. I descended under intermittent flashing to make a life in cool rain and mist. Disordered, seething terrain. Where to stop, if ever, and retreat, away from those I had bloodied, who overburdened my light body in flight. Down to the river, an overhang of rock, a safe place to recover before the first day of a life of sorrow.

Oh why, I wondered. Sense formed as swiftly as my body transformed. The first woman who touched me did not deserve what I did. Those other women, children, brothers, sisters: mistakes I made. Mountainous debt. Regret, regret, my first sensible thought. All I wanted was to make amends for lost control.

But what if mother and midwives had cooed? What if they had placed my snout to a breast while humming a soothing song, caressing the stripe between my curling ram horns? Would I have acted differently if they had acted differently?

I was all reaction: surging blood, primal disorder, unable to compose myself until all else calmed. Beneath an overhang of rock, salty tears from glowing red eyes, the sun risen, I tucked my snout into wings to sleep, but I could not sleep.

In the red-tea river water I saw a reflection—in the center of those glowing eyes, pools of blue, solitary, repentant, sorrowful, the most human part of this animal composite that originated the language I heard in my head, this inaudible internal speech.

I tried to speak but only snorted. A wail muffled by shame. Like an automatic apology, endless lament streamed at once, an unintelligible expression of pain, regret, apology, a narrow blast of hope that penance might restore original innocence.

Two weeks of regret in the wilderness beneath an overhang of rock, subsisting on rabbits and birds, lonely, curious, I elevated over parcels tended by farmers. Easy meals of livestock. In and around Estellville, all forms of humanity tempted me to see if they were brothers and sisters too.

The house where I was born had boards on windows and doors. Limbs had fallen across the entrance in the brambly obstruction, blocking the entry of anyone on foot.

I returned down the chimney. The carnage had been cleared but the floors were still streaked. This would have been my home, the youngest of thirteen, or so I later learned.

Nostrils as sensitive as a bloodhound’s, I took up the scent of those who cleaned the house, sniffed along the path, followed tracks these men had made.

I soared atop an extraordinary oak. Its limbs were thick, each fanning to create a space beneath suited for meditation, the way air hangs in a cathedral. They would reduce it to timber no sooner than Winchester Abbey might be quarried for stones.

In nearby printing quarters, two young men labored, bound by blood and duty, to announce what had happened on the day of the birth of Mowas Leeds’s thirteenth son. They planned to present the impossible as absolute fact. They worked as though all lives depended upon it.

“I cannot see returning to calendars and trifling practicalities after pushing this account into the world,” said Titan.