Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

But what about you and your older brother?

He’d never conspire with me. He’d throttle me, simple moralist, you know that.

But your uncle knows no morality, drinking partner of that murdered Merkins, maybe he avenged the pints the bartender had failed to stand him?

If we didn’t do this then who did?

A devil?

There is no devil. We are the devil. We did it.

The devil is our dream, our desire.

The devil is December Jukes, full stop. We blame this on her.

But she’s done nothing. She’s done all.

Since her return it has been mayhem. And we have behaved as though possessed.

We are not to blame for any of this. We have done nothing.

We know we’ve done terrible, twice.

For all we know we did what happened last night, too.

But we didn’t.

Who can say what happened?

One thing we can say is December is to blame. No one else is suspected of extraordinary powers. But what now is our desire, our dream?

Umbria whirled in ragged circles around her unmoving center. All now transformed into something less than human. To see behavior devolve complicated my urge, my need, my hope. The more I watched these people, the more I thought that not even the highest power might comprehend their actions. All sense of order and justice and good seemed upended by fear. They planned to marry the girl to the Mullica, but the longer she lived, the more the town did itself in.

Another three bodies were discovered, no marks on their stomachs, no hidden armonicas, not the holders of titles of particular importance. They were anonymous members of the community, seemingly chosen at random, or chosen per dissimilarities, and these three sent the town into open madness.

No one thereafter would let themselves be alone. The weather had warmed and it was wet, the center of town a mud pit that might soon see Umbria’s extinction. All spent their days in plain sight, a joyless celebration intended to advance one’s innocence and achieve protection of the masses. Viruses spread among them, excremental maladies, hacking coughs, unending phlegm spat at the earth. Pregnant mothers held their stomachs and tried to evade pervasive terror. Men on knees clucked along with rags on their heads, hoping to discover a cure for visibility. Some rode piggyback to become superhuman, trying to glimpse a far-off moment of peace. Into trees others climbed and from there were safe but exposed to the sight of civil disorder. Beatings, lashings, flailing of self and other. Hands together, some beseeched heaven for a remedy, only to receive a secular knee to the nuts. Slop was spilled and filth strewn as though one must keep all trash airborne. Bandaged skulls, bloody limbs, the new leaves a testament to the season’s cruelty, hair pulled out in clumps, a wooden leg used to ram the door of a dwelling, no one trying to bring peace. Confusion became so severe on the ground it seemed the sky had opened and from it poured armies of rebellious angels, overgrown mosquitoes, sexually suggestive manta rays imitating harmless orchids, beams of light solidified into glowing silver trumpets, enormous worms, gargantuan crab shells, an egg twice the size of December from which perhaps a sense of order might soon hatch.

I watched human citizens transform more or less into beasts, the evil always concealed in the land now out in the open. In comparison, I was a tender flower, forever repenting as they churned to prove their innocence. And then out of the unhinged and improvised ceremony of sinfulness, a cry emerged for the sacrifice of the town’s most precious and innocent: the attendants surrounding the damned.

They took refuge with December as madness raged. They wanted to run outside and stop it, and yet all along I reveled in it. Every fallen moment of humanity made my state seem more common. Few devoured their family, yes, but look at Umbria: did it matter if the ravaging came at first breath or when everyone was fully developed? What was the benefit of advancing age if all purported good would be tossed into a swirling cesspool of worst urges? I revealed myself then, flying above, through them, among them, but either they were blinded by madness or now I fit right in.

It was Umbria’s last gasp, this proclamation to round up the children who attended December. The chaotic sprawl funneled toward the humble holding shack. The attendant’s parents, most of them, assented, convinced that sacrifice was for the greater good. One mother objected, but they dragged her into the woods.

That no one spotted me, that I didn’t distract from the fury, suggested how far Umbria had fallen. Yet all I did was fly among them, another element of nightmare, hovering above as the door to December’s shack was torn from its frame to better accommodate the men who pulled out their quarry. December, too, they extracted into daylight but let her stand and watch what they did with the girls who pleaded their case through cries and kicking at first, and then once their innocence was presented as the reason for their sacrifice, they screamed their guilt for the first two murders, statements laughed away as the stuff of panicked minds offering whatever preposterous claims might set them down.

Each child was strapped to a beam of oak and held aloft, muttering confessions, calling themselves killers. The town entire trundled en masse, hooting, roaring, like a bloated sidewinder snake, as it made its impassioned way to the river, the color of which now seemed stained by bloodlust more than cedar bark.

I watched December watch them as they went to the river. She followed, no longer the devil’s spawn, now a bystander to sprawling ill will, a madness in comparison to which her father’s seemed manageable, preferable to a civilization’s collapse.

Speakers at the river competed for the common ear, each intoning bombastic judgment upon the girls, sentences the river would execute: In the name of the Lord and the common good, so our safety and commonality might not be slighted, we relegate our purest urchins to propagate their innocence throughout the area so it might return to a state of grace. These children are our saviors and today shall forever be celebrated and their sacrifice be honored as the most recent holy covenant of heaven and earth, and as we cleanse our illness in these waters we shall listen for their final words expressing accomplishment of their duty. The Lord too suffered forsaken, and these children, the lambs of our flock, have struggled, their innocence stirred by aghast countenance and preposterous confessions of crimes they never could have committed. Now as we release them into paradise, we expect to emerge into a state of grace surpassing any achieved since these colonies transformed into country.

I would not intercede. It wasn’t worth the bloodshed, the hysteria. Better to pass into legend and limit myself to a witness role. And so the girls were introduced to their groom—the extra-animated Mullica River—warmed perhaps by their struggling bodies. How quickly the girls’ desires had shifted. The ends were the same (sacrificed), but the means lacked the posturing, the planning, the graceful determination, and of course the respect accorded to those ascending to the pantheon of holy martyrs. It seemed everyone wanted to kill off their most promising aspects, their hope. Like some eugenics program in reverse, they exterminated their privileged and most promising so the rest might rise in emulation of those removed.

The Mullica accepted anything offered it. The girls were no exception. The succession of wavelets on its surface broke open and shifted toward spitting whitewater, like woodchips airborne after the fall of an ax, and then it settled and returned as though nothing had happened. These masses along the banks of the Mullica did not witness everything become orderly as their unrestrained actions gave way to patience and respect and reasonable plans. Voices fell after salutes and hallelujahs, and in that silence they sensed that before paradise were achieved they would need to finish the work they had started. To restore their former state, they first needed to reunite December with her attendants.