David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

At some point after the suit to challenge the Last Will and Testament of the old woman was filed, after discovery had completed and the attorneys had deposed everyone they could think of, one of the beneficiaries of the old woman’s estate, the oldest son, contacted Leah Shepherd personally and proposed that they meet without their attorneys to discuss settling the case “without those lawyers eating up all our money.”

They met for lunch at a chain restaurant that had just opened up on the bypass around Crow Station. Leah felt nervous because she disliked confrontation, but the man was soft-spoken, up until the moment when he, with his fat fingers, began to rub Leah’s shoulders and suggested terms of the possible settlement which shocked Leah to silence. She stood and began to walk out, past a table of elderly women having a birthday party, and the man, a firmly built fifty-year-old with a shaved head who’d made a name for himself with a construction company in Indiana, called her a cunt and a whore, booming, his soft voice gone, across the mostly empty restaurant, and he swore to her that she would be sorry, for being a fucking tease and being a fucking dyke and for stealing from his sainted mother. His scalp flashed red. His floral print shirt was unbuttoned at the top and his white chest hair seemed to glow against the skin of his chest. It looked like cauliflower. He had spit on his lips and followed her out to the parking lot, barking, and he stared at her as she drove away. When she stopped at a stop light several blocks away, she looked in her rearview mirror at the chain restaurant in the distance and could see him still standing outside, a tiny speck, staring at her car.

When Jacob heard the boys on the playground making fun of Leah’s birthmark, Jacob told them that they shouldn’t make fun of it because she could make a creature with long claws that would come snatch them away. The boys laughed at him and ran off, jingling their change, eager for Mountain Dew and Mello Yello, for Jolt and Ale-8-One, but later, when they were at home alone, in bed, listening to the nothing of night, they sought silence through prayer and licked with their sugar sticky lips and jumped when the wind tried the windowpane.

Did Jacob ever wish that creature to come?

So each summer day when expelled from the house by their mother and father, they crept and snuck, cutting through yards and driveways, avoiding any spot that was too open, pretending they were space explorers. Once, cutting through a backyard they found a sundial in the middle of a garden. “What time is it?” Jacob asked.

“I don’t know. The arm thing is broke off. Stand on it.” He clambered up, tipping the time piece and squealing, they scrambled away, never to cut through that yard again.

While his sister slept, he listened to the backdoor open and someone come up the stairs. And then voices, soft, and he slept.

The History of Lycanthropy in Europe and Asia Minor. Occult Practices of the Nazis (with 12 New Illustrations) . The older girls sunned themselves in bikinis by the diving board. They whispered to each other and yelled up to the shirtless boys in the lifeguard chairs. Chariot of the Gods. The Human Body (with 4 Color Fold-Out). Monsters You’ve Never Heard Of. The Encyclopedia of Monsters. Jacob wanted to dive off of the high dive, something Leah was sure he was too young to do, but their grandmother, Mr. Shepherd’s mother, was asleep under her umbrella and the lifeguards were watching the young girls saunter on hot cement, so Leah didn’t tell him not to. She didn’t like the pool, but enjoyed reading the books their grandmother brought her from the library where she worked. The True History of UFOs. Stone Circles of North America and Other Unexplained Wonders. Ghostly Tales of Love and Revenge. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The Severed Hand. The Girl With the Ribbon Around Her Neck and Other Folktales. He climbed, checking to make sure Leah was still watching. He walked to the end of the blue tongue suspended in the empty sky above the blue water. He waved at her. Curses, Hexes and Spells. He wanted her to put aside the books and watch him, Watch watch watch! She turned to look up at him standing, hands on knees, gazing over the edge at the faraway water.

“Leah! Leeaaah!”

A man she did not know walked up to her while she was waiting for her lunch to come and said, “Leah?” She looked up at him as he waited to be invited to sit.

“Why did your mother let them go all day at the pool with no sunscreen? Look at that burn on poor Jacob’s nose.” Mrs. Shepherd cooed over the burn which would eventually become covered with a scab that looked like a lost continent. Mr. Shepherd shrugged. The scab covered the burn and lasted for months and months. In Leah’s memories of her brother, he always had this scab, no matter the year or season.

Mrs. Shepherd tried to lighten Jacob’s hair and bleached it bone white. This is how Leah remembered him as well.

Each morning, Mrs. Shepherd woke her children by turning on the light in the bedroom and singing a hymn. One Christmas, Leah gave her brother a cheap plastic car. She told her mother that she’d saved her allowance for months and had purchased the blue car from the small rack of cheap toys in the back corner of the Convenient across the street from the elementary school one afternoon before walking home. So proud her mother was of such generosity. Those last seven months, Jacob slept with the car every night.

The first Leah could remember: They held her out over the slumping slave wall and she pointed at the cows drinking clouds out of a barrel. Her mother’s legs were made of grass and her stomach out of the dirt and her breasts out of the sun and her hair out of the night. The cows licked the sky from their noses and swayed.

Leah mentioned the memory to her mother who pulled out the picture from the old photo album showing Mrs. Shepherd in green and yellow holding Jacob out to a cow in a field. Her mother smirked and put the picture back.

A gnarl of green branches and crackling leaves. Under it, the ground is bare of grass blades and always damp with mud. Bits of rock and glass found in the gutter by the storm drain. When a thunderstorm washes the crushed, colorful glass and dead leaves through the cement furrows, they flow here.

“Leah, honey, please get your hands out of that mess. You are going to prick your finger and get a blood disease or tetanus. Your jaw will lock up and you will never be able to eat again. The doctor will have to cut a hole in your throat, like one that man has who lives next to your aunt, the one with the robot voice. You will have a hole like that and you will have to eat baby food through it for the rest of your life. We will have to hire a nurse to sponge off the mucus that will grow around the hole and you will have a decaying smell about you for the rest of your life and no one will ever marry you.” No one ever did marry Leah Shepherd, though she was engaged for a time during graduate school to a man named Derrick Green. The failure of their relationship had nothing to do with a blood disease or tetanus. He told a joke at a party, his lips covered in spittle as he gave the punchline and his friends roared in laughter and told him he was terrible and Leah recoiled and he saw the look of disgust on her face and he gave her a look that said, What? and Oh, come on, it’s just a joke. Later, as they drove home from the party, he picked at her about her disapproval of the joke, even though she’d not said anything about it, but he’d been with her for a year and he knew that it hurt her, but he knew she would just let it fester and he wanted to get it out, to go ahead and fight so that they could move beyond it, but she wouldn’t talk to him at all. “You are overreacting,” he said. She didn’t break off the engagement, but he could tell it was over and they eventually just ceased being a couple and it had nothing to do with broken glass.