Sat Jan 12, 2013 7:46 pm
It was as if his fingers had been made out of warm wax. For years they had been stretched from their natural shape into long, fleshy, stalactite-like things, longer than most men's forearms. For as unable as they were to open a doorknob, they could -- with happiness and earnest -- kill a man.
On the first night he learned how to draw three marks, he killed a boar. Its horns had been gnawed down to their hollowed nubs when he was done, sucked free of their marrow.
On the second night, he killed a dairy cow on a farmer's land. He had scooped away the red, red snow, and had called ferns out of its hot corpse. All it took were three specific marks. The husk of its deflated body was a fine garden-bed.
Those same hands dragged him out of the muddy shore of Silver Lake, where he had buried himself years before. There was dry poison in his guts and moss lining his brow. The caustic water had drenched his skin, had eaten his hair and had worked like a chisel at his mind. It left pieces, but not the whole; it left some thoughts, some memories he could not piece together into cohesive streams. Just messy chunks. Half-Phlynn parts. He threw up mud into the cattails.
On the third night, he killed a doe because it did not have fierce antlers the way he thought a deer must.
On the fourth night, he knew he had done wrong, so on the shore of Silver Lake, near the place where he had dragged his half-rotten boything-body out of the sucking mud and woody clay months before, he broke his fingers. Three of them. One for each animal. He chewed the knuckles with his broken teeth until oily blood splashed in his mouth and the bones crumbled like cornmeal on his tongue. When the pain was too much, he screamed and laughed into the muddy snow.
It had all been a smattering of forgetful things -- what had come of those he knew, those he loved, those he cherished and protected? -- until the wolf-wearer had come to him as he cried over the stem of a broken poppy. The wolf-wearer showed him how it could live again. Suddenly, the old memories did not hurt his skull and the flower was all that mattered.
He scrambled to the edge of Silver Lake, dragging his severed fingers in his free hand, trailing black blood as he crawled. He dug a pit for each finger, crammed them in with his palm, burying them like shallow treasures. Only when they were good and buried did he use his thumb to molest the sanctity of the shoreside land with sweeping marks, things like math, specific in the way he drew three jagged lines over each little finger-grave.
"C-...Come see what I am making, king Bug," the boy whispered, as if the words might carry without being screamed. He squatted over the little pits, sucking his muddy thumb.
Bony white fingers started sprouting amid the cattails of Silver Lake, unfurling from the damp soil like sun-hungry plants.