Willing To Pay
Listen (8 min) | Short Story | Horror/Dark Literary Fiction | Disturbing imagery
Leah Hudson stank of desperation. That’s what made her such fun.
Leah’s mother had run off years ago, and every man, woman, and child in town knew Mr. Hudson took it out on his daughter.
No one raised an objection. Mr. Hudson was a man with enough money that folk called him comfortable. And he was a deacon of the church. If the price of avoiding embarrassing parish meetings was Leah Hudson’s hide, the grown-ups were willing to pay.
The girls in Leah’s class at school enjoyed the benefits of their parents’ reticence. She passed their notes, gave them as much of her jelly sandwich lunches as they desired, and, when they bid her, bore the secrets of her soul. They, in turn, allowed her to hover in their orbit.
When, on a Tuesday morning in September, she sunk into her desk, red-eyed, Audrey Brown and the other girls demanded an explanation. “We’ll know if you’re lying,” Audrey said, and they couldn’t be friends anymore if Leah was keeping secrets.
Leah whimpered to them the length and breadth of her story.
After school, Audrey and the others followed Leah home to witness the truth of her tale. When they were all inside the barn, Leah shut the door.
Giggling bubbled from the pack of girls pressing together at the center of the floor, their eyes darting up and around.
Audrey broke from the bundle, striding to Leah, hands on hips. “Come on, where is it?”
Leah twisted her own thumb, eyes brimming with tears, checking the faces of the others and forcing her own into a broken-mirror grin. She pointed to the hay feeder.
The girls shuffled in that direction, kicking up a stale cloud of dust and manure. Throats gurgled and fingers crimped. Sarah Worth dug in behind Emily Michaels’ shoulder, and Charity Gillis screamed like a cat, jabbing them both in the ribs.
At the edge of the feeder, the group held its breath.
Audrey pulled Leah forward. “Go on.”
Leah’s voice cracked, and she had to try again. “My daddy’ll be mad if he finds out.”
Audrey smiled, draping her arm over the girl’s shoulders. “Don’t worry about that, I won’t tell. None of us will.”
Leah stared at the feeder, working her jaw, bottom lip protruding.
Audrey pushed her towards the trough.
Raising her hands like a Halloween witch over a cauldron, Leah commenced, plucking one brittle straw at a time, placing them right and left of the hole being excavated.
A stink wormed its way up Audrey’s nostrils and wrapped her tongue in a sour coating.
The girls huddled and peered in.
Nested in the hay lay the dead body of a gray and black striped cat. Pregnant. Mouth half open in a crippled roar. Rib cage crushed and sealed with a tire mark.
Leah snorted back tears. “My daddy threw her on the trash heap, but I’m going to bury her. I’ve got a white pillowcase that’ll do for a shroud.”
Audrey knew they could do better than that.
On her way to Leah’s house, Audrey had caught sight of Irma Boyd hanging out her laundry. Audrey’s mama never let her mention the welts on Mrs. Boyd’s arms, but she’d heard her parents discussing the woman when they thought Audrey couldn’t hear.
“That husband of hers,” her mama would say, “he’d drive any woman to the asylum.”
Her daddy’s answer was always the same. “A woman doesn’t have any self-respect, that’s the kinda man she gets.”
She wasn’t sure what all of that meant, but she knew the Boyds weren’t good people, and the word no wasn’t in Leah’s vocabulary.
Audrey grinned, shaking her head and linking her arm in Leah’s. “I’ve got a better idea.”
The five of them hid, spying from behind the Boyd shed, Leah cradling the body of her cat.
Mrs. Boyd stood bent to the clothesline. Untangling a faded, threadbare, blue striped sheet, she spread it across the rope, snatching clothespins from her mouth and pressing them in place. Basket emptied, she turned and tromped up the porch stairs, disappearing into the house.
Audrey grabbed Leah’s sleeve. “Alright, she’s inside, get going.”
Leah’s eyes filled with their usual pools, but her feet remained planted.
Audrey smacked Leah’s shoulder with the back of her hand.
Leah jumped. She gazed down at the animal in her arms and around at the group.
Audrey sighed. “Come on, quick, before she gets back.”
Shoving Leah out from behind the shed, the other girls hissed encouragement.
She plodded, as through knee-high mud, to the clothesline. Gaining her destination, she glanced up, examining the rope.
A cloth bag full of clothespins dangled in front of her.
Stretching on tiptoes, the girl clasped the cat’s tail against the line, its fetid, blood-and-hay-covered corpse stiff and rocking in the wind.
She grasped at the clothespins, and her grip weakened. The animal thudded to the ground.
Audrey and the others tittered behind their hands, saving the full force of their mirth for the grand finale.
Leah resumed her efforts. One clothespin after another was drawn as she affixed the body, tail first, to the line.
On the fourth pin’s fastening, Mrs. Boyd emerged with a basket full of wet laundry. The woman spotted Leah and gasped. Her bundle fell, bouncing off the steps, shirts spilling into the dirt.
Audrey and her friends burst, quaking with jelly-sandwich-flavored laughter that threatened to knock the shed down.
And Leah—poor, stupid Leah—was frozen in place, gawking at Mrs. Boyd.
Mrs. Boyd stared back at her. Didn’t fuss over her laundry or shout. She looked, as Audrey’s mama would say, like someone had just walked over her grave.
Audrey had never marked the likeness in bearing between Leah and Mrs. Boyd: the same droop of the shoulders—Mrs. Boyd’s was deeper—and the same flinching tuck of the mouth in the left-hand corner. They shared no features, but the whole scene put her in mind of a circus funhouse mirror.
Charity Gillis cupped her hands around her mouth and howled another cat scream.
The spell broken, Leah turned and fled, abandoning the body.
The girls chased after her, squealing and shrieking, leaving Mrs. Boyd to clean up.
END
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Thanks for restacking, @Travis Knight. It’s appreciated.
love it...the cruelty of kids knows no bounds!