Angelmaker nosleep

Trigger Warning

My meemaw was a backwoods abortionist. Women in every walk of life came to her. Mostly it was the poor ones, though. Scared girls too young to deal. Married women who already had too many mouths to feed. Grandmothers just a year or two shy of menopause who thought birth control was unnecessary.

Growing up, I always knew people didn’t like my grandmother. But I never knew why. Meemaw wasn’t mean, she wasn’t bitter or cruel. But she made the air in the room tense when she walked into it. Even with my own mother, her daughter. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I learned I almost had a baby brother, right before mama up and left her alcoholic wife-beater of an ex husband.

I only heard the word angelmaker when it fell from my mama’s lips.

“You see, darlin’,” she said as she tapped an ash into the clay dish I’d made in second grade, “folks ‘round the old town weren’t big thinkers. They needed a term they could wrap their heads around. No ‘pro choice’ or ‘pro life.’ People understood angels. If it was an angel, it was in God’s hands. And out of theirs. You follow?”

It was hard to swallow past the lump in my throat. My mom had dropped the cement-heavy revelation on me without hesitation, glad to spread the burden around.

I don’t judge meemaw for what she did. I’m what my daddy would’ve called a “big-city liberal hen.” I understand women have needs that must be attended to, and I understand that the proper training doesn’t magically appear out of thin air. It was just a shock to have to whole thing put into perspective. Like being told the rock you always hopped over out of some unnamed fear was actually a skull. Something was always off about that old town and the people in it. I guess that was why my mama felt she had to leave. One two many boys joking about “makin’ angels in the backseat” will do that to a person, I guess. I don’t blame her for leaving meemaw behind.

But now I wanted to visit the old town again. Mama warned me it wouldn’t be the same, I'd look at it with new eyes and wreck any nostalgia I'd had about the place. But I had to go, you understand. I had to see it with new eyes. It was worth remembering as it really was, not as a child’s thin understanding of the world.

The town I grew up in is barely a town. It probably won’t even exist for much longer. With the death of factory jobs and all the young folks (like me) moving off to the cities, it’ll drain like pus from a wound and all that’ll be left is the rusted scar of the tin shacks.

I turned off the highway onto a road that became a path that became two wheel ruts in the long grass. I must admit to a childish sense of glee as the trees grew thicker together and I started seeing familiar landmarks. As a kid, you don’t care about economic downturn or urban decay. All you can see are trees for climbing, old buildings to explore. I really had loved the old town, despite everything.

Few people were outside when I drove through. That number dropped as I went on. There’s a kind of sixth sense among small-towners, the presence of an outsider disturbs an invisible web. I parked at the old clapboard library and got out to stretch my legs.

“Alice? Land sakes, is that Alma’s granddaughter I spy?”

A woman had come around the side of the library. The first and only person in town to approach me. Her hair, pulled straight back from her forehead, was grizzled and grey. Her skin was tanned and creased like leather. Her teeth when she grinned were straight, white, and square like a horse’s. But her eyes, they were what got me. The lightest blue I'd ever seen, surrounded by dark rings. They weren’t eyes that ever let you feel at ease. You could feel them when your back was turned. And though she never once stopped smiling when I was with her, I didn’t feel they were friendly.

“How do,” I said politely, holding my hand out to shake.

The woman guffawed and yanked me into a hug instead. She was surprisingly strong.

“ThankyoumylordGodandJesusforsendingmethischildletblessingfalluntothisvesseloncemore,” she whispered, so quickly I could barely catch it.

The woman abruptly thrust me away from her to study me, feeling the muscles of my arm and back with hands big as bear paws

“Good heavens, girl, what kinda work you been up to in that big city?” The grin never left her face. “‘Fraid to spoil that pretty manicure?”

I laughed politely and pulled away. “No, I've got an office job. Sorry, but the last time I saw you I was probably real little. So I don’t…” I hoped she’d take the hint.

The woman rolled her piercing eyes upward and back again, clapping my shoulders. “So you don’t remember poor old Leah? Such a shame, your meemaw and I being so close and all. We did the work together, child.”

“The work?”

Leah nodded. “The work. The work always need be done. The world needs angels, my lamb.”

I was shocked she’d be so open and brazen about it, especially here in the heart of town. “Well, I've only just learned about meemaw’s work. I was hoping to...I don’t know, get a feel for how it was for her. Understand her better.”

Leah was nodded, mouthing things up to the sky. “If you’re here to learn child, I'm here to teach. Don’t know how Alma let you get away all these years, but you’ll stick well enough.”

I had no intention of sticking, none at all, but as long as she thought I was on her side I was probably safe. I had told my mother and several friends where I was going, and what measures to take if I didn’t come back within a day.

Leah made me walk with her. “No roads where we’re going, child. Only paths.” Her hand in mine was surprisingly tough and reminded me of a work glove. I noticed she wore no shoes. Her toenails were unkempt and some of them deformed from fungus.

The shacks from my childhood had changed little since I'd left. A random satellite dish here or there, the absence of tarpaper, the occasional truck were the few signs of progress. Leah’s feet cut a swath through the grass as she towed me along, offering a nonstop stream of chatter.

“Yessir, your meemaw was the best around. Better’n me in a lotta ways. But she limited herself, you unnerstan’. Ain’t just little ones that need angel-makin’. Specially not these days. I tell you, there’ll always be need for an angelmaker, as long as there’s a man living on God’s green earth.”

She towed me to a rundown little shack. I didn't realize there was a funeral going on until we walked in the front door and came face to face with a fence of terrified stares.

They weren’t all dressed in black, but they were every one of them mourners. They looked at Leah like chickens eyeing the dog just outside the coop. None of them looked at me at all.

Leah grinned and pushed past them. “Old Hep will be in the kitchen. Here y’go.”

An old man was laid out on a table made out of fiberboard laid over two sawhorses. He was still fully dressed and someone had put a white towel over his face. His hands were crossed on his breast and bound with twine.

Leah hobbled around his head. “You see, child, it’s not just the lost little lambs that He calls home.”

I watched her take a large pearl pin from her hair, not comprehending the way she flexed his fingers and wrists until I noticed the towel fluttering with breath—

Before I could even gasp, she plunged the pin rapid-fire in several different places. The old man jerked and was still.

I went numb from shock. Leah grinned with those white teeth.

“You’ll learn, child. I aim to teach you. Got to callus that soul.”

I wanted to leave. I wanted to turn and go. But Leah took my wrist and pulled and she was so much stronger than me that I found my own clumsy feet walking after her.

It smelled so fresh and green outside after that kitchen I felt sick. I recognized the difference between Leah and my meemaw now. They had treated meemaw like a necessary evil. They treated Leah like an unavoidable catastrophe. Full-grown men carrying farm tools turned their gaze aside when we passed. A girl driving goats down the path went ashen as we approached, pressing herself against a nearby fence and holding her breath as we passed.

“Widow Murray’s got another little one,” Leah said in a conversational tone as she pulled me along, “weak lungs. Not fit for this vale of tears.”

My wrist was numb. I couldn’t pull it out of her grasp.

The house we approached had a porch that rotted so the only way up to the front door was a board ramp. A front window was broken and repaired with plastic wrap. An older woman was shelling peas into an enamel bowl when we walked up. She reddened and became more invested in that bowl, shelling peas with a ferocity they didn’t earn. Leah didn’t call out, didn’t acknowledge her at all. Just pulled me up that shaky, unsecured board ramp and into the house.

A young woman sat on a chair in the front room. She’d been crying. She still sniffled as we walked past, eyes glued to the floor.

“Now just you come along,” Leah said almost soothingly, “I'll learn you how to make an angel.”

She pulled me through a swinging door into a back room. There was a pump and a bathtub that served as a sink. An old seventies refrigerator. A crib.

Leah let go of me. She walked toward the crib, pulling that long pearl pin out of her hair. So long and sharp it was practically a spear.

I could feel myself hyperventilating as she bent over the crib. I can't, I can’t, I can’t—

I screamed and clapped my hands over my ears, turning away. I screamed and screamed and screamed. I wanted to cry, but my eyes would only oblige me one or two tears.

It was a long time before I turned back.

Leah had her back to me. She rocked a bundle in her arms. She’d been talking this whole time.

“...and when the fallen laid down with the women of the earth, they begat the Nephilim,” she said as she turned so that I could see the little boy in her arms, translucent lids closed permanently.

I shook. “Put him down. You’re crazy. You’re crazy and I hate you.”

Leah just kept talking, and her voice was just so steady and strong it overwhelmed mine. “And those Nephilim continued to lay with women, and begat the Elioud. And we are all part Elioud, Alice, all a little bit angel. All it takes is a little bit of work to make that come out.”

The infant stirred. I gaped at its pale skin, spotted with red where she’d plunged the pin.

Its eyes rolled back, slowly. The whites of the eyes were so bloodshot they were almost black. But the irises, they were the same bright blue as Leah’s, that piercing, pitiless blue.

The angel took a breath.

I think I screamed then. I know the baby did. I saw its mouth open. There was a sound I felt beyond my ears. It buzzed in my skull and through my bones. Like a million angry ants marching through me. Like a cold wind tearing through me. Like a hot flame licking me into black bone.

I ran then. I was having bright spots flash before my eyes, so I missed a step on the board ramp and turned my ankle. The woman shelling peas stood up, looking not at me but at the house. I ran past her.

We had gone down a maze of paths on our way to the house. But I had grown up in this town, and was able to find my way back to the library. My car was still where I'd left it, even though I'd neglected to lock it. I think I floored it backwards all the way back to the interstate. My heart was hammering. All I could see in my mind was that child’s face, his eyes.

I didn’t tell my mom what I'd seen. Maybe she’d believe me. But I don’t want her to. I don’t want it to have happened at all. I want to go back to a world where my meemaw was just a woman nobody liked and not a maker of those...things.

But I can’t.

And I know that someday, somewhere, I'll see those eyes again. Someday, at the end of the world, I’ll see them.

Submitted February 04, 2017 at 03:04AM by demons_dance_alone http://ift.tt/2kaVOyZ nosleep