Free Growth by Jeff Jacobson Page B

the body around until its neck had snapped.
    Under a perfectly curved sliver of a nearly blackened moon, the creatures scuttled into the cool grass and passed easily through the chicken wire. At first glance, they might have been mistaken for fat spiders. Spiders didn’t quite move like these organisms, though. These blobs lurched along unsteadily on mismatched legs. They moved slowly.
    The spider-things gathered around all four of the support posts and swarmed up into the henhouse. As they climbed, the blobs hung unnaturally, as if they weren’t connected to the legs by any kind of bones, either internal or external. They swayed, plump and gray as death, as their too-many legs clumsily worked their way up all of the four-by-ten posts.
    They left nothing but silence behind them.
    As the nearly invisible moon passed through the long night, the spiderlike creatures laboriously crawled up into the henhouse. Dozens. Then hundreds. At first, there were a few mildly startled clucks, a few investigative pecks, as the chickens tasted the new creatures. The insects tasted sour, and the texture of the flesh was even softer than worms. The chickens snapped at the spiders in irritation, but even that slowed and stopped as the spiders overwhelmed the birds.
    Silence descended upon the henhouse.

SUNDAY, JULY 1st

C HAPTER 6
    When the sun rose, Sandy was out in the garage, beating the shit out of a punching bag while an old boom box blasted Ramones tunes.
    She had learned long ago not to think about her job when she was punching and elbowing and kicking and kneeing and head-butting the bag. When she had started out as a deputy, she would come home and try and relieve her stress by gathering a mental image of some asshole she’d encountered on the job, then dump as much aggression and anger as possible on the bag, unleashing all that steam in one forty-five-minute eruption.
    It worked fine, until one night on the job she almost put her fist through some drunk dipshit’s face thanks to her new muscle memory. Since then, while working out, she found it was better to disassociate from the worst images of humanity and focus solely on the movement of muscles as they drove her skeleton.
    She would have preferred to hang the bag outside, but she had to be conscious about how she was viewed in the community. It was bad enough that some of her fellow cops teased her, saying that she must have been picturing the father of her boy when she was attacking the bag. She’d laugh, too, and say, “Sometimes.” For her, though, it was more about taking out her frustration about everything that she couldn’t control, wringing stress out of her body, simple and complicated at the same time.
    Her ex, Kevin’s father, would probably say that she couldn’t make up her mind about a damn thing. The irritating thing was that he was probably right.
    She stepped back a moment, gathering herself for another flurry of punches, and looked back to the door to the house. Kevin liked to get up late on Sundays, so she let him. She used to take him to church, but finally stopped when he asked her about her own beliefs, specifically what she thought happened when somebody died. She thought this might be one of those Hallmark or Lifetime moments where the parent sits down with their child for a life-changing talk, a moment they would both remember forever. She had also decided long ago that honesty was the only policy, with the exception of Santa Claus. She told him, “I took you to church not because I was worried about your immortal soul. I took you because . . . it was expected of me. I thought it was the right thing to do. I never worried about any of the stuff they told us. Life is beyond all of us. It’s up to you to find what you believe.”
    Kevin nodded. Said, “Cool.” And ran off to play with his rocket ship models.
    So much for the Hallmark moment.
    Sunday mornings now, she let him sleep in and play video