Free Creatures by Billie Sue Mosiman

CREATURES

    by

    Billie Sue Mosiman

    CREATURES copyright@Billie Sue Mosiman 2012, All Rights Reserved

    Three Short stories about Creatures including THE SCREAM, THE LONELY WALK, and ANGELIQUE.
    A werewolf, a zombie, and a fallen angel--Creatures.

    THE SCREAM

    by

    Billie Sue Mosiman

    Copyright @ Billie Sue Mosiman, 2012

    The wound would not heal.
    Joey leaned the hoe against the barn wall to adjust the bandage covering his right forearm. He frowned, worried at how dirty the strips of torn sheet had become from this day's work in the field. If the wound got infected any worse, what would happen to him?
    Shadows indicating the approach of evening slouched in the corners and rafters of the big open hay-strewn building. It was October, a month when the light failed early. Joey had been attacked in June, during a late hour of darkness as he came from across the field after finishing a long day's tilling.
    They wouldn't believe it had been an animal. They thought he had snagged himself again on the barbed wire fence during crossing from the back field to the front. They called him clumsy and a fool, and no, they would not put in a gate they could ill afford for his convenience. They called him worse names than that, but he tried to forget them because the words hurt too much if he kept them in his mind.
    If Joey had told them it was not the fence, it was not an animal he had ever seen, something less wolf than macabre beast, more human than gorilla, they would have ridiculed him mercilessly. They might even have sent him away. They threatened him often enough for him to believe them.
    Yet no scoring of the flesh from barbed wire had lingered. Instead a throbbing pain and a sulfurous stink came slowly creeping into him that lasted six months now. He tried everything to cure himself. They didn't believe in doctors and would not take him to one. Here at the end of the twentieth century they lived as if they were firmly entrenched in the nineteenth. He had to make do with a poultice of black greasy salve used as medication for the cows and mules. For pain he sneaked an occasional aspirin from his mother's purse. Not that the aspirin helped. The pain kept growing, a tiny incremental bit day by day, until he realized nothing his parents had in the house was going to stop it.
    Still the wound festered, turning blue around the bite marks, now threading red streaks up the inside of his biceps toward his shoulder. It ached all the time. He expected it would kill him--a thought that skittered fretfully in and out of his thoughts a dozen times a day as he tried to get through his work.
    "Did you chop the weeds between your mama's winter greens or have you been daydreaming in the barn for hours?"
    Joey started. In the open doorway stood the menacing silhouette of his father. In his father's hand Joey could make out the leather horse whip, his father's constant companion used for whipping his son, flinging snakes from beneath the house, frightening cows, swatting flies, and any other action meant to control his world.
    "I hoed the garden," he said. And he milked the cows, fed them their hay, saw after the mean-spirited hogs that he hated with a passion, and watered the fall sweet potato crop.
    His father went through the list nevertheless, questioning him closely about the chores. He was not allowed into the house until everything was done.
    Why didn't Evie ever have to help out, Joey wondered sullenly. She was big as he was now, and despite all her weight, just as strong. But, no, Evie was their darling. His sister put on a good show in their presence, while behind their backs she tortured him every chance she got. Called him dowder-head and pinched his earlobes and poured sand in his food. Now there was a monster no one could have imagined.
    "All right, clean up at the pump. Come inside, supper's getting cold."
    His father pivoted and left him alone in the barn with the dark coming on and the fears of his wound nagging for attention. Joey