Original fiction by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff & Mikal Trimm
Copyright (c) 2007 / May not be reproduced without permission

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The first blister popped, bled.

The soil lay rock-like beneath the heavy frost, and his shovel worked scarcely better than a child’s toy. Still he kept digging, pausing only when his hands grew too cold to grip the handle, or when a fit of coughing took him, doubling him over to spit thickly on the ground.

His foot brushed against the gunnysack lying next to him, producing a muffled thud. Take a breath, man — don’t kill yourself in the doing.

He sat down on the small pile of fresh-dug dirt, pulling the sack closer to him. Gentle, now, his trembling hands doing their best to forget the cold, forget the strain of digging.

Who should I call? Mother or Grandmam?

The question still haunted him. Mother, her love a guidepost for her son, or the elder, the Grand — the sum of wisdom, the fount of arcane knowledge?

He stroked the outlines of their skulls through the sack. They huddled against each other in the darkness, chattering their secrets where he could not hear them.

He could not allow them their gossipy silence. He needed answers. He needed help.
He slipped a hand inside the bag’s cloth mouth, feeling cold bone and warm memories pressing up against his fingers.

Mother? He paused, listening to her soft murmur for a moment. Her voice was loving still, but tinged with sadness. Bitterness.

No. Love was the catalyst that sparked all this, but it had failed him before. And Maggie, more than anyone, would know how little love mattered in the final accounting.

He smoothed one fingertip down the length of a delicate cheekbone, then moved to stroke the other skull more harshly.

Grandmam, then. Wisdom, bleak though it might sometimes be, would have to serve.

He pulled Grandmam’s skull from the shadow of the cloth, careful to keep his fingers away from her mouth. She tended to bite when disturbed, and her old yellowed teeth could still take a finger from the unwary. Her fleshless head shone brighter than the snow at his feet. It bathed in the moonlight, sucking in the feeble rays so that everything around it fell more deeply into shadow.

The jawbone creaked in its sockets, yawning and closing with a series of arid sighs and dust-dry clicks. It spoke, finally, in a voice woven from wind and grave mold: “Ya’d have another poor soul at yar call then, Seamus? Have yar mither and I not taught ya enough?”

“Why do you blather at me so, old witch? You taught me the Arts, or have you forgotten?” Seamus held the skull at eye-level, his fingers clutching the hollows of her cheekbones.

Grandmam’s voice spat forth in gusts. “Dead-talkin’. A tool, boy, and all you seem to remember, aye!”

“Dead-talking! And no! Not all I remember.” He calmed himself, picturing Grandmam as she once was — patient and oh so wise. These days the patience was gone, and her tongue was as sharp as her teeth. “I remember you told me to always keep myself in the company of women. You said it would save me from the evil that men-folk fall into. I’ve kept to that, haven’t I? One way or another?”

The skull wheezed out a laugh, or maybe Grandmam cried — hard to tell. “Laddy mine, ya mastered so much, yet learnt so little.”

Seamus scowled. “Just be ready to call her. You know your business. Leave me to mine.”

It was even harder digging with Grandmam’s casual insults and constant nagging, but he kept at it until Maggie’s bones were exposed, still clothed in their bright, tattered wrappings. He paused a moment, looking down at the remains of the woman he’d loved.

The woman he’d lost, despite the strength of that love. First to another man, or so the rumors went, and then to the consumption.

He needed — like he needed air, water, love itself — to know if she’d loved him at the end. And, whether she had or not, he still ached for the sound of her voice, the feel of her breath against his cheek. . . .

“A pretty slave she’ll make, ya useless boy.” Grandmam’s voice cut through his thoughts, rising from where he’d placed her skull on an old stump. “And will that make ya happy, luggin’ her round like th’ other women ya say ya care for?”

Seamus stared down into the grave, shaking from more than just the frost-tinged air. She’d been pretty once, true, but not now, surely not now. A year in the selfish grip of the earth had done its work. Whatever had once been Maggie fed
the soil, leaving only the clever bones behind.

And was she his to take? Not if any truth hid in the whispered gossip of others. What would her voice sound like, years from now? Bitter? As bitingly taunting as Grandmam’s?

He shook his head, seeing Maggie’s beautiful face overlaid against her naked skull, hearing her gentle, carefree laughter in his memory. His guts twisting with a fierce cramp, he staggered back to the sack, taking his mother’s skull and placing it, with a soft kiss, beside that of his wife.

“Just call her, Grandmam. Wake her.” Then, as the old woman’s scorn grew louder and more strident, “Tell her I’m sorry.” He clenched his fists painfully hard on the shovel’s handle. Permanence. This called for permanence, or he’d likely be back someday, when the longing grew too great. “Tell her . . . she’s free.”

Seamus waited a moment for the message to be passed on, then brought the flat of the shovel down hard on the two skulls. His mother’s fractured swiftly, joyously, but Maggie’s took a bit more work.

Behind him, Grandmam cackled, her heckling tone almost completely unchanged. “So th’ fool boy’s learned! Took long enough. Thought ya’d never listen t’ me. We women know, we teach, we — ”

He turned, a smile forming on his cold, weary face as he raised the shovel high. Maybe wisdom, like virtue, could be its own reward.

Grandmam’s laughter echoed through the night, even after the blade came down.

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Marcie Lynn Tentchoff is an Aurora Award winning poet and writer from the west coast of Canada, Her work has appeared in such magazines as On Spec, Dreams and Nightmares, and Illumen, as well as in various anthologies and online publications. Mikal Trimm has sold a plethora of stories and poems to various markets in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. He has recent or upcoming work in Polyphony 6, Postscripts, Black Gate, Electric Velocipede, and Interfictions, to name a few.