When Second Night Falls
The terror chose a hand to hold. To grasp in darkness as it walked, now un-alone. No eyes left to see, it gripped the finger of the girl named Natalie. Claws of silver, a ring bound round. No crowns to be cast for the child now disowned.
Here begins the true tale of a farmer’s lass, cursed as she was, from the age of three.
Now this first part I was told, not witness to, being scarcely older than she at twenty-three harvests by the moon, I count. But her mother did tell me…
“Oh she was a scrawny thing, all elbows and kneecaps. Her ribs showed right through the rips in her shift. Lord knows her feet were black and blistered, how long she’d walked we’ll never know,” Mrs. Harvisher said. “That bedeviled ring was around her finger even then, gripping tight.”
“We worried it’d cut her finger off as she grew,” Mr. Harvisher supplied. “Pig fat, duck fat, goat soap, lick spit, we tried it all to slick it off but the damn thing just grew as she did.” He made a sign against evil.
“Has never let her go,” his wife mirrored the warding.
“Thing’s alive, I seen it move,” the weathered farmer said. “Slithered like a snake, one finger to th’ other and back again as she twiddled them.”
“Oh come off, I don’t care about the old farts,” the client interrupted. “Get to the hot girl I get to save!”
“I’m telling it as it happened, the whole way through,” Elliot said, “as I always do.” He shifted, reorganizing his thoughts on the now broken story. Parts already fading, the parents’ faces unraveling as the narrative thread threatened to spin loose.
“But it’s booooring,” the client said. Bit of a foppish dandy, Tevin was, body over-muscled by half. The kind of muscle bought, not earned, like the new story he’d soon tell.
“How you tell it after is entirely up to you,” Elliot said. “But for now I will tell it, and tell it true.”
…I almost gave up.