It Will Come Back

Something was out there, in the murky swamp, and it was eating her food. It started with the trash can out back being overturned. Then the pies and breads she set on the windowsill to cool started going missing. She didn’t care much about whatever was out there, after all the problem was simple enough to solve. She started letting things cool on the kitchen counter, both to deter whatever was out there and to save some money, since she couldn’t afford to make daily trips to the nearest town’s grocery and keep up with her aging father’s abundant medical bills. He was bedridden now, iller than she’d ever seen him.

The tray of cookies she’d set on the counter were cool now anyway, and he’d asked an hour ago to taste her mother’s famous cookie recipe again ‘for one last time’. She’d called him a ridiculous old man, then. Told him he had a few more years left in him, which made him laugh between his near-constant coughing fits. But she hadn’t heard him cough since she started making cookies.

She went into the living room where they both slept to check on him. He was still, cold and quiet. She listened to his chest for a second. Silent. No rattling, but no breaths came out of him at all. He’d finally passed on. A rush of tears fell out of her eyes, and she sobbed over him for what felt like hours.

She knew in the back of her head that she couldn’t do anything about his body. She’d ran out of money to buy any gas for the truck, and it had only barely gotten her home. The truck was as dead as the corpse on the couch, so there was no way she could get him to the funeral home the next couple of towns over.

She waited to confront the issue for a long time, maybe longer than she should’ve, half-pretending that at some point he’d get up again, and start griping to her about the weather. But he never did. She was truly alone now, and running out of food in the cupboard. Her father was always the one who picked out plants they could eat from the swamp, but he’d never really taught it to her.

Despite imminent starvation, she started to leave things on the windowsill again. They’d disappear every night, like clockwork. At first she left out whatever she baked, then whatever snack they had in the cabinet, then anything edible she could find. Sometimes, if she felt whimsical or silly, she’d pretend that there was a friendly man who lived out there, who’d take her food but keep her company in return for it. Maybe they’d become friends one night or another.

But soon, whatever was out there got impatient. Angry about being given less than before, or maybe it just got a whiff of her father’s body rotting in the summer heat. It began to scratch at the front door, every single night without fail, howling and howling the most mournful and bone-chilling howl that she’d ever heard.

She knew it couldn’t be any man. The silhouette in the door, illuminated by candlelight, was bulbous and shifting. It crawled on many legs, and scratched with many arms. Many times she saw a hand or even a foot press on the fragile plastic front door, denting and crackling the plastic under their force.

It was only a matter of waiting until one hot and humid night, while she sat by her father’s dead body, lit in the light of the last flickering tealight she could find, the door broke. It shattered into a million pieces, and the plastic shards crackled under the immense weight of whatever was crawling into her house.

It had a bulbous belly that hung heavy underneath it as it crawled. Its many limbs were all human, legs and arms stuck out of its torso seemingly at random. It was pale, and had no hair on it to speak of. Algae and swamp water and mud dripped off of its lumbering frame, sticks and leaves and bones fell from between the many folds in its skin. Its head was bald, blue veins standing out against the shiny skin of its forehead and black eyes set within deep eye sockets. And worst of all, worse than the algae coating its body and worse than the deep black unseeing eyes, worse than the many limbs, was the smile. It smiled wide, sharp thin teeth white as the moon.

It crawled into her house. It crawled, with no intention of turning back to go back into whatever sinful part of the swamp had birthed it. It crawled over, past her, and to her father’s body. It sunk those peg teeth into his decaying, soft flesh. And it ate. It gorged itself on her father’s corpse, leaving behind nothing but bones and whatever fluid it couldn’t slurp into its mouth. Then it turned its dead eyed gaze to her.

She trembled, frozen in place, expecting at any minute to feel those pegs to sink into her flesh.

But instead, it nuzzled its hairless head into her chest. It yawned, satisfied with its meal, and sunk its large head into her lap. She was frozen by its sated smile as the final tealight flickered out, leaving her in the complete darkness of the new moon.

As she trembled, praying for it to leave and hoping it wouldn’t be hungry again anytime soon, she couldn’t help but remember what her father used to say to her, when she was in town for a carnival or a performance and she showed mercy to the dogs of the street;

Darling, don’t feed something that can beg.

Because it will come back