Read Online Curse the Names by Robert Arellano - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert Arellano
Tags: Horror
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room, no portal. Although the isolation makes days terrible, the nights are still worse: fourteen-hour stretches of pitch darkness beside tepid coals. You forbid burning wood at night when the mother isn’t cooking and everyone has their cobijas. The boy can hear his brother and sister breathing, but they cannot steal glances to console each other. These fleeting glimpses of humanity are all that keep him from slipping into the trap of forgetting that he is not your slave, that the world is not his father’s dominion. This is what you want them to believe. This is how you control them.
You stand up and look at the son. You have to milk the heifer, and you communicate as much by picking up the bucket and shovel before going to the door and putting on your high boots. Her udders are swollen, and soon this will make her sick.
You have to clear the path of snow out the front door. The last snow blocked the slab of micaceous rock that served as the one window. The weight of it caused the roof to collapse in places.
It is like digging out fresh. You use the milk bucket to carry loads of snow to the end of the path where the small barn has a low portal in front of the door.
The son takes turns shoveling.
58 steps to the barn door. The howling wind.
You look at your son, thirteen years old, so he knows what has to be done. Your look says: You take care of the family.
The first to go was the mother, a shrewd choice on the son’s part as she was the only one who might have overcome him. It took a lot of swings as he got used to wielding the heavy ax-head at this angle, when before he brought it over his head to split logs on a charred stump. Her hands were hacked to pieces by the time he delivered the crushing blow to her cranium. Just like splitting wood. And then he went to his sister who waited in the door. Only the baby succeeded in letting out a scream.
You get back and find it. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. The baby rests in the mother’s arms, both of them bloody. Your daughter is there, her fingers strewn on the floor. The stumps that remain on the wrists are black and swollen. One overhead blow had cleaved her skull. You look up at your son, look up at the viga with the knot. Counting from the door, the boy had hanged himself from the third one.
You sit in the room with them. Nobody farting or sniffing. Nobody’s lungs drawing a breath and nobody’s blood coursing through veins. It is finally quiet. You think of the last thing you said. You take care of the family.
Monday, July 8
I stood at the bathroom mirror, my hand throbbing. Kitty called groggily from bed: “Drop Oppie at Salon des Chiens.” It was the first thing she had said to me since we got back from camping, and I understood what she was talking about. Oppie’s fur was still full of burrs and goat heads from the camping trip.
I unloaded my golf bag while Oppie jumped playfully in and out of the trunk. “Down, boy!” When I lay the towel out on the passenger seat of the Spider, he hopped in and curled up like a little gentleman, careful to keep his claws away from the leather back.
I took off Oppie’s house collar, the nice phrase Kitty used to describe the shocker, and put on the travel collar. When I would open the garage door, Oppie would sometimes bolt after a jogger, but with a little jolt from the invisible fence system, he’d pull up short of the sidewalk.
It was a bright summer morning on the Hill. I pulled the Spider out of the garage and made the drive to Trinity. The bank clock flashed 7:45 / 80 °. Jesus!
I put the top down on the Spider with the switch. Hundreds of people were already downtown driving their big cars and walking on wide, clean sidewalks. “Wait here,” I told Oppie, ducking into Starbucks.
The same faces as always greeted me from behind the counter: hard-working people from the valley who got up in the dark and took buses or drove from fifty miles away to prepare the food for the people who live on
You stand up and look at the son. You have to milk the heifer, and you communicate as much by picking up the bucket and shovel before going to the door and putting on your high boots. Her udders are swollen, and soon this will make her sick.
You have to clear the path of snow out the front door. The last snow blocked the slab of micaceous rock that served as the one window. The weight of it caused the roof to collapse in places.
It is like digging out fresh. You use the milk bucket to carry loads of snow to the end of the path where the small barn has a low portal in front of the door.
The son takes turns shoveling.
58 steps to the barn door. The howling wind.
You look at your son, thirteen years old, so he knows what has to be done. Your look says: You take care of the family.
The first to go was the mother, a shrewd choice on the son’s part as she was the only one who might have overcome him. It took a lot of swings as he got used to wielding the heavy ax-head at this angle, when before he brought it over his head to split logs on a charred stump. Her hands were hacked to pieces by the time he delivered the crushing blow to her cranium. Just like splitting wood. And then he went to his sister who waited in the door. Only the baby succeeded in letting out a scream.
You get back and find it. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. The baby rests in the mother’s arms, both of them bloody. Your daughter is there, her fingers strewn on the floor. The stumps that remain on the wrists are black and swollen. One overhead blow had cleaved her skull. You look up at your son, look up at the viga with the knot. Counting from the door, the boy had hanged himself from the third one.
You sit in the room with them. Nobody farting or sniffing. Nobody’s lungs drawing a breath and nobody’s blood coursing through veins. It is finally quiet. You think of the last thing you said. You take care of the family.
Monday, July 8
I stood at the bathroom mirror, my hand throbbing. Kitty called groggily from bed: “Drop Oppie at Salon des Chiens.” It was the first thing she had said to me since we got back from camping, and I understood what she was talking about. Oppie’s fur was still full of burrs and goat heads from the camping trip.
I unloaded my golf bag while Oppie jumped playfully in and out of the trunk. “Down, boy!” When I lay the towel out on the passenger seat of the Spider, he hopped in and curled up like a little gentleman, careful to keep his claws away from the leather back.
I took off Oppie’s house collar, the nice phrase Kitty used to describe the shocker, and put on the travel collar. When I would open the garage door, Oppie would sometimes bolt after a jogger, but with a little jolt from the invisible fence system, he’d pull up short of the sidewalk.
It was a bright summer morning on the Hill. I pulled the Spider out of the garage and made the drive to Trinity. The bank clock flashed 7:45 / 80 °. Jesus!
I put the top down on the Spider with the switch. Hundreds of people were already downtown driving their big cars and walking on wide, clean sidewalks. “Wait here,” I told Oppie, ducking into Starbucks.
The same faces as always greeted me from behind the counter: hard-working people from the valley who got up in the dark and took buses or drove from fifty miles away to prepare the food for the people who live on
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