The Mercy Rock

t/w: themes of murder, violence

Rain rejects the scorched soil below, desperately reaching toward the merciless clouds above. I wonder what those unfortunate droplets did to be exiled from the barracks. Perhaps they were deserters, parachuting down with silent grace, like those dancer girls in the pictures.  Did they fall upon the abrasive farmland and have second thoughts? Could they ever find their way back to the heavens?

Ma would have me lammed if she knew I was thinking bad again, but the rain will cheer her up.

A clear moat surrounds the calf, slithering and circling its prey. Blood marbles the surface.

The moat spreads and becomes a maroon puddle, creating a portal where my vanity may still exist.

Pa smashed all the mirrors for little Liza. There weren’t many in the barn to begin with, but that last Christmas before the war, he took to them with the mercy rock. I think it was an act of kindness in his eyes — his own silent gift to Liza. Her first and last, unless you count the Black-Jacks Charlie sent home from Brighton during his bridal tour last year. I discovered them before Ma and hid them in my apron for days. When I finally showed Liza our contraband, my nervous heat had softened the sugar just enough for her stale jaw.

A single liquorice remains beneath our bed, a tantalizing black secret between us sisters. Sometimes I feel guilty, but I doubt she could chew one now. It would be cruel to tell her.

“I still hear wailing. Ruth. You clean that up.”

The liquorice mirage dances off my tongue and slides across the soil to inspect the calf. Frail clouds escape wet nostrils, dispersing into the frigid summer air. Perhaps it’s the pathetic sight of the bloodied calf, or the way the clouds disperse so freely… somehow, the scene mocks me. The clouds continue their dance. They rise up, beyond the stone walls of the farm, sadistically waving down at me.

I reach for the mercy rock, stained a sweet pink from use. I plunge it down toward the water, careful not to break eye contact with the pretty girl smiling at me in the puddle.

One, two, three, four.

The clouds don’t dare dance now.

Five, six, seven.

The pretty girl disappears, leaving dainty shards of skull and soft crimson pulp in her place.

…

“If you’d been gentle, there might’a been something left of it.”

“You told me to clean it up, Ma.”

“Go sew that mouth shut before I tell ya brother.” Silly Ma.

Charlie moved farther than an automobile could take him — or us. He’s down near the beach somewhere with a pretty girl and a little house. He fled from Pa and conscription, from Ma and her dead calves, and he sends me Black-Jacks and ribbon.

Ma doesn’t say this. She speaks of our Charlie as Pa spoke of God. Some kind, powerful man that will one day come down and save us. I think that God is a lie, a tale men like Pa tell to scare us. But I don’t tell Ma or Liza this.

“We’ll get a healthy one next time. That Labour man… Mac…” Coy hesitation betrays her. “He’ll be good to us farms.”

And her political rant is over before it could begin. Silly Ma.

There’s a shallow pride in her today, messily buried somewhere within those words.

This awakens a strange frustration. I hate when she tries to be clever. Clever was for Charlie, and politics was for Pa. Ma and I would jump and fight for scraps of their meaty conversations.

Ma shouldn’t pretend to know about politics or be clever. Ma can’t even keep a calf alive.

I don’t believe in God, but I think Ma might be cursed.

The grotesque underbelly of the farm manifests within her womb. She says so herself. Ma says it’s where we rotted before we eventually escaped. “You were my lesson,” she once said to me and Charlie. “Eliza is my punishment.”

Like the dead calf, Liza emerged from Ma weak, mute, and mangled. Like the dead calf, Ma left me to do the work. My divine duty.

My room is a converted skin shed on the bottom floor. It’s not like my old bedroom from before the Great War, not in the slightest. Here — if you’re quiet, that is — you can hear the gentle cries of the pigs from across the farm. I moved in to help Liza when I realized she couldn’t lift her head. One supper, she failed to meet Pa’s eyes. Strong eyes cracked by years of labour.

I knew then that the privilege of a single room had somehow escaped beyond the farm walls, never to be seen again. Liza’s affliction has a way of infecting those around her, yet still my sister lives in a blissful purgatory.

See, Ma doesn’t think she really knows what’s going on in our world. Says that when Charlie comes back to pull the crops and birth the calves and do the proper jobs, then maybe we could put her in an institution.

I have this image in my head of some helpless crip ruling over a great, white house with pillars. I picture Liza dictating an army of nurses in those silly red and white hats. I see Buckingham Palace, as it is in the postcards, now filled with hopeless little Lizas. I think it's quite a funny picture, but it awakens the same irritation as Ma’s pride.

It may exist within the farm, but it mustn’t escape our solid stone walls.

I am angry now, and I want to see Liza.

…

My sister’s pale face is lit by a singular lamp. A familiar, toxic aroma beckons me inside as kerosene shadows flail across the wall like possessed ballerinas. The farm whispers through the window, taunting Liza and her damp, soiled sheets.

“I got you a present. Take it before Ma sees.”

I want Liza to admire my work, presenting the severed limb with pride reserved only for special occasions. Careful not to drop fresh blood on the wool, I wrap Liza’s hand around the flesh. Her fingers remind me of last year’s failed crops: five wilted stems. For a moment, I think I see gratitude, but it quickly evaporates with the kerosene, and she returns to her natural state of terror.

She’ll be upset that I had to kill the calf. She wanted to call it Lily — after Charlie’s new bride.

I tell her that it did not suffer, that the poor thing came out ugly and as mangled as her. I tell her not to worry. It was very fast because I used the mercy rock. I tell her to eat what she can Ma comes and retrieves the lamp.

She tells me nothing.

But when our eyes meet again — an order has never been as clear.

I take Liza outside to meet the girl in the puddle. I make the pretty girl promise to keep me company.

The rock feels lighter now. The puddle becomes a stream, and the pretty girl giggles at last. She calls for Ma to join us. We play, all together, in the rain.

One.

Two.

Three.

Ma and Liza finally meet in splatters soaring up past the stone walls.