Clara Cooke
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The grave was fresh in the churchyard. No coffin. Not for me.
Bells tolled from the towering belfry. Night fell, and the ache settled in my knees from kneeling in frigid mud. My hands tingled. The Reeve, with mulled wine on his breath and goose fat on his fingers, bound my wrists together in a numbing knot at the foot of the dais.
Michaelmas was his, a festival to commemorate the judgement of souls. They weighed mine in front of the whole parish on a scale tipped from the start. Ascension or damnation, it was all the same to them.
When the Vicar in crisp robes issued my last rite in that droning church-tongue, he asked for my confession. My smile came unbidden.
“Ol’ Shuck,” I mused, “hunts alone.”
Parishioners shifted from one unsteady foot to the other, farming tools at their hips. And I…remained outside their circle of light, like always.
“Some devil butchered our lord’s bannermen. We cannot ignore those maw marks.” The Curate, choking on his own jowls, bristled.
“The horses never settle. Even the mules spook at the very jingle of their own harnesses.” The Clerk, with fingers hooked around the tithing box, added.
“Wolves in the valley, again, you dolts,” the Reeve snapped. “Every year they come, you all know this. Even this foundling cur knows.”
I no longer flinched.
Beyond the firelight, I saw the shadow first. Orbs of amber rimmed by night incarnate. Hackles raised down the spine and haunches.
The Vicar looked into my gaze—then away when he saw the same eyes as our lord. His jaw tightened.
“Trust God with your demons, boy,” he said.
The Eucharist came next. White altar bread. Not the sawdust rye I knew. I chewed and watched the flames gutter low.
Then the chrism, bitter and lingering. Forehead, lips, collarbone. Holy oil caught in the light of starving embers, marking me for burial.
Squealing screams from the stables punctured the weighty silence. The gates splintered from kicking horses. Parishioners scrambled for their sickles and spades as their circle of light shuddered to smoke.
Night prowled on all fours with a belly low to the ground.
“Those who smell of goose fat,” I spoke, “will meet their God first.”
No church-tongue. Plainspeak.
The shadow tore through the dais, followed by a pack of smaller ones. #
A final breath. A snapping of the neck.
Parishioners shrieked curses to the sky as they tripped over their robes to escape, tossing the tithing box altogether. Only one remained.
Stalking towards me on padded feet, the shadow rumbled once from its throat. A wet, crinkled snout pressed deeply into my ribs.
I stilled.
The smaller shadows yipped near my knees. Scythe-sharp teeth gnawed on my fingers and binding.
“You said Ol’ Shuck hunts alone,” the Vicar hissed.
“A lie,” I confessed, finally, slipping free from frayed rope, “to protect her pups.”
Her nostrils flared before her warm, rough tongue darted out. Forehead. Lips. Collarbone.
“And the mother who claims me.”
Clara’s prompts were: at a festival, a cryptid, a lie
Clara Cooke resides in Richmond, VA as a secondary school English teacher. She is in her fifth year of teaching, and when she is not planning instruction or walking her rescue Great Pyrenees, she is writing to her heart’s content.
This story was inspired by Maggie, a black German Shepherd Clara rescued as a child.
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