Saturday Sample: In Fields of Butterfliy Flames by Steve Wade, white wine

 

 A Mother’s Love

She pretends to be my daughter. “No, Mommy. Please, Mommy, don’t,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mommy. I love you.” Her bright eyes pleading desperately to infect me with the blindness she has brought to others.

Only I can see behind those green eyes, eyes that draw men to her the way the blue sea sucks bodies into its drowning waters.

Because of her this family is in ruins. The first thing she did was take him from me. Helplessly, I watched it happening in this very house where I had raised her as my own. The ankle-socked girlie-laugh could no longer disguise the swelling flesh, the intentional hitching up of the checked mini-skirt, revealing sinful thighs, as she prostrated herself on the couch before the TV in the evenings. 

My heart bled to see him peering out from behind his newspaper - a black panther sizing up its prey in a jungle clearing from behind a mesh of snarled vines. Except the doe-eyed antelope innocently grazing on popcorn was its own lure. Prey to entrap the predator.

I begged God to severe the umbilical cord attached to this gestating horror. I promised to be a better wife, to never again deny my husband the rightful pleasures bestowed upon him by our matrimonial union. No use. The pull of the drowning waters was, for my husband, too strong, the temptation to swim into the voluptuous horror too great.

Even then I did not despair. My faith was full. I persevered. I approached God on His terms. If he He gave me back my husband and my child, I was willing to forgive, if unable to forget. The rest of my life I vowed to dedicate to Him, to the spreading of His Gospels. I was ready to endure discomfort and pain, to undergo hardship, to rise long before daybreak in deepest winter, to fall to my knees before His image and worship for hours, until my body gave way to fatigue and famine.  

All in vain. That’s when I knew that somehow I had spawned one of the Devil’s minions, if not the Devil incarnate.

In the early stages, this thing confined its abominating ways to those occasions when I was absent. But I saw it in their smug and satiated faces on my return from morning worship. He, who never whistled, whistling as he pottered about the house, hands in pockets, his eyes, like a serpent’s tongue, flicking at that thing, tasting the air between them. And she, it, stretching shamelessly on tiptoe to reach something in the high kitchen cupboard, already goading him, tempting him with her indecent white flesh for the next encounter.

Soon even the thin veil of supposed normality was cast aside. Responding to her demonic summons, he was compelled to leave our marriage bed deep in the night-time. With my hands clamped against my ears, I’d pray aloud to deaden her hedonistic screams woven into his heavy grunts. I prayed that He might at least spare me the sickening sounds of betrayal by removing my sense of hearing. But it was He who chose not to listen.

Forsaken. I had been forsaken. But wait. Was not this a test of faith? After all, had He not put his own son through just as great an ordeal? For a while I did succeed in turning the other cheek - with the help of pills and vodka. That changed when the others came.

Now working hand in hand with the Devil, the two conspired to draw in others for the sake of Mammon. Like swarms of flies they arrived, buzzing through my home, to gorge themselves on her oozing, naked flesh. Each evening, when the last of the swarm left, slaked and bloated, the pair of them unashamedly counted out their filthy lucre on the kitchen table. They then celebrated, the only way they knew how, atop the table among the pestilence-stricken notes and coins. You would have imagined that even the Devil must sometimes tire of excessive indulgence in fetid fornication.   

The temptation to shut down the world and close forever the night was colossal. A handful of pills and I could escape in my sleep. I had wonderful visions of being welcomed into Paradise. In the place of pain and suffering - perpetual springtime. A place filled with brightness and birth, budding flowers and laughing babies. But then the Light was infiltrated by an enormous grey shadow that swallowed up the sky. The flowers wilted and decayed, the laughing babies grew pointed canines, turned black, sprouted tails and moved about on cloven hooves.

That I should succumb to the ultimate sin against Tthe Light was part of her scheming. But just as I realised her strategy in time to sabotage her twisted plans, I was confined to my bed with a sudden illness that left me enervated and begging for death. Miraculously, I pulled through on the seventh day. The significance of my recovery on the symbolic seventh penetrated like the first hammer blow pounding home a bolt into one of my outstretched hands. I had a purpose, a true mission, and a reason for being: to beat the Devil at his own game.

Careful consideration brought me to a conclusion that, initially, I found impossible to accept, but which steadily washed through me for what it was: an irrefutable truth. My husband was completely blameless for everything that had taken and was taking place between him and the abomination masquerading as my daughter. What good man stood a chance when pitted against the greatest evil? My role was to rend the Devil’s mask asunder, divest him of his cloak. Only then would my husband regain his purity and learn again to see the ugliness and deceit that lay hidden beneath seeming beauty.

The Devil made a mistake when he chose to inhabit the thirteen-year-old body of a fragile girl. Stripping her, for me, was easy. Watching the welts rise and the white skin bruise red and purple as I beat her, firstly with my fists and feet, and then with the back of the wooden hairbrush until the handle snapped, sent a flurry of excited sparks shooting and ricocheting from my stomach to my head. Her screams and pleas for me to stop, and the way she curled her skinny arms around her brazen body, where she lay twisted in the bleeding earth, was putrid animal fat tossed onto hungry flames.

“No, Mommy. Please, I’m sorry, Mommy,” the thing whimpered in a perfect take of my daughter’s voice.

“Begone Satan,” I said, working the syllables to the rhythm of the blows I rained upon her. “Beelzebub,” I went. “Lord of the Flies.”

Her evil green eyes were petrified at having been rumbled for who she, he, it really was. 

It was my turn next to endure punches and blows when he came in from work and found his chattel spoiled. Outwardly, the wreck of a pubescent human being, she lay trembling on the couch where I had bundled her, having dragged her living carcass in from the back garden where she’d tasted the beginning stages of my retribution.

Everything continued then as I had foreseen it. From where he stood in the living-room doorway, freeze-framed, his incredulous eyes, rounded and horrified, telescoped onto the blackened and blood-caked mass of battered flesh. It seemed minutes, but was probably only seconds, before he tore his gaze from her to me. I closed my Bible and placed it reverently on the coffee table next to my armchair and allowed the joy washing through me to break across my face in a smile. It had been so long since last I felt so filled with bliss and goodness.

He reached me with such speed he might have been carried on the wings of angels.

“Yes. Yes,” I said through the dazzling flashes of light that came with each successive knuckle crack against my jaw and face. I had finally reached him. The pain from the beating was as nothing compared to the knowledge that the man I was joined to in Holy Matrimony had taken his first steps on the journey away from evil.

The combination of our weight, together with the increased ferocity of his attack, tipped the armchair backwards and left us sprawled upon the floor, reunited lovers in a deathly embrace. The heat and rising scent, a burnt-umber manly smell, humming from his closeness, and the intimacy throbbing from his squeezing fingers wrapped around my throat, delivered me to a state so glorious, so divine, he must have seen the look of ecstasy in my face.

I clearly passed out for a while, for I next remember my demisting senses grasping that I was reseated in the righted armchair. Across from me in the opposite armchair, he sat resignedly, his eyes locked onto the stained carpet. His face now wore the expression of a man who has had the greatest of all wonders thrust upon him.

Too sore to get my body to carry out my divine impulses for a number of days, I, like Job, waited until I was ready to continue my Crusade. My husband’s absence facilitated my mission – he left that day he saw the Light, and has yet to return. Sometimes the truth is too enormous and needs contemplation to fully accept what is put before the senses. He’ll be back. This I know. I’ll be here for him.

It’s surprising how much the human body, even that of a thirteen-year-old girl, can withstand: being tied naked to a leafless tree beneath a clear moonlit sky on a freezing night in January, being constantly beaten with a rolling pin, a diet for three days of foul meat, and repeated suffocation with a plastic bag to the point where the deprivation of oxygen turns the face blue.

Although he, the Lord of the Flies, tries to convince me otherwise, with his girlie-pleas to me as his mother, my faith has kept me strong and rational. After all, what ordinary child, a child who hasn’t been infested by demons, could survive for so long such extreme efforts at exorcism?

The past few evenings have brought with them the return of the misguided mortals swarming ravenously around my doorstep. For the sanctity of my marriage and the sake of my daughter’s soul, He has bestowed on me the strength and courage required to counter this locust plague. While she lies broken-boned, gagged and bound in the wooden barrel at the end of the garden, I close my eyes and pray as the locusts feast upon my offered flesh.

The Day of Judgement is nigh. No sacrifice is too great, no suffering too painful, for a wife and mother with the might of God to guide her along the path of righteousness.

Amen.

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About the author 

Steve Wade’s award-winning short fiction has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. His work has been broadcast on national and regional radio. He has had stories short-listed for the Francis McManus Short Story Competition and for the Hennessy Award. His stories have appeared in over fifty print publications, including Crannog, New Fables, and Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. His unpublished novel, ‘On Hikers’ Hill’ was awarded First Prize in the abook2read.com competition, with Sir Tim Rice as the top judge. He has won First Prize in the Delvin Garradrimna Short Story Competition on a number of occasions. Winner of the Short Story category in the Write by the Sea writing competition 2019. His short stories have been nominated for the PEN/O’Henry Award, and for the Pushcart Prize.