A Slice of the Dark and Other Stories by Karen Heuler

Author:Karen Heuler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy
Publisher: Fairwood Press
Published: 2022-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

The Living Wood

Years ago the village midwife, Mayra, heard a knock on her door first thing in the morning, and found her neighbor there, carrying her child wrapped in blankets. “There’s something wrong,” Ilsa said, her face white and strained. “He doesn’t move right.” She placed the infant in the crib in the kitchen, where Mayra often saw women before and after childbirth, as she was a midwife and healer. Mayra bent over and lifted the wrappings away from the child.

He lay still, peacefully still, but his chest barely rose with his breaths and it was hard to know if the child was asleep or dying. Mayra ran her fingers gently along the baby’s chin and cheek, and removed his shirt and ran her fingers down his arm. All was smooth, though with a peculiar lack of resiliency, yet the skin felt warm enough. Mayra’s fingers ran up the child’s arms and across his chest and then across his belly, hoping that the sense of touch would give her some clue as to what was wrong.

She felt along the child’s smooth foot, her index finger poised until it felt a prick. She took her hand away and found a small splinter in her finger. “What is it?” Ilsa asked fearfully.

Mayra thought for a moment and then bent down and gently licked the child’s hand.

“He’s made of wood,” Mayra said.

Ilsa lurched forward and grabbed onto the back of a chair. Her breath caught in her lungs.

*

A second child was found to be made of wood as well, and then a third, and neighbors spread the word as they woke their children up; soon everyone knew which were wood and which were real.

There were seven children in all who had turned into wood. They were all very young, ranging in age from 11 months to 19 months.

Their hearts beat, slowly and with a strange sound, but they beat. These strange children were alive. They opened their eyes and licked milk off fingers and stretched their arms out but they were slow to smile and never wept. Their mothers kept their hopes up that this strange illness would pass and their little ones would go back to normal.

Mayra thought that wouldn’t happen. Her grandmother had told her a tale once, when she was very small, about a town where all the horses had been replaced with wooden horses, and all the cows.

“Listen, listen,” Mayra told Ilsa. “My grandmother told me—and she heard it from her grandmother—about something that happened a long time ago, when all the cows in the valley turned to wood. The farmers rose in the morning and went out to milk them or let them out to pasture, and in every barn along the way, the cows stood there as they should, but they were wood. Farmers cried out in despair, for it was almost winter and the cows were important and what sort of sorcery was this? Was God in his heaven and the devil on earth?

“My own grandmother’s grandfather rode out to his neighbors, who were as dismayed as he was.

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