Sunkissed Innsmouth
Part Eighteen
The snow hit once again and then harder and after that a third time and so long that there was no more telling the usual muddy lanes of the small village except for where the buildings stood and hardly anyway to tell the lane leading up to Rotary house or the fences of the goat pens except for the tops of the posts. Felecia spent her thirteenth birthday alone in the snow, burning trash and wet logs just to keep warm. The day after her birthday the village lost one of its elderly to the cold and one of its babes to hunger.
The day after that, a day made darker still by Felecia refusing to speak to or acknowledge Phillip for his choice to give most of their food to the big house, culminated in a near midnight visit by the greasy man. Mullens came with a small sack of precious goods, canned meats and pickled vegetables from the town down the road. He opened the bag and waved a small bar of chocolate over the miserable coals of Felecia’s fire.
When Felecia didn’t lunge at it or begin disrobing on the spot the greasy moron lost any slender sense of leering looks or freshly wetted, wormy lips. “Shit girl, are broken in the head like that other one? Is that it?”
Felecia didn’t need to wonder about turning into her grandmother then, she didn’t need to worry about using words as a weapon. She could still hear the mother from the night before in the village, wailing over the bundle in the blanket that hunger and cold had taken. Felecia looked at the sack of canned and jarred goods and looked at the greasy man holding onto it all. The people of the village weren’t so different from the people who inhabited Rotary house after all.
“You have all of that, and you haven’t shared any of it with your neighbors who need it more than you or I do. What do you expect me to make of you? As a person, much less a man? How could I ever respect you, or myself for being with you? Did you even bother to think about that before you waddled up here?”
Felecia was ready for the look that came next, she knew that look, she had seen it before and experienced, in essence, what came with that look of male hatred and disdain. Her eldest brother gave her that look before his final voyage when she made mention of his ugly looks and penchant for always being around that last year when she dared to use the water closet at night.
Mullens stood there for a moment, no doubt contemplating how close Felecia and her hovel were to the groundskeeper’s house. What noises might travel and what might transpire thereafter? Felecia took the skinning knife Phillip had gifted to her after their first hunt together and waved it back and forth. “I’ll take no pleasure defending myself from you, but I won’t lose any sleep over it either.”
The greasy shit got himself turned around and was a few steps away in the knee-deep snow before Felecia spoke up, “You leave those goods, and we can keep this between you and I.” Felecia was still thinking about the mother and her grief, what desperate folk down in the village might have need of those goods, and yes, sure, who would miss a bit of chocolate besides.
Mullens groaned and coughed. “Fuck that, and fuck you, you stupid little bitch.”
Felecia expected exactly what she got and only contemplated for a moment what it would take to stand up and rush the ugly worm. People in the village would continue do without, her included. Mullens would no doubt keep offering his bag of goodies until some desperate young girl in the village fell for his bait. Stacked against murdering a man out in the snow, Felecia chose to stay where she was. She wasn’t sure she would have the courage to do it, and what if she botched it. Gutting a dead deer was one thing, would Phillip still be so ready to help her and offer advice and encouragement if he came out of his tiny house to find her ineffectively stabbing at Mullens as he howled and squealed?