Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Thirty One
Felecia pulled the door to her cabin open and stepped out into the winter mush of frozen snow mixed with freshly churned mud. The texture of the ground felt through her thick work boots reminded her of that night as so many things tended to during the winter months. She pulled the door to the cabin closed and already missed how warm it was inside. She stepped away from the cabin until she could take in its slanted roof. The last of the snow from the previous storm was still stuck up there but it wasn’t thick, it would melt on its own and hopefully before the next storm hit. That meant moving onto fences, there were always fences, the ones that needed mending, the ones that needed to be extended. Even the ones that had served their purpose and begged to be pulled up all together.
The cabin had three fences that surrounded it. The shortest one that led a small part of the way up the rutted lane to Phillip and Taryn’s house. A second one that marked Felecia’s yard. They stank something fierce in the summer but Felecia learned the hard way to keep her chickens close by as well as Rachel, her one and only milking goat. The third and largest fence, the one behind the cabin, housed her still failed attempts at gardening and the nearly equally failed attempt to roust out and capture feral pigs.
Clarence was already waiting at the edge of the fence. The wizened bastard knew that Felecia was late and was already snorting and complaining when she arrived to dump a pale of food scraps, broken/bad eggs, and compost worms. Felecia spent weeks trying to coax and trap feral pigs during the previous fall after her last hunting trip with Phillip and after all that hard work and worse yet, wasted food, Clarence was the only partial success. The old boar was constantly angry and anxious, he butted against the fence posts constantly and dug at the ground relentlessly with his small tusks. Only as the snow began to settle in did he slow down and even then, he always met Felecia in the mornings with the same contemptuous and angry look. The feral pig had the same look in his eye that the lout did right before the knife came into play. That same haughty turbulence that always expected a win, that same look that melted into raging contempt when the owner of those eyes realized they wouldn’t get what they expected from the encounter.
Felecia fed the feral pig and regarded the animal with her own contempt for a few moments before moving on to other chores. Clarence, the feral pig named for the eldest brother she loathed and feared seemed as failed an experiment as the snow-covered ruts she called her garden. The pig had his way in those ruts before the snow came and even rooting as he did, he seemed disquieted at such a spectacular failure. The only plant Felecia seemed capable of growing was onion and even they came up small and unpleasant.
Keeping Clarence was an insurance policy. If this winter decided to drag on, if the waters along the coast stayed iced over and the growing crowd of kept women and girls in Rotary house kept feeling selfish, well Clarence’s day were numbered. Then again, the feral pigs days were numbered either way likely as not and maybe that was what always had him wild eyed and angry.
Clarence wasn’t alone in feeling contemptuous, kept, and running short on time.