Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 138
Leaning on the ground hurt, her knees hurt, her back felt like it was on fire. Her arms and hands ached endlessly whether she tried to use them or not. There was a moment where Felecia nearly felt the mixture of courage and insanity it would take for her to try and cave her own head in against a tree stump.
The water stopped her. The small trickling sound of running water that emanated from beyond the tree line. Bashing your own brains in took a level of commitment that Felecia found herself lacking, surely anyone could drown themselves if they had the conviction though.
Felecia crawled on her hands and knees from the bare earth of the high spot below the cave entrance down to the trees below and beyond into the murky ankle- and knee-deep pools of muddy water. The algae and leaf litter left the top of the water looking green and brown and Felecia knew enough about the water in the swamp to know that nothing under that layer would be worth shitting into much less dunking her head in. She ignored those instincts and plunged her face into the first pool that looked deep enough. She didn’t dare open her eyes and tried her best to hold her breath until she ran out of it.
Pull up, get out of this muck…BREATHE!
Some untethered and unrecognizable voice howled inside her head as Felecia’s body screamed at her as she ran out of breath and it began to buck and tug and jerk against her commands.
Life wants to live.
Phillip’s voice echoed inside of Felecia’s otherwise empty head and she opened her mouth and felt something awful try and swim inside. She came up sputtering and spitting and reaching into her mouth to remove some awful swamp creature only to yank out a pinch of muddy leaves.
“I can’t even drown myself!”
Felecia yelled and the fetid swamp grew suddenly still. The constant buzzing and chirping of insects ceased for a moment and the sudden silence startled her. She had been single mindedly searching for a way to kill herself ever since she saw the interior of the cave and she wasn’t having some clear-headed epiphany but she stopped for a moment and noticed the silence that she had caused.
Two, maybe three minutes went by before the insects of the swamp continued their endless drone. For two or so minutes Felecia was the one thing the entire denizens of the swamp had to worry about. The one thing they had to fear. There was no real threat, no obvious plan to kill the myriad and filthy denizens of the stagnant pools and yet they all went silent at her cry, waiting for disaster and death.
Felecia had cared for her father, and her brother Bartholomew, she had cared for the serving girl Rachel, and Phillip, and she had cared for Jacqueline, and she had cared for Nelly the chicken. In all the loss there was one commonality.
Having the insects of the swamp fear her noise didn’t serve her, caring for all the people she loved hadn’t served her either. Nothing seemed to serve her. Even killing herself, didn’t seem to serve her.
Felecia sat there in the miserable heat of the swamp, naked and covered in dry mud, letting the moss and mildew settle in as she rested and stayed in place. She breathed deep and spat out the last of the fetid water and garbage that had collected in her mouth during her attempt to kill herself.
The insects began their buzzing and their calls once again but it seemed different the second time around. Felecia had never been still out in the swamp before; she had never been still in the cave with Jacqueline either. Felecia had never been still in the Big House, not even as a small child. Life was an endless routine of movements, some subtle, some not, all still in motion just the same to avoid stillness. To be still was to be lazy and even being disobedient was better in many ways than being lazy.
Felecia didn’t feel lazy though. She was still, listening to the miserable denizens of the swamp she had hated all these months, but she was still and allowing herself to live among them without searching in her mind for something she should have been doing instead. For once there was nothing else, and for that matter, why would there need to be?
Felecia had been trying to hunt rabbits up on the rise near Phillip’s hut, it was after their shared hunt for meat that Phillip wound up offering to the Big House even though there wasn’t much. Felecia knew they couldn’t go out again with the weather turning but she wanted to do something, anything, for the struggling villagers.
Traps worked for rabbits, usually and mostly, but for a full week her traps kept failing. The village lost another baby to the cold and the hunger and she was out in the snow, near freezing herself with her bow locked in her hands looking over the frost bit terrain and waiting for movement.
Something launched out of the snow near vertically and Felecia tried to get an arrow ready in time. The tiny brown creature was up and running before she could even manage to nock an arrow.
“Squirrels aren’t worth shooting.”
Felecia heard Phillip and turned away from the tiny speck in the snow.
“Anything is better than nothing.”
Phillip shook his head, “Not if it takes more work than its worth. Conservation is key to survival. We make due with little out here because we’ve got little. Just the way it is.”
“I can eat a squirrel; I can’t eat grass and dead leaves.”
“You can eat it; you just can’t hunt it. It takes you three days to make a straight arrow with a sharp head, and one bad shot to break it. Traps though, they are more forgiving.”
“I laid traps.”
Phillip barked out a forced bit of laughter and slapped the sheath of his knife. “You left out jelly coated string for the barn cats to lick. Let’s take a walk north and see what my traps caught.”
Felecia followed Phillip for nearly half a day only to find the majority of his expert traps left alone, buried in snow, or picked clean and left in place. Finally, they found a rabbit so small that Felecia figured it for a squirrel until they got closer. The animal was looped around the forepaw instead of its neck which should have hung it clean. The poor thing was stuck in place with ice forming in its fur. Phillip picked it up and the little animal never flinched or showed a spark of life.
“It’s no bigger than that squirrel you told me to leave, and it’s frozen.”
Phillip didn’t respond he only tucked the little animal inside his coat and kept trudging through the snow. A couple of dozen steps into the deeper woods they came across a larger rabbit standing on a rise, turning its nose this way and that with the breeze, apparently ignorant of the two hunters that had come upon it. The rabbit sniffed this way and that and they turned and did so again, keeping its ears straight as it did so.
Felecia took note of the animal and got an arrow ready before Phillip motioned for her to stop and retreat.
“It’s right there, distracted. It’s a big rabbit.”
Felecia whispered and pointed at the animal as if Phillip didn’t obviously know the state and place of the animal in question.
Phillip only stood in place and shook his head as Felecia tried to stand up and take another shot. Phillip’s coat started to flutter and even buck then. The old man was careful as he reached in and took the tiny rabbit out of his coat by the scruff of its neck. The little animal that had looked frozen only minutes before was yanking this way and that, bucking against the old groundskeeper’s grasp and even trying to bite his hand as he set it down on the snow.
The rabbit over on the rise stood suddenly still. Keeping one eye on the scene as the tiny rabbit stopped fussing and took one small hop and then another in the snow. The larger rabbit turned its head and yawned and then made a yipping sound and the smaller rabbit made a similar sound in kind before lopping over to it.
“Times are hard for everyone now; rabbits get started later because the winters have lasted longer. Some of them throw the first litter and try again so you get winter kits. Winter kits grow up on sticks and yellow grass, they taste like shit and fight like Spaniards.”
Felecia looked at the rabbits as they hopped away together, “Good for them, we’re still hungry.”
Phillip nodded, “You’re right, life wants to live, all life does. There’s nothing special about us, just luck, so let it be luck then.”
They found another full-size rabbit after that, hung on a trap, and they managed to shoot a couple of birds. The meal was meager and the village wasn’t saved, but that one rabbit and its surviving winter kit, would they have made a difference? Not to the village, no, but they made a difference to Phillip and Felecia.