Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 179
Taryn didn’t wait to politely say goodnight, he didn’t shout or say anything and he didn’t slap Felecia though she would spend a good long time wondering why he hadn’t. She believed she had most certainly earned a slap, at the very least. Taryn chose instead to turn away from Felecia and slowly plod home.
Felecia stopped laughing, finally, and watched Taryn walking away. She wanted to stop him, to run after him, to hug him and pull him down to the ground. She wanted to beg his forgiveness and tell him she would at least consider the proposal.
She didn’t though.
Wasn’t this what she had wanted after all? Certainly not so cruelly served, but wasn’t this the way out she had needed? The exit she had been craving since that morning when she realized her life was effectively over and that any hope for the future was just, terribly unfair.
Felecia looked down at the remains of the fish and sighed, “Nana would be so proud.”
The crying didn’t start until Felecia was secure inside her shack but it didn’t stop until the sun began to peak up over the trees. The leftover fish became the best morning meal either the pigs or the chicken had ever or would ever likely have. There were no more intrusive voices, Felecia waited for them to come, sometimes while out working in her fields, sometimes when sitting alone at night, but she was always weary, always waiting for that madness to suddenly return.
There were no more night time visits from Taryn, no more panicked visits to help track Phillip down and no more welcoming chances to see the old ruin on his way further down the spiral to sweet demise. At first there was nothing but the shack and the fields and Felecia’s careful planning and preparing and waiting for the right time to move on. She would load up the animals and take them to Phillip’s, even if Taryn refused them, she would leave them there anyway.
That first season of renewed seclusion came and went and Felecia felt all the worse for it. Felecia felt that she was worse than merely an outlier, she was an outcast on every front and well past her welcome in all places. Then the girls and women began to show up. Some said they heard she was the one behind the mask, the one who did the unthinkable to all those men that night. Others said they went out to see the old woman in the swamp and found the place empty, save for a crude sign that pointed them to her shack. Still others came with word that a boy in the village spoke of a woman who could cure and cleanse, tucked away at the outskirt of the woods. Most came with womanly problems, some came in need of fresh starts, and still others came because they had nowhere else to go. All of them came with some manner of offering. A few fish, a bushel of this or that, a favored trinket or old family heirloom.
Like most true callings, Felecia’s eventual vocation was not chosen. She turned the first few away, likely less impressively than how she met the girl and her grandmother out in the swamp, but not by much. The women and girls kept coming though and eventually one came with the sort of problem Felecia felt she was suited for. A man in the village had hurt his wife, he was hurting his children. Felecia waited until he drank himself into a stupor one night and snuck into his small fishing shack. She ushered the women and children out and secured the bastard to his bed with fishing line before beating him with a broken boat oar.
Lessons from her last public stand in the village had sunk in and the things Taryn had tried to say to her were in the forefront of her mind. Killing them didn’t serve as a deterrent, shaming them didn’t seem to work, and neither had worked publicly. That time Felecia made it personal. She made the man feel vulnerable, she hurt him behind closed doors and there was nothing he could do about it. She stuck a rag in his mouth to stifle his screams. Felecia did something to the man that could be done again and all the other men in the village would know that when they saw him trying to hide his bruises in the morning. Fire, fought with fire.
The wife of the man came a few days later with a silver mirror that had belonged to her mother and a few fish. The woman wouldn’t take no for an answer and came back some months later with more fish and a story of how her husband didn’t hurt her or the little ones anymore.
Nearly another season came and went as the women and girls made their nighttime visits and Felecia realized she was never going to gather the courage to leave as she still felt she rightly should. The notion wasn’t that the village suddenly or had always needed her, or even someone like her. Jacqueline had clearly been doing something, similar if not the same, but that hadn’t changed things. What Felecia was doing was changing things, but no, not even that, the women and the girls of the village had finally, finally, had enough, they were the ones choosing to make changes, Felecia and the mask she wore were merely the devices of that change. Who was she to stand in the way of progress, after all?
Seven months after that awful night outside of her shack and the first real frost of the year had hit, Felecia woke reminded of the season that marked her for life. Snow would come soon and there was precious little time left to play silly games. Taryn had come to her with his heart on his sleeve and Felecia had doused the youth in gasoline and set him on fire for his trouble, then she spent half a year living in the shadow of his property without the courage to come and say how sorry she was.
Felecia spent three days going from her shack to the fields and back trying to find the courage and the pretext to bother them. She had inquired and watched from a distance, she knew there were no changes with Phillip and that nothing much hand changed for Taryn either. They were safe, and alive, and that was enough knowledge needed until it was time to try and somehow fix the damage done.