This week on the Drabblecast- a melancholy story about loss, abandonment, and the perils of old magic.
Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Rhysling-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, F&SF, Podcastle, Asimov’s, Vastarien, and Reckoning. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).
Drabble: “The Hills,” by Jonathan Lee Wilson. Jonathan is an aspiring narrator and crafter of short stories. Some of Jonathan’s voice work can be found on the Dunesteef, Anklecast, and Dribblecast. You can find more of his stories @taletellersuniverse on Youtube.
Art by Cindy Fan
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The Goat Wife
by Avra Margarita
“A girl is an orphan without her mother,” the villagers tutted at the funeral.
The Widower looked at his daughter, who was slight enough to be bounced on the knee of the old neighbor woman. Light as poplar fluff. But the neighbor woman was cataract-ridded and rickety-boned, and his dead wife had had no sisters for him to remarry and keep the family’s line intact. Keep the girl from being a motherless thing, carried away by a strong gust of wind.
The neighbors left and the Widower was alone, in a house he didn’t know how to keep warm, with a toddler he didn’t have the means to feed, and only a goat bleating mournfully outside for company. The girl’s wails harmonized with the animal’s and soon she, too, sounded like a baby goat might.
Although his eyes hadn’t shed any tears since he was the girl’s age, the memory of orphanhood was lodged inside him; it threatened to shake loose.
At night, while the girl twisted in her bed and cried out for her dead mother, the Widower trudged out into the yard, to the post where the goat was tied, with only a knife clasped in his hand.
#
Old magic, the Widower’s wife had called it. Her family had been practitioners, which explained why few of them remained alive. They believed in baskania, the evil eye, and in folk spells to trick all-seeing fate.
Old magic was known to claim its children young, but that hadn’t stopped his wife from partaking. She’d taught the Widower a few spells, but he never paid them much mind. The pungent herbs, reviving attars, and succor-giving poultices were woman work. The weathered uncles at the kafenio said so. But sanguine spells and sacrifice? That was a man’s duty. The Widower could give his daughter that much, his body could sustain it.
He returned from the yard with the knife, now bearing a rust-crimsoned stain, still clutched in his trembling hand. He let his blood drip from the wound he had gouged deep into the meat of his forearm. It fell across the house’s mud floor, flowering round and red as the poppies overtaking the local cemetery. Cloven hooves followed, smudging where the blood had dropped like a trail of breadcrumbs. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. A two-toned tempo of bipedal, uneven gait.
The girl, mercifully, did not rouse. Not until morning, when the succulent smell of cooking pervaded the house for the first time since the funeral.
#
The Goat Wife stood in the kitchen, tossing wood into the old metal furnace. She fanned the flames, then cracked fresh eggs onto the cast-iron skillet set upon the stove. The domestic scene was distorted only by the unnatural jerkiness of her movements, followed closely by the Widower’s eyes.
Albumen sizzled as it hit the frothing butter. Several eggs lay broken on the mud floor below, the Goat Wife’s cloven hooves unaccustomed to such fine movements as the whisking, and pouring, of eggs. In a single eggshell, a dead chick curled, cauled in its mother’s former protection.
The Goat Wife moaned, her bowed frame shaking as she leaned against the stove for balance. Her two front hooves, keratin-hard, remained unharmed, but the heat burned the dark-gray hairs around them. It made the air taste charred against the Widower’s tongue. Again, the Goat Wife wobbled, her ungulate body charmed upright solely through the boon of blood.
“Mommy?” the girl called out, toddling over to hug the Goat Wife’s bristly, crooked hind legs. The hem of the girl’s nightdress became soaked with slimy egg whites, but she didn’t seem to mind.
Forcefully upright, the Goat Wife’s muscles spasmed. She tried to speak, but her throat only gurgled—half-bleat, half-moan. Yet, despite the pain, she did not shake the girl off. She had been given a purpose, and so far, the Goat Wife had responded to her call with grace, as much as form and nature allowed.
The old magic had not steered the Widower wrong.
He stood by the door and inspected the scene. His wound had bled through the rag he’d tied thrice around it, like a tourniquet. Yes, he thought, watching as the Goat Wife clumsily scooped the girl up so she could peer into the steaming breakfast skillet. This will have to do for now.
#
It wasn’t long before the neighbor women came to meet the Widower’s new bride. The girl’s new stepmother.
“She’s from abroad,” he insisted whenever the women seated around his kitchen table asked a question he didn’t know how to answer.
It had been a week. His head had grown perpetually light with blood loss. Still, the Goat Wife walked. Every day, she was getting better at cooking and other household chores that his hands were too big—too stuck in their own ways—to accomplish. Better at taking care of the girl, too.
“Abroad,” the neighbor women repeated, then took mouthfuls of mountain tea to slosh between their cheeks and dispel the distasteful word.
Let them think she was a mail-order bride, the Widower mused—a desperate woman from the poorer neighboring countries looking for a tie to land and family. The truth was, the Goat Wife had ruminated on the grass grown upon his land since she was a suckling. Had watched her own mother bleed out on that same soil as the Widower slaughtered her for the Easter spit roast the year his daughter was born.
Mother… something wiggled inside his head, a memory he could not unravel. It had splinters; caught itself in the ridges of his brain and uselessly pulled. He didn’t often think about her: how the Widower’s own mother had disappeared one day and was never found. How the girl never met her, this woman who had once held him inside her body.
With haphazard, clunky movements, the Goat Wife served more tea and crumbly, cud-like halva to the tittering neighbor women. They thought her inferior—the Widower had been counting on it—and so they did not look too closely at the way her black gloves flopped empty around the hooves shinier and darker than a pewter iron heated over coals. The way her long, voluminous dress didn’t completely masquerade the jaggedly wrong angles of her animated body. How the black lace veil lowered in mourning deference over her face still allowed for a peek at her bushy goatee. The beehive amber strangeness of her gaze. How it burned. Silently, it burned.
“At least she loves the girl,” the neighbor women muttered, focusing on their tea and spoon-sweet treats, never once thanking the Goat Wife—a service animal—for hosting them.
The Widower’s arm wound throbbed. He wondered if the Goat Wife’s crooked legs did, too, after hours of standing. But there was no room for gratitude or compassion in the bond he had charmed between them, so he chased the thought away with a shot of brandy through his own tea.
When the girl jumped on the Goat Wife’s lap and let her new stepmother dutifully feed her sweet crumbs of halva, the Widower knew he had made the right decision.
#
The sun hung weak and low enough to be bundled into a wicker basket for safekeeping. The Widower swung his axe to mimic the arched trajectory of the sun across the autumn air, then let it loose. The wood cracked apart in a puff of chips and stale dust. He didn’t shield his eyes from it, or his bare chest and burly arms from the splinters.
As he worked, he pictured the woolly neck of a goat stretched out on his chopping block. Then, the slender stalk of a wife’s throat.
“Daddy,” a voice called, wispy as flyaway hair and the ephemerality of a toddler’s milk-sweet scent.
“Darling,” he said. The word clunked wooden on his tongue. His late wife had been so much better at endearments than he was. Sometimes, his mouth even stumbled around the shape of the girl’s name, so he chose to lock it away in a chest inside his own, wrapped tight and compact as an old animal pelt. “You shouldn’t be out here while I’m working, you might get hurt.”
“I dreamed I was a little goat,” the girl said in piping sing-song. Her shins were scratched, her dress stained yellow—he didn’t know with what. It looked like milk, spilled or sicked up. A profusion of it.
The girl stood before the chopping block, which reached her clavicles—he pictured her tiny neck meeting the downswing of his axe, not a chunk of wood but a young sapling, snapped—and she smiled. It was wide. Too wide.
“I dreamed I was a little goat, Daddy, in a field with other goats. There was clover and millet and ryegrass,” she crooned in a voice crystalline with youth, but with a bleat-shrill frequency underneath. A guttural, masticating echo. “And in that beautiful field, we ate and ate, the other little goats and I, but I kept getting hungry, Daddy. I ate the grass of my brothers and sisters.
Then I ate my brothers and sisters, too. Until I looked around and I was alone in an empty field of bone splintered like wood, and I licked my wet lips, and I was empty, too.”
The Widower shuddered, his muscles overtaken by a strange palsy, as if they wanted to propulse him into a run. He lowered the axe and cut his gaze to the figure of the Goat Wife framed by the kitchen window. She was in the middle of washing the dishes with one cloven hoof and one olive-skinned hand growing incrementally dexterous, singing to herself from a goatee-covered mouth which hid the flash of full, feminine lips.
Slowly, over a period of weeks, the skin of the Goat Wife had been unraveling in uneven peels, like a chestnut cracked over an open flame.
She never once looked his way, yet the Widower had the peculiar sense—evident in the tumescence of his arm hairs—that she was listening.
“Did she tell you to tell me that?” he asked the girl, dragging his eyes back to her diminutive form, the juvenile twirl of her shoe scuffing the yard-dirt. Her usual speech pattern was stuttering, stilted. Not this barrage of chilling words.
The girl blinked, as if coming out of a trance, her face slackening with confusion. Her lower lip trembled, and he thought she might cry, but the trembling only spread into a guileless smile.
“Tell you what, Daddy?”
#
Later at night, he found the girl asleep by the fire, curled over the dark-pelted body of the Goat Wife—the fur he imagined was milk warm, though rough. The Widower’s body hair rose, engorged. The air in the house was dense enough he could cut it with his fingernails. The sight before him floored him, the babe and the beast he had brought inside to care for her.
“Wake up,” he barked, not exactly knowing why. “You, girl. You have a bed in your own room. Go there and stay.”
The girl, confused, betrayed, rubbed her bleary eyes, fixed her nightgown, rose to her feet by grabbing fistfuls of coarse fur for support. He couldn’t stop looking at the indentations his daughter had left in the Goat Wife’s pelt.
The gum-pink flesh peeking out from under the sooty fur.
The girl glared as she made her way to her room, lacking body heat and a mother’s comfort. Her sobs resounded across the small house. The scent of musk and wet straw and aliveness lingered by the dying embers. He did not look at the Goat Wife. Afraid of seeing blame in her coal animal stare. Or, worse, nothing there behind the beady glint. With the clenching of his fists, his old-magic wound had bled open all over again. The Goat Wife bleated beseechingly from the floor, making as if to go toward the girl—or perhaps, to trot out into the night on all fours, never to be seen again.
His anger was primal—not a widower’s rage, but that of an orphan’s. Accustomed, but not attuned, to abandonment. He strode toward the woodstove, clamped his hand around the mother-wife-creature’s goatee, and force-fed another mouthful of his blood into that fleshy, traitorous mouth.
There. The Goat Wife wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet.
#
Winter breathed frostbitten lullabies against the house’s crooked window.
The neighbor women had ceased their tittering visits after the girl and the Widower stopped showing their faces around church. The Goat Wife’s face had split in two so that it looked like a torn and stringy carnival mask worn over a woman’s face. Soon, he wouldn’t have to keep bleeding himself open and lightheaded to maintain the old-magic spell of compulsion. The
Widower would be able to undress her of the goat skin, free her of her binds, lock the pelt in the closet, next to his bundles of winter furs. Then, she would be a woman, a true mother to his daughter, a wife to him, who had saved her from her feral, unthinking nature.
Mother. He went to bed worrying the word like a sunflower seed between his front teeth. Often, in dreams, he aged in reverse. In his sleep, his mother’s soft touch gave way to an animal scratchiness as he felt the Goat Wife slip into his bed, press her deformed body along his back under the blanket.
“I’ve put the child to bed,” she bleated. Her fur was rough enough to scathe against the crescent of his spine, rubbing raw each vertebra. Woodstove-hot. And she smelled pungent but with a sweet underscent too, like his dead wife’s dried herbs.
He had missed a woman’s touch. Her warmth between cold bedsheets. But now he was gelid, and too scared to turn around and see what face the Goat Wife wore for him. Was it his first wife’s, his mother’s, or some new devil’s he had yet to meet? The wound of his arm bled, staining the old sheets.
The Widower was a pillar of salt. He giggled through his fear, remembering the donkey skin fairytale his mother had once read to him as a child—how could he have forgotten it? The girl in the story—another orphan—had wrapped herself in a donkey’s pelt and lived in its skin to escape her family without a trace.
Now, he pictured the flesh under the Goat Wife’s skin extruded like a mass of meat, masticated; a cud remade into being. Yes, even the girl in the story had let go of her animal skin eventually. The Widower stacked lumps of his courage together like a pile of cut wood, preparing to dig his fingers into the Goat Wife’s pelt, and pull.
But when he turned around, the bleached-white moon sailed high in the sky, the room was bathed in darkness, and his bed stretched empty of women, goats, or ghosts.
#
The Goat Wife stood on her hind legs, cradling in her hands—half-hoof, half-fingers—a pail of warmed milk for the girl. Her moves had been getting quicker, her pain almost elegant now as it clasped her joints. The Widower stared at the milk’s pocked skin and wondered if it had come from her tits. If he should draw the line at something like that. He didn’t want the girl to turn feral. To get strange ideas in her head about her place in the world. The milk was thick as cream. When the girl drunk, she got a fat crust on her upper lip. The Goat Wife watched the girl sate her hunger. Was there tenderness or resignation in her gaze?
The Widower remembered himself as an infant, how hungry he’d been, how greedy. You’re not supposed to recall these things, he knew. But the hunger had lived with him ever since. His mother’s milk had dried out of sadness, he’d been told by the father who raised him, another hungry man. The Widower was fed milk from the family donkey to survive as a newborn.
But now, watching the wrongness of the Goat Wife’s skin, the Widower was able to recall so much more. His own mother, bent crookedly over the stove, moaning in pain. How his younger self had hugged her around the waist and buried his face in her skin, and she was whiskery and musky like the animals he fed and watered outside. How, when she walked, her hind legs crackled like wood splintered apart in a blazing fireplace.
A girl is an orphan without her mother. But perhaps widowers, too, would always be orphans under the skin.
Before the Goat Wife, he had thought himself inviolate to dreams. Now, the Widower received a different visitation each night, and each morning his wound had bled anew. He recalled the dream that had slinked its way into his sleep just yesterday. Him, undressing the Goat Wife with his trusted knife, then locking her skin inside his bedroom closet, wrapped around an old donkey skin that he knew, in the dream, had once belonged to his mother. Would it be so terrible? In the cool darkness, the two pelts—mother and wife, parent and child—would acquaint themselves, tucked close together in blessing, in tenderness. The Goat Wife would not be able to leave him and the girl, or transform back into her animal self. Their little family would lay red poppies on his dead wife’s grave and come back home to feast on freshly butchered meat, and be happy.
The dream had ended but, being in the Goat Wife’s presence, he could recall now, no matter how briefly, what he always forgot in waking. First because his father, through the threat of his leather belt, had forced him to forget.
Then later, because the Widower made it so through his own will. How his mother one day left her donkey skin behind, walked away, never to return. Like nothing was more precious to her than freedom. No pelt. No home. No son.
He was young then. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
The Widower left the Goat Wife and the girl in the kitchen, communing over milk in secret, bleating tones. The wood-splinters of dream remained, a temporary awareness he clung to as he entered the bedroom with its dresser that contained his ritual knife. Soon, thought the Widower, staring at the blade he had been using to plunge into his arm. Soon it would be time to cut off the goat skin at last. To free the woman underneath by tying her fully to himself. Though the dream would fade, this certainty at least would linger.
But first, he went deeper into the bedroom and crawled on all fours through the dust-cloaked closet where his mother’s abandoned donkey skin lived. He wrapped his fist around the pelt, the knife clasped in his other hand, and breathed in the musk and entrails. Fetal, he curled up on the closet’s bottom, and wore the skin around him like an orphaned child might do with a baby blanket. He mouthed at the mildewed pelt for comfort, shaking inside the empty skin until dawn.
Until he could do what needed to be done.
END
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