Cursed Beasts of the Woods and Hills

Trigger warning: This piece contains violence, mature themes, and some strong language.

Cursed Beasts of the Woods and Hills

Tucker Bradley Sloan

It gets cold at night. Some people think fur keeps you warm, but mine makes me itch. The way it quickly grows through my skin, covering my bare body in the moonlight.

Not to mention, it makes using toilet paper impossible. We have had to resort to other means for cleanliness. What? You do not want to know. 

Mom was turned first with a curse by a cripple who was blocking a covered bridge she had to use in the rain. The water rushed underneath the bridge, and mom was thankful for the shelter, but the shelter would not last long. She approached the crippled man who lay on the side of the bridge playing with his cane he had whittled himself with some of the most morbid designs that mom did not want to look at it any longer.

“Do you know the way the Freemont?” She said loudly hoping the man could hear her. She began to shiver from the cold. “Please, sir? Can you help me? I am trying to reach Freemont by nightfall. Can you help me? Please?”

“That’ll be three gold coins, and I’ll let you pass!” said the bastard. My mother had no form of payment- especially of this magnitude.

“You won’t tell me the way?” she asked desperately.

“Freemont. That way,” he said as he pointed over his shoulder, but not in a clear direction. “Three coins! Three coins! You pass! You pass, then.”

“Here!” she said as she plucked the buttons from the front of her dress accidentally exposing herself to the creep, but she did not care. “Here! Take these! They must be at least half as much as you are asking. Please. I am with child. Do you know the way to Freemont?” she asked again, praying for a clearer answer. Then thunder and lightning struck violently all at one moment.

“Did you hear that?” Mom yelled at the psycho Rumpelstilskin.

“If I did, I wouldn’t tell ya.” Said the evil, old man who then hit my mother’s neck with his cane. He then blew his own dried-up feces into her eyes, and said, “Bitch be gone! Bitch, cut off your head, for after an hour you will wish you were dead!” That is what did it. The curse. That wretched curse. He was evil. He kept the buttons which left my mother exposed, but he did not care. To him, she was just some poor wretch. Someone to threaten. Someone to abuse.

My mother soon writhed and screamed out in pain. I was coming out a lot sooner than expected. It must have been that damned curse. I clawed my way out with record breaking long fingernails that no child a minute old has ever had in history on this earth. Her salt. Her wet, hot blood trickled into my mouth. That was my first connection with my mother, and she was beautiful to me forevermore. At least she was to me. Hot out of the birth canal, mom turned me with the most savage of bites. Ravenous after my blood, but not as much to drain me. Just enough to put me over the edge. Enough to send me to the other side. A side of no return. I cried, but she did not hold back. She just kept sucking, and sucking, and sucking. Do you feel sorry for her? She was sucking me dry, and you feel sorry for her?

 Mom was not exactly one of those people you would want to hang out with, well, especially not the night of the full moon. She had odd boundaries. She was easily scared. It was just her and I those nights, but I was glad. You have not met my mother. It was just the two of us. We were alone, and we had primal, animalistic ways that got us through the tough and cold nights. You would not think of her as being what she truly was when you would see her human body dressed in the worn-out garments from Roger. She was movie-star material at fifty-years-old. She had a face that no one could ever forget, and she loved that about her. Her youthful appearance, her perky tits- all was in God’s hands, and His hands did love her. She was doing pretty good, but then we had Roger. It was just the two of us in hiding in one-armed Roger’s woods and small barn. We liked Roger, but soon we would need more space. More shelter. More food was not a problem. We hunted for what we needed, but we needed more fresh water, and better clothes to get us through each day in the woods, and that crappy shelter.

Roger had it all. Land, money, you name it, but the one thing he did not have was a woman, and he wanted mom. 

“Got your fresh linens for ya ma’am. Don’t they smell nice? And here are your personals, dresses, and pants. Here’s your dress shoes and boots all polished up in a beautified fashion. I…” he said with his little stutter. “I… I like you.” Then momma’s eyes enlarged and turned yellow. Something was happening to her, and it was not a full moon. Was it panic? Sheer panic? Mom did not want to be wanted. No, not ever again. Not by anyone other than me.

Every full moon, we explode out of our clothing and turn into this fabulous, powerful beast. Last month, I grew up to fourteen feet tall. That is a record for me. Females are always bigger when they emerge. Mom could grow up to sixteen feet. The bigger we were, the more powerful we got. The lives would soon end for the food that we sought. Mom sure was salivating, but she knew that to spare Roger, she must soon run away.

Coarse hair pricked through her skin from her head to her toes. She scraped the bloodied dead skin and tissue off her engorged breasts. Breasts that I was immediately drawn to. 

“Roger! You stay away from my mother!” I said as I clasped my mother in my arms and took a drink. A drink I had not tasted in weeks, but this time was different. She kept growing and growing. Fifteen, sixteen, twenty feet! She took off running down the street! In the cold. In the rain. My mother would never return again. 

Anger and sadness filled my heart with madness. My skin started to itch and I began to sweat. I looked at Roger, and he just wept. I took his one arm. I bit it off at the elbow, and said,

“See how it feels to lose something, something you love? She does not love you! She is an animal.” I was the only one for her. I was, and now she was gone. For lack of love, for food, for water, and strength plus motivation- my mother soon passed all alone by the ocean. Starving and hungry and dying for some respect- she died there on the beach and was soon treated like a speck.

“Burn it! Burn it at dusk! We can’t have her seen here. Not now, and not ever.”said the county coroner.

I could smell my mom burn from the woods by the ocean where she died. I had trekked a long way just to say goodbye. I cried so hard as if I had been given a potion. “See? Can’t you see? Life is love in motion.” I sounded drunk as I sang drunk in my barn. I was drunk on whiskey and Diet Coke, but it was my best way to function. Without a mother, and without a lover- I was all alone. Whiskey was all I had left as long as I could get it to go down. Screw life, you perfect creatures. Die young. Die pretty, and feed me.