by H.B. Diaz
The children were hungry.
As the shovel sparked against stone, a single flash in the velvet dark, Mary heard their cries. She saw them in her mind, wide eyes pleading and swollen from crying, and the weight of what she meant to do became easier to bear.
Blood crawled between her blistered fingers and down the wooden handle of the shovel. The bell that hung over her mother’s grave rang and rang, as it had from the post of the sickbed.
“Coming, Mother,” Mary answered, as always. She gathered the filthy hem of her dress and began again, each strike of the spade bringing her closer to what ought to have been the corpse of her lunatic mother.
The strychnine hadn’t worked.
Mary examined each detail of what she had done; how carefully she had measured, how cleverly she had masked the bitterness in Mother’s tea with a spoonful of sweet cream and honey. She performed this ritual for weeks on end, drop by drop, until eventually Death caught her mother’s scent. Instead of sending her across the Lethe however, he’d merely closed her eyes in slumber, like a maiden from a fairytale.
And so the bell tolled. Still her mother lived.
Neither the pouring rain nor the clatter of horses in the street could drown her mother’s words, sung through teeth clenched in madness, as the layers of earth between them thinned.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells…
Mary shut her eyes, resisting a mounting urge to flee. She thought of the anatomist on Burke Lane, of that day she’d passed his lecture hall and watched as he cut into the corpse of a young man, one hundred students looking on with her.
He would need another.
At long last, Mary’s shovel struck wood. The coffin lid was not so difficult to open as she had expected. It creaked on its hinges as the silt fell away, pebbles dropping onto the pillowed silk inside. An expression of terrible sanity came over her mother’s gaunt features as Mary knelt down over her.
“You mean to kill me twice, child?” she whispered in a crow’s voice.
“Yes, Mother.”
Mary collected the soaked hem of her dress once more, and held it over her mother’s mouth and nose. Too weak to scream, the old woman simply shut her eyes and waited for Death to revisit her.
Rain fell into the coffin, pooling in the hollow of her mother’s throat and trickling along a streambed of wrinkles. Mary held her breath, waiting, waiting, until at last the bell fell silent.
That night, when Mary returned home to her children with loaves of bread and lamb chops wrapped in paper, her pockets heavy with money to spare, Mother’s voice echoed still in her ears.
Mary, Mary…
“Children,” she called over the rhyme. “Set the table for supper.”
Tiny feet padded to the kitchen. With cries of delight, they answered.
“Yes, Mother!”
H.B. DIAZ is a gothic horror writer whose short fiction has been featured in anthologies by Horror Tree, ID Press, Flame Tree Press, and others. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association and lives with her husband and son in a historic (and likely haunted) Maryland town. Visit her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/hollybdiaz and on Amazon at https://amazon.com/author/hbdiaz.