I never knew my mother. I didn’t even know what she looked like. There wasn’t a single picture in our house, and not a shred of social media evidence.
Today I would finally find out. I wiped my sweaty brow as I turned onto the highway and hit the gas. The memories of my past came flooding into my mind as the world passed by.
As a kid, the only family I ever knew was my father.
My father was a man of God. Or so he’d like me to have believed.
But why would a man of God never step foot in a church?
Why would a man of God never have me baptized?
And yet, every night, religiously, he would sit me down before dinner and we would pray together.
“Our Father, who art in heaven…”
And then it would almost always turn to the same two things… My father, his hands clasped tightly and his eyelids squeezed shut, would beg between grinding teeth:
“Please Lord, please accept Her into your arms.”
Sometimes a tear might fall, but he would always then look at me.
“And watch over my boy.”
My father’s ashamed face filled my mind as I turned off the highway and onto the little farm road.
“I know I have made a mistake, Lord. Forgive me.” His words echo in my ears as I pass by rows of corn fields.
“Where is Mom?” I must have asked that question a thousand times as I grew. But the answer eluded me. Instead of answering, he would turn to the bottle.
The door to my father’s bedroom was always locked. But one Saturday night he’d drunk the bottle from almost cap to bottom. Sunday morning I found him curled up next to his bed, a Cross gripped tightly in his hands. It was the first time I’d ever been in his room. It had been drowned with religious doctrine; pages of the New Testament were even hanging from the ceiling. The pages grew more frequent as I neared a pale cabinet in the corner of the room.
The memory faded from my mind briefly as I reached the spot in the tree line that had to be the entrance and parked my car on the shoulder.
The cabinet was so covered in pages that I could barely see any wood at all. I pulled one page off and jumped back in surprise. The cabinet was made of white bone. And it looked ancient. I hesitantly reached for the black iron handle.
A cold hand fell on my shoulder. I recoiled and found myself face to face with my father, his eyes bloodshot and crusty drool dripping from his chapped lips.
“I’m sorry, I…” I started to stammer.
“That was hers,” he whispered to me.
“Mom?” I breathed. My father didn’t respond, instead he gazed at the cabinet and a curtain of darkness fell over his eyes. Then he turned back to me and spoke.
“Don’t call her that again.”
His words chilled my spine as I began walking the forest trail. He was never the same after that night.
After the cabinet incident, my father began to scream at night. It was usually wordless, but sometimes I could make out the same two words.
“Forgive me!”
Any attempt to comfort him was dashed, because at that point, he couldn’t bare to look at me. I didn’t know why. Other people had no issue looking at me. Well… except the one time I went to church. I’ll never forget that. I was about 16. The second I entered I felt, unwelcome, which from what I’d been led to believe, was not supposed to be the right reaction. Eyes glanced at me quickly and then looked away, hushed voices whispered, and I found myself in the only empty pew. I was an alien there. I left shortly after.
The trail was darkening by the second. I had been walking it for hours. Still, it plunged deeper and deeper into the forest, with no sign of ending. I pulled out a flashlight and clicked it on. I was not stopping.
When I was 17, my father, in a drunken panic, carried my mother’s cabinet out onto the yard, drenched it in lighter fluid and set it on fire. He broke down weeping next to it and when the police arrived, he was inconsolable. Only one thing survived the fire, an old polaroid photo. It was a picture of my father and what had to be my mother, standing in the woods, smiling. Except nearly all of my mother had been burned out of the picture.
My father’s condition deteriorated. Attempts were made, but it was soon too dangerous for him to live at home, and so he was interred at a mental hospital.
Years went by, and with each visit I made, he looked worse. And he never once looked at me.
I shook my head and shined the flashlight forward, now completely ensconced in darkness. Despite it being summer, it was freezing. I pulled a jacket out of my backpack and continued onwards. I knew I was close now. I could feel it in my bones.
At 25 I got the call from the hospital. It was the end. When I arrived, my father was nearly gone.
My father, his eyes shut, reached out for my face. I leaned forward and his shriveled fingers pulled me to his cracked lips so he could whisper his confession.
“I killed her.”
I moved my lips to his ear.
“Where is she?”
My father’s lips trembled. He took a sputtering gasp, winced and then he told me where she was.
And then he finally looked at me; for the first time in nearly a decade, he gazed upon me with those cloudy eyes. Which immediately widened in terror.
“You’ve always looked so very much like her…” he whimpered. And then he was gone.
At last, I found the grave. There was no headstone, but the great pale tree above it could not be mistaken. I plunged my shovel into the earth and dug until my hands were raw.
Finally, I finished. I heaved an exhausted sigh and tossed the shovel.
The coffin was handmade, unnaturally wide and covered from top to bottom in the New Testament. I touched the lid and flinched; it was searing hot.
Grabbing the shovel again, I pried the lid off, opened the coffin and shined the flashlight at the bones of my mother.
She had been decapitated, and her head, resting on her chest, was the first thing I saw.
Her teeth were like pointed knives, a whole mouth of razor-sharp canines. An icy chill snaked from the top of my spine to the bottom of my toes. I took a breath and then looked past her head at the rest of her body.
The flashlight dropped from my hands, plunging me into darkness as I screamed.
Wings. The bones of great, spiky wings lay spread out above her shoulders.
I turned heel and sprinted away blindly into the darkness of the woods.
My chest burned but I did not stop, until at last, my knees buckled and I collapsed to the dirt.
I squinted my eyes in the darkness, just barely able to make out the forest in the pale moonlight.
And then I felt it… behind both of my shoulder blades. It was like two burning needles were piercing through my skin.