I was born into one of those old families of the South, the kind that has long silence toppled and decayed, attempting desperately to hold itself together. We’d had money, once, as evidenced by the grand old buildings that sat on our property. But the old barns and guest-houses sat empty and abandoned, choked with cobwebs and weeds and Spanish moss. The forest had begun to reclaim the property.
My family was like many others of its kind. A long, winding lineage marked with rape and slavery and pain. But one thing set us apart- there were no women in my family. I had no mother, no sisters or grandmothers. Every member of my family was male.
My five brothers and I never thought it strange, though. We were uneducated and mostly separated from the outside world. Our days were spent laboring on the decaying property, all of our efforts inevitably useless. When we weren’t plucking weeds or clearing out the decades of trash from the various buildings, we played. The quasi-wilderness of our home was a perfect stage for our games.
My father was a kind man, but strict. Our self-contained life came with a strange set of rules. There was a chapel on the property, a small white thing half-hidden in the woods. It was in better condition than anything else, due to my father’s doting care. We were not allowed inside the chapel without him, however. A padlock on the door prevented us from sneaking in.
We were, on occasion, allowed to go to town. It was a half-hour walk through the woods to get there, and excursions were highly anticipated. There were conditions, though- we had to stick together, and we weren’t allowed to talk to women.
We could talk to men and other boys, but my father strictly forbade us from talking to women, girls, even old maids. He instructed us to say hello and good day and yes ma’am and thank you ma’am like good little Southern boys. But other than that, not a word.
This was weird, of course, but everyone in town seemed to abide by these rules as well. The women would give us curt nods and avoid us otherwise. It was so engrained into our daily lives that none of us ever questioned it.
It wasn’t going to work forever, of course. My oldest brother, Jamie, started making eyes at the pretty girl who worked at the drugstore ice cream counter. She made eyes back. Soon he was sneaking off to be with her during our visits. He would leave my brothers and I at the drugstore or the park, buying our silence with penny candy and ice cream.
Jamie’s little tryst didn’t last long, though. Lazlo, the second youngest, had always been loose-lipped. One day when we came back from town, our father asked us what we did.
“Jamie snuck off,” Lazlo blurted. “He always goes and sneaks off to see that ice-cream girl.”
Pa’s face grew very pale. He turned to Jamie and seized him by the shoulders.
“Is that true?” he asked in a voice that was much too quiet. “You’re seein’ a girl?”
A tense silence hung over us. Jamie opened his mouth, closed it.
“Jamie, come join me on the porch,” Pa said icily.
My father never hit us; I want to make that clear. But when he was truly angry or upset, he had a way of talking that cut you to the bone, that made you feel like absolute dogshit. When I was really little and got in trouble, I would hide and cry for hours afterwards, consumed by guilt.
Jamie and Pa went onto the porch. The rest of us dispersed throughout the house, the happy mood of the day soured. For a couple weeks afterwards, we beat on Lazo especially hard, and gave him the worst roles in our games. After that he mostly kept his mouth shut.
Jamie returned with a pale face. He didn’t talk to any of us until the morning, where he tried to act like nothing had happened.
I caught him alone that day. I tugged on his sleeve and asked him, “What did Pa say to you the other night?”
Jamie looked down at me. His face suddenly seemed very old. But he gave me a weak smile and tousled my hair.
“Not yer business,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
I wasn’t in the habit of displeasing my older brother, so I went along with my life.
The next time we went to town, the ice-cream girl batted her eyes at Jamie, but he stared straight away from her, and she frowned sadly. She wasn’t as nice to us after that.
There isn’t much else to say of my childhood. It was unique, surely, but we had always lived our lives that way, and I was not the questioning type. Our existence continued rather uneventfully for years. My brothers and I cleaned old houses that would never be occupied, and weeded yards that would never be used. The forest grew in faster than we could pluck.
Then came the day when Jamie turned eighteen. Birthdays were frequent in a family of seven, but turning eighteen- that was special, according to Pa.
On the special day, Pa got us all up early and scrubbed our faces with a spit-wet cloth. He made us put on our best clothes, moth-eaten from disuse. He gave Jamie one of his old suits, and it hung baggy on his thin frame. Then we gathered in the chapel.
Inside, the air was still and silent. I remember feeling disappointed at the sight of the perfectly normal interior. I always expected there to be some great, terrible secret that my father was guarding. But it was just an old chapel.
We sat in the front pew, all in a row. Pa and Jamie hung back at the door. They exchanged some quiet words, and then began to walk.
They marched arm in arm, staring stiffly ahead. They stepped in time to some silent rhythm. Slowly they made their way up the aisle.
My father bent behind the pulpit, and the sound of creaking wood broke the terse silence. He had opened a trapdoor.
Pa and Jamie, still arm-in-arm, descended into the door, down stairs we couldn’t see from our angle. My brothers and I sat uncomfortably in the pew, restless but still quiet.
I felt a strange swelling sensation, like something enormous was happening that I couldn’t comprehend. I channeled this by plucking wildly at the loose threads of my ill-fitting pants. My brothers and I sat nervously for a long while, until Pa emerged again, alone. He shut the trapdoor behind him.
“Time to go home, boys,” he said.
I wanted to ask where Jamie was, but my tongue felt heavy. Instead I fell into step behind him, and we made a solemn procession back to the rotting mansion where we lived.
Jamie was there the next morning, snoring in his bed next to mine. We all scrutinized him for some change, but he was the same Jamie he’d always been. The only answer to our questions we received was a hard sock in the arm when we bothered him too much.
A few months later, Pa came into our room in the middle of the night. I had been lying awake, but I pretended to sleep as he quietly roused Jamie and led him out the door. I dozed very lightly, only to be re-awoken when I heard them coming back up the stairs.
Jamie made his way to his bed slowly. In the faint moonlight, I could see that his shoulders were shaking. He crawled under the covers. I could hear the muffled sound of him sobbing.
After that, Jamie was different. He was withdrawn and angry. He stopped playing with us and was quick to yell. There was an angry tension between him and Pa. Even as young as I was, I knew the change had something to do with that strange place in the chapel.
I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out the secret of our family. After all, I was the second oldest. My birthday came that November.
I remember every second of that day.
Pa woke me before my brothers. He brought me into the master suite where he spent the nights of his lonely existence. The room might have once been grand, but now the walls were ashy with cigarette smoke and it smelled like stale living. The bedsheets were rumpled on only one side. It made me sad to think of Pa sleeping alone every night in that huge, motheaten bed.
Pa dressed me in the same suit that Jamie had worn. It fit me a little better; I was fuller and shorter than he was. I looked in the mirror and felt a flash of pride. I was a proper gentleman for once, like those clean-cut men in the old magazines we sometimes found while cleaning; no longer a dirty-faced little boy.
Pa stepped back after fixing my tie, his eyes shining. The harsh line of his mouth wobbled as he rubbed his thumb across my cheekbone.
“I’m so proud of you,” he said, and hugged me. My chest swelled with warmth and pride.
We walked through the woods to the little white chapel. It was cool, and the woods were alive in red and orange. My brothers gathered in the pews while Pa and I waited outside the doors.
He looped his arm through mine and looked at me.
“Just follow my lead,” he murmured, patting my arm. His words soothed me. The doors of the chapel swung open on their own, and the sound of church bells echoed through the woods, though the rusty bell in the tower sat still. But I wasn’t afraid.
Pa walked me down the aisle, towards the empty pulpit. We walked in time to the toll of the bells, something I realized only the two of us could hear. My brothers whispered and fidgeted in the pew. Jamie sat on the far end, staring straight ahead, his eyes dull and back stiff.
We ascended. Behind the pulpit lay the secret trapdoor, ancient and moldered. Pa gave the rusted brass ring a mighty pull, and it opened with a creak.
Before us lay a stone staircase, riddled with cracks and dappled with moss and mushrooms. The shallow stairs led into the dark.
For the first time that day, I felt something other than anticipation and pride. I was afraid. But I think, looking back, that I would have been unable to leave if I tried.
Pa and I walked carefully down the stairs. He still held tight to my arm. We emerged into an earthen tunnel, tall enough for us to walk upright, though roots from the ceiling brushed our heads.
For a moment, we stood still. There was a strange sputtering sound, and a breeze blew from the darkness ahead. That should have been impossible, as the tunnel seemed to only go deeper into the ground. But as the breeze came, so did light. Alcoves had been scooped into the earthen walls, and tens of candles suddenly burst to life in their wax-filled recesses. I jumped as the sudden light revealed hundreds of moths. They took off, excited by the flame. Their soft wings flapped and brushed against my cheek.
As Pa and I walked down the tunnel, my apprehension grew. I started shaking. Pa stood resolute by my side, his presence steadying.
I don’t know how long we walked in silence. The tunnel was not without its own sound- the pop of fat from the candles, the drip of moisture from the ceiling, the tamping of our shoes and the fluttering of moth’s wings. They landed on my shoulders and my head, and bounced off of my face often.
I wanted to ask Pa where we were going. But, yet again, I stayed silent.
Soon, I became aware of a faint sweet smell. Almost at the same time, the candlelight revealed a door. Moths were clustered around it so thickly that it appeared the frame was made of a canvas of pale shivering wings.
Pa turned to me. In the flickering candlelight, the hollows of his face were cast in sharp relief. He looked more like an ape than a man.
“This is where I leave you, son,” he said. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Don’t be afraid. You won’t be hurt, I promise. Just do what Nature tells you to do.”
He saw that I was shaking, and he laid his hand on my face.
“This is our family’s legacy, Eli. Jamie did this, I did this, my father before me did this…it’s as old and ancient as our blood. Older, even. Nothing is going to harm you.”
“Okay,” I choked out. My father smiled wanly, then turned and left me before the door.
He disappeared back the way we came, and I was alone.
Cautiously, I pushed open the stone door. The moths fluttered away from it, forming a cloud that I had to bat away to see.
The chamber that I emerged into was huge. The walls were lined with hundreds of alcoves with candles burning bright, and more candles were spread across the floor. Across from me, there was a great white bed, surrounded by gossamer curtains. The sweet smell was overpowering, undercut by something primal and funky, like body odor.
Then, the bed moved. From its side unfolded pairs of strange appendages. I struggled to comprehend what I was seeing. They were arms- human arms, ending in human hands. But they bent in too many places, and they were too long and pale. Long tendrils like feathers flared from their elbows.
It wasn’t a bed.
It was a person, perhaps in the loosest sense of the word. Its body was huge, white and bloated. What I had thought were pillows were actually huge pendulous breasts, bare of nipples. The swell of the ‘bed’s’ comforter was a huge stomach, sagging down to the ground in ripples of white flesh.
As I watched, a pair of the arms reached to gently part the gossamer curtains, like a bride lifting a veil.
Its face- how to describe its face? Once, cleaning trash out of our house, I found an old china doll. It had a puffy, exaggerated expression of innocence, though time had worn the paint from its face and gave it only the barest imitation of humanity.
The creature’s face looked like that doll, but its eyes were large and bulging, and completely black.
Most notably of all, from its forehead sprouted a pair of long feathery antenna. They were as long as its arms, reaching towards the high ceiling. They waved back and forth gently like ferns.
As I took it in, stunned by the wrongness of it all, the creature smiled at me. Its pale, fleshy lips parted, revealing a dripping black mouth with no teeth. And then it spoke.
“Hello, sweet Elias,” it said. The voice was so wrong. The intonation and words were clearly English, the voice feminine. But it had a weird buzz to it, and a thick quality like someone speaking with their throat blocked.
I was somehow able to find my own voice.
“What are you?” I asked. “How do you know my name?”
A strange buzzing and clicking noise came from the creature. The fat on its body rolled like waves, and the toothless mouth gaped wider. It was laughing.
“I am you,” it said. “You are the fruit of my loins. I birthed your brothers, and your father, and your father’s father, and his father before him. I know every inch of you, your flesh, for it grew and pupated within me. Now, the time has come for you to give of yourself, so I may have your son.”
I understood almost immediately. I felt a mix of horror and revulsion, but it was far-off, suppressed. The sweet smell filled my nostrils. It made my head swim. My skin was hot and itchy in the ill-fitting suit.
I should have been terrified. I should have been disgusted. I am, in retrospect. But I was under the spell of the creature, the scent of its pheromones too powerful for my brain to comprehend. In that moment, I knew that my body served a singular purpose, and I knew what that purpose was.
Then I was before the creature. Its many arms petted my hair, my body, my face, the soft feathers tickling me. It cooed and spoke to me as I climbed on top of it, my body sinking into its soft and yielding flesh.
I lay on its stomach, its bosom as my pillow. Lying against its skin, though it was tacky like dough, I felt a comfort I had never known nor have ever known sense. I was safe, I was swaddled, I was loved. It wrapped its spindly arms around me, its buzzing words of encouragement burrowing into my brain like worms.
And then I began to move my hips, and I was in heaven.
I’ll spare you the mechanical details of that coupling. Me recalling having sex with a moth-monster who was also apparently my mother and grandmother is just as traumatizing as you reading about it.
But what I must say is that I have never felt pleasure like that since. I have never once felt so held, so loved, and so safe. I know now that I wasn’t in my right mind, and recalling it makes me nauseous. But there are still nights I jolt awake feeling a ghost of that heavenly pleasure, and for a moment I grieve that I’ll never feel it again.
I don’t know how long I was in the chamber with that thing. I vaguely remember dressing myself slowly, still drunk from the pheromones in the air. I remember the creature rubbing its belly as I left, followed by a cloud of moths.
I slept dreamlessly for hours and hours. Over dinner, I made eye contact with Pa as I was shoveling spaghetti into my mouth. He beamed at me proudly, and I felt good.
But Jamie was looking at me also. He didn’t return my smile, his mouth now permanently set in a grim line.
As the encounter with the moth creature faded like a dream, Jamie continued to bother me. Hadn’t he experienced the same heavenly pleasure I’d had? Sure, there were lingering dregs of fear, even disgust at what I’d done, but if everyone in our family had done it, what was the harm? It was our legacy, after all.
More time passed, and my confusion turned to anger. Jamie barely interacted with us anymore. Did he think he was better than us? Did he think that his feelings made him separate from the family, somehow?
I never got the chance to confront him. He came to me.
It was about five months after my eighteenth birthday. Life had continued as normal. But one morning when we woke up, there was a strange feeling in the air. I made a comment about it to my brothers, but they just looked at me blankly. As we went about our chores, I felt strangely happy.
We were walking out of one of the old guesthouses when Jamie grabbed me roughly by the arm and pulled me away. He was nearly nose-to-nose with me, and his eyes were bright and wild.
“You listen good now, Eli,” he hissed. “Why the hell do you think Pa never let us talk to the girls in town?”
I looked at him in confusion.
“That thing in the chapel,” he continued. “It doesn’t want outside…competition. It gave birth to all of us. Boys. But it can’t control the gender of the baby it makes. Why do you think there’s no girls in our family? What do you think happens when one is born?”
The beginnings of dread begin to creep up from my stomach.
“Yours is coming today,” Jamie continued, his mouth turned into a scowl. He let go of the vice grip on my arm. “And for your sake, I hope it ain’t a girl.”
His face fell. “I wasn’t so lucky.”
Before I could say anything, he was gone, stalking off after the rest of our brothers. I stood staring after him.
As night came, my dread grew. Gone was my pleasant mood from before. Night found me sleepless, and I stared at the ceiling for hours.
When the door creaked open, I knew it was Pa. He came to my bedside and motioned for me to join him.
We made our way through the dark woods to the chapel. The bad feeling was everywhere, soaked into the very air. The creatures of the night were silent, and it was cold.
The chapel stood a white smear in the darkness. We went inside. The floorboards seemed to vibrate, and when Pa opened the trapdoor, I heard it.
A terrible, buzzing wail, full of anger and pain, punctuated by inhuman squeaks and growls. I had heard the sounds of animals in pain before. This was like some sort of horrible symphony of all of those cries.
I recoiled at the sound, standing rooted to the spot. I looked at Pa to see if my horror was reflected in his face. It was, to some extent, but over it lay a veneer of hardness. I realized then that whatever was happening was no mystery to him. He had probably experienced it a hundred times before.
He took my arm and practically dragged me down the tunnel. The moths were flapping around wildly, diving at us and bouncing off the walls. A few of them flew into the candle flames, their feathery wings burning as fast as paper.
The screaming got louder.
We came to the chamber. The creature was in the same spot, but this time, its body was rippling like a wave. Some of its arms were braced on the walls and floor. The sweet smell was gone, replaced by that of blood and viscera.
The creature’s puffy doll-face was twisted in a horrifying mask of pain and rage. Spittle flew from its black mouth as it wailed, the sound bouncing around the chamber. Its antenna swiveled wildly around its head, every feather twitching and shaking.
At the sight of us, its pallid face contorted further.
“LEVI!” It bellowed my father’s name. “WHAT HAVE YOU WROUGHT? THE FRUIT OF YOUR LOINS BEGET ME ONLY CURSES!”
I was transfixed by the creature’s rippling body, bile rising in the back of my throat. It was pushing something out, I realized. A dark puddle was forming on the floor beneath it.
My father moved towards the creature like he meant to comfort it. A pair of arms sideswiped him with surprising strength, sending him careening into the wall. He tripped over the candles.
The creature let out a deep, throaty groan. Its body gave one more powerful ripple, and there was a wet noise as something dropped to the floor of the cave.
What lay before me was, essentially, a cocoon. It was roughly watermelon-sized, white, and it glistened with fluid in the light. The creature’s screams died into rattling breaths.
As I watched, the cocoon began to tremble. A tiny red fist tore its way through the gauzy membrane. From the hole, I heard a cry, weak and plaintive. It was a baby.
Something came over me. I somehow knew that the baby was mine. I’m sure others can tell better stories of parental instincts kicking in, but that’s what happened to me at that moment. While my father and the creature struggled to recover, I knelt down and began ripping the cocoon apart, trying to free the baby within.
The cocoon had the texture of spider silk, thin and sticky. It dissolved at my touch. Soon the baby was free. Its skin was red and blotchy, and it looked like a lumpy potato. But its face and cry were wholly human, and as I held it in my hands, I could feel the very gears of the world turning. My fate was changing.
“Elias,” the creature rasped. I looked up at it. Its expression had relaxed, its black eyes grown wide and shining, reflecting the candlelight. Its antenna had calmed, resuming their slow and gentle waving. It reached its nearest pair of arms out to me.
“Bring it to me,” it demanded. I lifted the baby in front of me, and realized with sudden dread that something on it was missing.
The baby was female.
The creature’s arms strained for the baby, and I instinctually clutched it to my chest.
“Why?” I asked.
“It is a usurper,” the creature spat. “It is a curse, and the labor was long. I am hungry.”
It licked its lips, leaving behind a film of gray spit from a black tongue.
Jamie’s words came back to me then, and I realized that he was right.
Pa had gotten to his feet. He clutched his side, clearly hurt, and his clothes were singed from candle flames.
“Just give it to her, son,” he wheezed. “It’ll be over soon.”
I looked down at the baby. It was crying and squirming. It grabbed onto my shirt as tightly as it could, its little fist balling in the fabric.
For the first time in my life, I made my own decision; I turned away from my family.
And I ran.
I held the baby tightly to my chest as I sprinted into the tunnel. My father called after me, but his voice was drowned out by a buzzing wail that grew in volume until it seemed a physical thing, a wave pushing me out. Moths bounced off my face. As I ran past the candles, they blew out, filling the tunnel with darkness.
I thought I heard my father scream, a sound of terror beneath the creature’s anger. I don’t like to think about it.
I left our property towards town, the baby still bawling loudly. Finally I had to stop running, my lungs burning and my legs cramping. I have never been as afraid as I was limping through that dark forest, my daughter’s cries a dead giveaway to any who would follow. But nothing did.
I walked through the town, knocking on doors until someone answered. My daughter’s sobs had tapered from a steady stream to quiet whimpers, and I knew she needed care soon.
The ice-cream girl answered the door, her hair mussed with sleep. She took in the sight of me, recognizing me immediately, and her eyes widened at the baby in my arms.
“Please help us,” I croaked. It was the first time I’d spoken to a woman, really spoken.
Shirley’s family took care of me for a while. They taught me how to care for my daughter, how to change diapers and prepare formula and burp her. I never left their house for fear of seeing my family. I was there for only a week or two, then my daughter and I hit the road again. We went from town to town, surviving on the kindness of strangers. It was usually women who ended up helping us. I met all kinds of women- women hardened by the world, bitter ones, gentle ones, fiery ones. They taught me about the world, about all the things I’d been missing.
When we were far enough north that I felt safe, I began trying to settle down. My daughter was growing into a healthy, fat little toddler. She was the axis on which my world turned- everything I did, I did for her. Eventually I named her Deborah- Debbie for short.
I found a decent job, with on-site daycare for Debbie. Back then, it was a little easier to provide for a child than it is today, I won’t deny. But I still worked myself to the bone. It was the easiest way to chase away the shadows that plagued my mind.
I had lovers here and there, both men and women, but nothing lasted. Sex was difficult for me, considering what I had been through. I always felt disgusting afterwards, always unable to ignore the simple fact that it would never feel as good as that. And that knowledge made me feel like a monster. Eventually I stopped trying to feign interest in sex, and I was happier for it, but it meant that I never got into a real relationship.
I didn’t need a relationship. I had Debbie. And as the years passed and she grew bright and smart and funny, the shadows of my past seemed farther and farther away.
But I was a fool to let myself be comforted by time. I cannot escape the curse of my blood, no matter how far I run.
Yesterday was Debbie’s fourteenth birthday. Today she locked herself in the bathroom in the morning, crying for hours. When she finally let me in, I could barely contain a scream.
Because there, bursting from my daughter’s forehead, was a pair of long feathery antennae.