The Many Mouths of Hunger
The Famine lasted three winters past when the first grave was dug. There were no more bodies to bury, only husks of those from before, gnawed right down to the bone. The villagers of Croth had learned not to ask where the meat came from.
They’d also learned not to pray. Not to a god who had so clearly abandoned them. Desperation became their devotion, hungry acts their confession. The fallowed soil refused to produce a single green thing. The deep well in the village center remained the only thing still producing. Frigid water, tinged grey with talc, sloshed over the sides of it, greedy for the surface as the beaching whale is for sand. Father O’Brien said this well was a blessing, and often prayed over it and into it on holy days.
One Sunday, a stone, no larger than a fist, spit itself up from the grey water and onto the mud beside.
Sally, just seven years old and barely bigger than her bones, was drawing circles in the mud with bare toes.
The shining stone glurped from the well and clattered to her toes. Sally’s eyes went wide and covetous. She understood the idea of owning a thing, but had never done it herself. Though it was just a stone in color, it was perfectly round, smooth as the eyeball of a fish. She rubbed it with her thumbs, made it warm with her palm, and felt sad when it wouldn’t fit past her teeth. She loved it immediately, because it was hers, and because it came from a blessed place. At least so much as she understood.
“Sally!” Her mother called from across the square. She panicked. Her mother would take the stone to sell it for milk or meat. Or worse, would throw it back down the well. And though her stomach ached, she wanted nothing in this world more than this stone. She spun on a heel, headlong into a man carrying an empty canvas sack.
“Watch it!” he wailed.
The stone tumbled from her grasp and clacked to the cobble stones of the street. The man leered at her with pinched brows. His ribs jutted through his shirt like the frame of a felled house. When he saw the rolling stone, he lunged for it and yanked it from her scrambling fingers. The shine of it reflected in his eye as he turned it over in his hand, weighing its worth in mouthfuls.
Sally bit him.
An ugly sound tore from between his lips. Her teeth sank into his hand and she tasted salt. Blood. She whipped her head from side to side like she’d once seen a dog with a rabbit.
The man’s hand went slack as he grunted in pain.
“That’s mine!” she grunted. Sally grabbed the stone from his fingers and ran.
She didn’t stop running until she reached the outskirts of the village, where the burned church stood crumbled like the carcass of a long-dead beast. Crouching in the remnants of pew, she pried open her fingers. Fine cracks webbed the surface of the stone, faint as veins beneath thin skin.
“There you are!” Her mother’s shadow fell over her. The scent of sour sweat and old wool wrapped her. Familiar, and unwanted. Sally had stolen this moment alone, and it was interrupted too soon.
“Off running again while your brothers need tending. You think I got time to chase you like a wild dog?” She grabbed Sally’s arm and wrenched her to her knees.
Sally ducked her head. If she spoke, her mother would see the blood still in her teeth.
Her mother sighed, shaking her once. Not cruel, just tired.
“Come on, girl. No more sneaking off.” She squeezed Sally’s arm for a moment, and it was firm, but gentle. “You know well and better.”
Sally nodded, and let herself be tugged to her feet. Her mother was already muttering about chores left undone, water to fetch, firewood to chop. With eyes straight ahead, Sally rolled the stone into the hem of her skirt and pulled her coat to cover it.
Resentment built in her gut when her mother did not loosen her grip until their small home was in sight.
The door groaned as mother pushed it open. It was a single room with a rafter loft her father had built when the twins were born. It was barely enough for the five of them, and she spent most of her time outside when she could.
Her father had gone up north since last spring, chasing jobs on a ship, any ship. According to his last letter, he’d managed a job as a caulker’s mate on a Norseman’s whaling ship. Her mother didn’t speak of him, and if she missed him, she never said.
The fire smoldered in the hearth, more smoke than heat, the smell of boiled roots from the iron pot. Her twin brothers sat on the floor near the fire, hunched over a shared bowl of watery broth. They weren’t identical, but hunger had drawn their cheeks and eyes into the same dull features.
Neither of them looked up as she and her mother entered.
“Go on,” mother said, releasing her arm at last. “Mary needs milking. If you had any sense, you’d have done it already.”
Sally nodded quickly and stepped toward the pail before her mother could find another reason to keep her close. Her fingers itched for the stone still rolled into the hem of her skirt. She needed to find a place to hide it.
The pail was cold in her hands as she stepped outside, the air was wet with coming rain. Mary was in the pen, dark eyed and always chewing. Mary was a small, miserable thing, ribs laddering her sides, her coat dull and patchy. Mother said it was a miracle to have a cow, let alone one that still gave milk. But she also swore at the cow and called her “unfit even for slaughter”, so Sally wasn’t sure it was good to be a miracle.
Sally didn’t like Mary.
She didn’t like the way the cow watched her, the wet shine of those big dark eyes. She hated touching her, hated kneeling beneath the swollen weight of her body. No matter how much she begged, Mother always made her muck the pen and milk Mary.
Squatting over the stool, she dropped the bucket and pressed her forehead to the cow’s side like she’d seen her mother do. The milk came thin and warm, a weak stream splattered into the metal bucket. Not enough. Never enough. Mary’s belly pressed back against her cheek, fleshy and animal-warm, smelling of fermented cud and lanolin. Her pen hadn’t been mucked, and it reeked on Mary’s hoofs and Sally’s boots.
Squeeze, pull, release. Her hands ached.
Even as she finished milking, even as she lifted the bucket with trembling arms and turned toward the house, she could still feel it, warm and secret in her skirt. The stone she still needed to hide.
She looked at the patch of filth-strewn hay behind Mary, where the pen met the fence, where no one ever dug. Her mother wouldn’t look there, she was sure.
Heart pounding, she crouched quickly, making a show of adjusting her boots, and pressed the stone into the muck and straw. She buried it deep, pushing the hay over it, her breath quick and sharp.
Mary shifted. A slow, uneasy movement, her tail swishing, her hooves scuffing the earth. Sally rose quickly, brushing the straw from her hands.
She didn’t look back.
She took the bucket and walked toward the house, slow at first, then faster, the smell of the pen still clinging to her sleeves.
The rain began to spit cold drops that stung her cheeks and blurred the edges of the world. Behind her, Mary let out a tremulous groan and nosed around the hay at the edge of the fence. Sally ducked out of the pen and back inside, arms aching from the weight of the bucket, sleeves slick and clinging to her skin.
Sally nudged the door open with her shoulder, careful not to slosh the thin milk over the rim of the bucket. Inside, the fire in the hearth had burned down to coals, lending the room a weak, red glow. Her brothers looked up, hollow-eyed and hopeful, as she set the bucket beside the pot.
“Is it enough?” one of them asked. His voice was too big for his small, sunken chest.
Mother knelt by the fire, stirring the watery roots in the pot. “We’ll make it do.” She kept her back turned to Sally, her words flat but not cruel. “Take your share, boys. Don’t spill it.”
Sally watched as her brothers argued in hushed tones over who would get the ladle first. Thomas nudged his twin aside with a bony shoulder and dipped the cup, handing it over without a glance. The milk looked bluer than white, barely clouding the broth.
Sally’s stomach clenched. She moved to sit on the low bench, but her mother caught her by the wrist. “Did you muck the pen like I told you?” she asked quietly, voice pitched so the boys wouldn’t hear.
Sally shook her head, eyes on the floor.
Her mother’s grip tightened, then released. “You’ll do it in the morning. No use letting it pile up.”
Sally nodded, swallowing her protest. Her mother pushed a cup into her hand—half full, barely a mouthful. “Drink up, then bed.”
Her brothers had already retreated to their side of the loft, knees to their chests, heads bent together. The only sound was the scrape of spoons against tin and the soft, rhythmic thumping of the rain on the roof.
Sally drank her share, the milk warm from her own hands. Her mother watched her with tired, searching eyes.
“What’ve you got under your skirt?” she asked, suspicion edged with fatigue.
Sally shook her head, pulling her coat tighter. “Nothing, Ma.”
A long pause. Then her mother reached out, smoothed a hand over Sally’s hair. “You’d not keep a secret from your Ma, would ya?”
Sally shook her head, the lie thick and heavy in her throat. Her mother pressed a kiss to her forehead, then turned back to the fire.
Sally climbed the ladder to the loft and curled into herself, heart hammering. Down below, her mother banked the coals and washed the pot with a rag. The dark gathered close.
She lay awake in the loft, knees curled to her chest, listening to her brothers’ shallow breaths and her mother’s low, exhausted snores. Her mind circled the pen, the stone, the way Mary had shifted in the straw. Every hour she expected her mother to shake her awake, demand to be shown the stone so she could take it and throw it back down the well.
Morning came gray and thin, the light pressing cold through the single window. Sally dressed quietly, keeping her eyes down, and slipped outside before anyone else stirred.
The yard was slick with last night’s rain, the ground pocked and dark. Sally’s boots squelched in the muck as she made her way to the pen, breath held tight in her chest. Mary was awake already, standing at the far end of the fence, head low, sides heaving.
Sally’s gaze flicked to where she’d hidden the stone. The straw had been pushed aside, churned with wet earth. She crouched and clawed at the mess, searching for the cool, round shape of her treasure.
Her hand did not close around the stone. Instead there was soft and slick under her fingers, warm flesh.
She drew back, heart hammering. There in the hollow lay a calf, slick with birth, sides shuddering with the effort of breathing. There were no eyes at all, just blank skin stretched smooth over the sockets. It mouthed the air, searching, tongue lolling from a weak jaw. From the mouth, an awful noise.
Sally’s mouth went dry. Mary let out a low, guttural groan, pacing at the far end of the pen. The afterbirth steamed in the cold, the scent of blood thick and sweet. Her thoughts tumbled: fear, then awe, then an aching, hungry hope.
Meat.
She heard the house door open and shut. Mother’s voice was calling, sharp and already impatient, from inside.
She looked back down at the eyeless calf.
It spat the stone out, and fell still.
Sally jerked upright, clutching the filthy stone to her chest, breath hitching as her mother’s footsteps approached, squelching through the mud.
“What’s all this—?” Her mother’s voice caught as she reached the fence. She took in the sight: Mary trembling, the straw slicked with afterbirth, and the newborn calf collapsed in the muck, already still.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Rain ticked softly against the thatch. Sally’s mother stared at the calf, then at the cow, her face unreadable.
“Saints above,” she murmured.
Sally’s fingers clenched tighter around the stone, hiding it in her skirts. There was cold mud around her ankles. Her mother stepped closer, gaze fixed on the eyeless calf, the trembling cow.
“Never seen the like,” her mother said, voice distant. “No bull for three winters, and still she calves and milks.” She laughed, soft and strange. It was a thin, brittle sound. “The Lord’s ways are strange, aren’t they? Maybe the Virgin herself laid a hand on old Mary.”
She crouched and pressed her palm to the calf’s slick flank, gentle. “In Bethlehem, it was lambs and kings,” her mother went on, almost to herself. “Here it’s mud and famine, and sick old Mary.” She looked up at Sally, a fierce and wild light in her eyes. “But it’s a miracle, all the same. We’ll not waste it.”
She straightened, shoulders squared with resolve. “Fetch the knife, now. And bring the bucket for blood.”
Sally nodded, numb, the stone heavy in her fist. As she turned toward the house, her mother called after her, low and urgent.
“And not a word of this to the neighbors, hear? God gives strange gifts in hard times, but folk don’t always take kindly.”
The stew was thick for the first time in years. The smell alone made Sally dizzy. Thomas and Connor ate first, guttural sounds from their throats as they smashed the food into their mouths. They ate with their hands. Then with just their mouths.
Mother started with a spoon, but soon had set it aside and licked the food straight from the bowl.
Sally too, inhaled the barely cooked stew meat as fast as she could swallow, chewing just enough not to choke. She piled the meat into her belly until it made her sick on the rough hewn table. Ashamed, of Mother’s grimace, she didn’t let the sick go to waste either.
The boys and Mother and Sally slept heavy with the feast. And with the morning came hunger again, as if they hadn’t eaten at all.
So it went, so Sally kept burying the stone, and Mother kept butchering the blind morning calves.
Bury, birth, butcher, eat.
But not all at once. The twins started to get fat, and Mother was worried that Father O’Brien would suspect they were taking both soup and communion. But she also didn’t tell Father about the miracle of Mary, for he too was starving.
We have meat enough to share, Sally didn’t say.
Mother salted what she could, and boiled the rest into jars, then buried the offal deep in the fallowed garden. Soon, they couldn’t hide their fattened cheeks and they stopped going to church. Mother stopped selling milk in the square. They covered their absence with stories of sickness. Sally’s face went red when their neighbors hollow eyes fell on her full belly, as they offered prayers for their wellness.
Meat to fill your belly.
On a Sunday in summer, Mary died. There were already flies settling into her wet eyes and nose when Sally found her.
She dropped to her knees and cried. Not the soft, polite cry of a scolded child, but hard. A cry that pulled at her ribs and made her throat ache. Her hands clutched fistfuls of mud and straw. No more stillborn calves to barely sate her hunger; she cried for her empty, painful gut.
We have meat. Meat to share. Meat to fill your belly and meat enough to feed us all.
When her tears were spent, she sat back on her heels and stared at Mary’s empty eyes. She rolled the stone in her palm. With her small hand, she pulled Mary’s jaw open wider. The cow’s purple tongue lolled out onto the hay. Sally took the stone and pushed it deep into the dead cow’s throat. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes again. Not for Mary. Though Sally was sick with it, she was glad not to have to milk her thin teets again. She cried for the pain in her emptying stomach and her dry, hungry mouth. The faces of her neighbors swam in her mind, and she despaired to become thin again.
So she buried the stone deep Mary’s throat and prayed. Fingers ground so tight against each other that the skin on her knuckles turned red and then white. When Father O’Brien talked about prayer, Sally understood that prayers should be made of words. But because she was young, she didn’t have the words for her prayers over the dead Mary. So she made pictures in her mind and sent them up. But also out. To whatever was listening that could feed her. She shoved aside the pictures in her mind for her brothers and her Mother and her neighbors. They could pray for themselves if they were hungry.
She knelt there a long time, making pictures full of meat piled high on stone plates with mugs of dark mead and hot tea. Sally pictured these things, over and over, until the sky dimmed and the air turned sharp. Her knees had sunk into the mud. Her hands were so sore they wouldn’t unclasp. Still, nothing came.
Only the sound of the wind, and the steady drip of water from the eaves.
Meat to fill my belly.
Legs aching, she stood and made her way back to the house. Her skirts were soaked. Her jaw trembled with anger. For all the things the Father said, that prayers would be answered was always the thing he said the loudest. Louder than the psalms, louder than calls for shame and the renunciation of sin.
Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and the door shall open.
Sally had knocked until her knuckles bled and the door didn’t even rattle.
Anger rose in her throat hot and burning. She kicked over the empty metal pail and punched the wooden wall by the hearth. It hurt. She did it again. The second punch split the skin. She sneered at the prickling blood, then wiped her stinging knuckles on her skirts.
Though fitfully, she slept. Curled in front of the hearth so as not to miss Mother coming home.
Thomas and Connor cooed over each other in the corner and eventually, they slept too.
Mother came home late that night from a trip to the market one town over. Sally heard the wail from the barn and knew that Mother found Mary.
They slept like dogs and didn’t stir at the sound, full-bellied and deaf.
Sally sat up, breath held in the hollow of her chest. She waited for the barn door to slam open, for her mother’s boots to thunder across the floor, for the yank of her arm, the hissed demands to know what happened. But minutes passed and Mother did not come.
The silence grew teeth.
It gnawed at her under the blanket, chewed at the raw edge of her thoughts until she couldn’t stay still any longer. Something should have happened. Her mother should have come in, should have stoked the fire, should have cursed the mud and the weight of things, should have pulled the blanket over Sally’s shoulders in that grudging, familiar way.
Sally climbed down the ladder barefoot. Her brothers still didn’t stir as she stepped past their tangled limbs and moved to the door.
The fog was fat with cold drops of hanging mist as she went barefoot through the mud to the barn, skirts gathered in one hand for all the good it did. They were caked in mud from kneeling above Mary.
The barn door was already ajar.
She stepped in.
The straw glistened slick with wet, and gathered in odd shapes. The air inside was warm and close. It smelled of rotted hay and blood.
Mary stood at the far end of the pen, eyes wide, sides heaving.
Alive.
Sally froze.
There was movement at Mary’s feet. Under the straw and stink.
There, tangled in the straw, was her mother’s shawl. Draped across a heap where the foul odor was strongest. Covering her mouth and nose with a shaking hand, Sally nudged the shawl aside with a toe.
Bones jutted from the pile, pink and gleaming. The fingers were still attached to one hand, curled as if in benediction.
The shawl slipped down further. A shoulder blade. A patch of skin mottled with eyes.
Sally couldn’t scream. Her mouth wouldn’t open. Stumbling back, her heel striking the edge of the barn door and she fell into the muck.
One of the fingers twitched. The ribs lifted slightly, as if acreature had crawled beneath them and pushed up into the flesh with reverent hands. Then the skin shifted. Pockmarks of skin pulled all across the bits of body in the straw.
Mouths opened across it.
Dozens.
Some were no bigger than a coin, puckered and toothless. Others were wide and jagged, lips peeled back across sharp wet teeth. The tongues were slick, muscular things that lolled and twisted over the exposed bones like fevered worshipers around an altar.
And then, from one of the larger mouths, just below the hollow where a breast had once been, came her mother’s voice.
“You prayed, and I answered.”
She did scream then, scrambling back on her hands and feet, dragging mud and straw under her and into the fog.
A wet burble of giggling rose from a mouth on what had been a knee. Then another opened on the curve of the neck and hissed.
“Eat, daughter.”
Mary gave a low, guttural moo that shook her ribs. She took a clumsy step forward. Her hide twitched. And across her side, fresh mouths began to bud. First they puckered, then peeled into rings of jagged teeth. Eyes followed in bulbous form along the haunches of Mary, blinking open like sores.
Mary pressed forward, slobbering mouths whispering the litany from a dozen mangled tongues.
“Eat. Eat. Eat. Eat.”
The voice on the ribcage crooned once more, this time soft and full of love.
“You’re a good girl, Sally. A good girl fills her belly.”
A wound split across Mary’s rump and the skin peeled back from red flesh, supple and bloodless underneath.
The smell made Sally’s mouth flood with spit. Her gut twisted with need, her body remembering hunger like a hymn. The mouths on the meat cooed and clicked, suckling the air, calling her closer. She clutched her own stomach, sobbing now, not from fear but from longing. The wound widened. A slab of flank sloughed free, steaming gently in the barn’s breathless dark.
Sally crawled toward it.
The voices sang as one.
“A good girl fills her belly.”
Sally tore into the flank with both hands, her fingers sinking deep into the warm, yielding flesh. It gave like overripe fruit, the skin peeling back with a soft tear, meat fibrous and glistening beneath. She didn’t chew at first, just swallowed—ravenous, shaking, tears and snot slicking her face. The taste was rich and hot and filled her mouth with salt. Her belly cramped with the shock of it, but still she shoveled more in.
She didn’t hear the soft shift behind her, the damp rustle of straw, the whisper of mouths smacking wetly with anticipation.
Didn’t feel the touch at her feet. At first it was just a pressure, light as breath against her ankle. Then a tug.
Then teeth.
A dozen small mouths had crept near, low to the ground, attached to a slow-bubbling tangle of ribs and limbs. They latched on, tender as kittens at first. Then harder. Then deeper. One found the soft flesh behind her knee and bit down with a sound like wet paper tearing. Another chewed into the meat of her calf.
Sally didn’t cry out.
She didn’t even look.
She kept eating, hands slick to the wrist, chin dripping, eyes wild with a fierce light. The thing that had been Mother suckled at her legs with reverence.
Behind her, the mouths hummed.
“Eat, daughter. Eat.”
And so she did.