Page 49 of What Rough Beast

averageamericanmale: Yes, absolutely. Whatever you need.

burnedoutgirl: Okay

burnedoutgirl: I gotta go.

“Wait,” I say. But she’s gone, and I’m left staring at my phone, hoping that I didn’t fuck up the one good thing in my life.

Even though I already did.

Thirty

Ava

Widow is in Tripod’s pen when I get to work on Tuesday after school. My cat is sleeping in a cage, breathing evenly, each rib showing. She hasn’t gained weight, but she’s not losing any, either, which gives me the barest flicker of hope. Hydration is a different story; my hands can’t stop water from dribbling out the open side of her jaw, and with her IV removed, it will become a problem that we need to find a solution to, and fast. Short of her growing a new jaw, I don’t know what that is. I run a finger down her nose, and the deep rumble of a purr begins. She lifts her head, the bad side of her face pulling away from the towel, where her constantly exposed tongue has dried to it.

“Let’s turn you over, what do you say?” I ask, reaching inside to shift her. She rolls easily, a flash of white showing along her jaw. I look more closely, afraid that more tissue has died and receded, showing bone. Instead, there’s a spiderweb-thin figment of tissue covering the fissure between her upper jaw and where the lower should be, closing the gap. It’s only just begun at the corner of her mouth, and even as I watch, a thread of white extends from the cluster, reaching for another that’s coming to meet it from the wrecked remains of the lower jaw.

“What the fuck?” I ask, yanking my hands back.

They touch, tendrils finding one another and braiding together, weaving something that isn’t normal tissue, starting a process that can’t be called healing.

But it’s working.

I step back, unsteady, the office chair hitting me behind my knees. I sit down hard, gaze shifting to the incubator, where the egg shifts, stretches, slips back into rest. Hailey Wagner had asked me when I remembered having my fingerprints last as a joke, but I know the answer exactly. The night I found the egg, they were written large on its leathery skin, my blood the ink. The next day they were gone, absorbed.

It drank from me, pulled something, took without asking, and I’ve been giving ever since. From the care I offer it to whatever illness is sucking my energy and stalling my heart, it has been exacting a price. In her cage, my cat’s tail flickers. White tendrils spread there, too, new flesh growing to cover naked vertebrae, stitching back together what humans tore apart. Something is wrong at Restoration Acres, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t right. Her body was ravaged by humans, the real world taking its pound of flesh. If something unnatural is willing to fix that, I see no reason to fear it.

And if it has to draw from me for that to happen, so be it. Humans damaged me, too, and the real world looked the other way. If something from the other side is taking a piece as well, I’ve already been broken, and at least there are benefits.

“We should talk about the caged graves.” Widow’s voice comes from the doorway. She nods toward the desk, where the live trap that I’d abandoned on the cemetery path sits. “Saw you on the security camera.” She comes over, perches on the stool, fixes me with her cold, gray eyes. “You know about World War One?”

I give her a glare. “Yes, Widow, I’m aware of World War One.”

“How about the Spanish flu?”

“I know it was bad.”

Widow swings her feet onto the desk. “Bethington lost a lot of young men to the war, then women and children started dying at home, all of them horribly. Things go wrong like that, people look for someone to blame, and the Zedekers were easy targets.

“Didn’t help that Typhus wasn’t drafted. We were farmers back then, considered essential to food production, but a man not going to war didn’t set right with folks. Add his last name and the fact that people were dying like flies—some got it in their heads it wasn’t just the flu knocking them down.”

“What, like a curse?” I ask.

“I can’t say what they were thinking, but I know it wasn’t rational. Even when Typhus died from the flu, that wasn’t enough to stop rumors. So, they dug him up. Chopped him into bits and threw parts all over town. Panic overwhelms logic in times of fear, and everybody was scared.”

“And?” I ask, horrified.

“Oh, all those fuckers died,” Widow says, dropping an uncharacteristic f-bomb, her eyes taking on a gleam. “Handling a dead body full of Spanish influenza will do that to a person. Some people understood that was the reason, others stuck to darker thoughts, but either way, everybody wanted to make amends.”

“How?”

“They brought him back to the family, bit by bit,” Widow says. “Somebody would find a piece, wrap it up in a cloth, leave it on the doorstep. The family had already put a cage over his grave—and everybody else—in case the town lost its collective mind again. Had to cut a gate into the top of his, so that we could bury whatever new piece of Typhus came back to us.”

“That’s horrible,” I say.

“People are horrible.” Widow shrugs. “Things got dicey again back in the eighties. You heard of the Satanic Panic?”

“I know what it was.”