Story time...

"About two hundred metres to the south of the farm, as the hillside began to slope down towards the woods, I stopped and sniffed. Fifty metres or so to the right was an unmarked mutate grave, and to the left, another one about forty metres away. Even buried so deep I could still smell them; not entirely unpleasant, growing earthier as the worms fed. Dropping to my knees, I placed the body down carefully and pawed the ground, slicing away the upper crust to the crumbling dirt beneath, and dug. The rain fell heavier and swelled in the cavernous neck of the mutate. All sorts of scents lifted from the grass as the droplets disturbed them, and I closed my eyes, breathing deeply to take them in. I was still an adolescent back then, nascent in my senses, unaware from one day to the next how powerful one sense might be over another. Too dictated by the circadian rhythm of my blood and the rise and fall of the balance of my bodily chemicals. I could return tomorrow and only know the graves by the sight of the mounds. Or I could smell the nesting birds in the woods down below. I’d seen the mood swings of my brothers as they grew through puberty and into adulthood; teenage tantrums and fits of irrationality. Growing pains, I’ve read them called in books. Well, at sixteen, mine weren’t so much growing pains as mystery boxes to be unlocked, and sometimes locked away again."

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Short Story: Ends Meat

There it was again – the smell. Barrick glanced at his father, who had his eyes closed but he probably wasn’t asleep, just too exhausted by hunger to keep them open. His cheeks were shallow, as though sucking air, his lips two thin lines of scabs.

                Father’s hemp shirt had become a shawl these last few weeks. The same was true for Barrick, his brothers and his sister.

                Finally, father’s eyes opened, his nostrils twitched, and with energy summoned from a dark place, he rose. “Again…” he said, barely moving his lips; tension in the jaw and scabs that would split.

                “I don’t know how they can do it,” said mother, head limp and resting on her raised knees.

                Father swung his legs from the bed and stared into space. The look was a disease, and they all had it. Barrick had seen it first in the faces of the eldest; at night, sharing a bowl of thin soup and disappearing as the first songs began, taking a bottle of moonshine with them. One by one, others caught the look and stopped turning up at all. He’d see them by day, afflicted by the vacant gaze as they sat beside the transparent wall of the dome. They’d stare at the sands but Barrick had no idea what they were looking at; perhaps they saw mirages of visiting caravans that no longer came.