Put By
Eric Stanway
I guess you could say it started with Aunt Betty’s pickles.
No, wait. That wasn’t fair, and I wanted this to be fair. Truth is, Aunt Betty did just about everything a good woman should do after Uncle Eugene passed on. I mean, she could have just shut herself away, hid from her neighbors, wallowed in self pity. But that wasn’t like Aunt Betty – not a bit. She continued to put on a bright face, talked to the mailman, tended her garden.
It was the garden that was her pride and joy. She had what they called green fingers – she could raise almost anything in there – beets, beans, carrots, Brussels sprouts, peppers. She coddled and nursed that garden just like it was her child. And, when summer was just reaching its peak, she’d dig out that big boiling pot and rack of mason jars and start pickling away. Come September, she’d grab the whole lot, throw them in the back of her car, and take them down to the pickle festival over in Winchester.
Man, how’d she lord it there! The girl was in her element, beaming over her table stacked with jar after jar of comestibles. The flatlanders would cluster about her table like moths, money virtually falling out of their pockets. It was a rare event when she didn’t come home with at least three blue ribbons under her belt.
So, I guess you could say she died happy. Right in the middle of pickling, actually. They found her sprawled out on her kitchen floor, the pot still bubbling, a beatific smile on her face. There are worse ways to go.
And I ended up with the house, being the only relative left. A modest little place, right outside of the Four Corners in Richmond. That wasn’t a bad thing, really, me being out of work, married, and a five-year-old to care for. The house wasn’t big, but it didn’t need to be. Abigail was the happiest I’d seen her in months. I can still see her there, standing on the back porch in the last of the summer sun, beaming at little Emily as she ran about the yard.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Abigail lately – how she looked, how she stood, trying to embed that in my mind, trying to remember how it had all once been. She was sort of what you would call a gypsy type – all curls and cheekbones, and easy smile and dark, sparkling eyes. And my daughter, the same. I could see what a beauty she would become.
For a while, life was good. I got myself a job pumping gas down at the Four Corners, Abigail a part time gig at the Winchester library. As Emily was getting to be of school age, the need for babysitters became a little less urgent.
Well. It was one Saturday afternoon, and we’d just come back from Mr. G’s Discount Foods, and we had a whole lot of canned goods. Emily was off across the road, playing at her friend’s house. We were just about to put the groceries in the pantry when Abigail suddenly scrunched up her nose. She said she thought she could smell something.
For a couple of minutes, I couldn’t detect a thing. And then it came to me, faint but growing – the kind of whiff that you get when you leave some trash bags in the garage for a bit too long in August. That unholy stench of rotting flesh, ripe with maggots. We did a little scooting about in the kitchen, trying to find it, thinking maybe the cat had beaten something half to death and it had crawled off under the cabinets. But there wasn’t anything there.
So then, she opened the cellar door, and it hit us full in the face. There was definitely something dead down there. We soaked a couple of dishrags, put them in front of our noses, and headed down the wooden steps.
The cellar was pretty much what you’d expect; a furnace that had seen better days, a wheezing water heater in one corner, various piles of junk piled about the room, sitting under a thick shroud of dust and cobwebs.
And then I saw the pickles, all stacked up on little shelves on one wall. Row after row of mason jars, all labeled with those fancy little stickers you’d get at the feed store with the flowers around the edges. And, on each one, an indication of the contents and the date of jarring, in my aunt’s meticulous handwriting. There, in the middle of the floor, we saw the source of the smell. One of the jars had broken open, and there was a thick, greenish jelly stretching out over the floor.
I really don’t know why Abigail chose to reach out and touch that stuff – me, I was giving it a wide berth – but that’s what she did, and her expression of curiosity fell into terror and pain as it suddenly jumped up and grabbed her hand.
Everything is kind of a blur after that. I remember her shrieking it hurts! It hurts! She was whipping her arm around as the stuff devoured it right up to the shoulder. There were no words after that, just screaming. I could see her clothes burning away, then the skin, then the muscles, going right down to the bone. And she was still screaming, right up until it leapt up and ate her face. After that, she fell to the floor, and her whole torso disappeared into the sludge. Her legs were still moving out of some kind of motor response, pounding on the concrete floor. Then, even that stopped, as the jelly completely enveloped her, leaving just a skeleton suspended in aspic.
I have no idea how long I sat on the floor, staring at her. I could hear my own breathing coming in painful, dry, sobbing gasps, and it seemed to echo in that cellar as I gazed in horror at the thing that used to be my wife.
Then, it began to move.
It was slow, at first. It moved Abigail’s hand, trying to get purchase on the floor. Then, it rose up on one elbow, and turned to face me, and, I swear, I could see Abigail’s eyeless sockets regarding me with something that looked like hunger. I was frozen to the spot as it grasped onto a support beam and awkwardly staggered to its feet. It swayed on its new legs as it lumbered slowly toward me.
That’s when something broke in my mind, and I jumped to my feet and ran past it, making for the stairs. I could see the thing out of the corner of my eye, pivoting to follow me as I ran, panicked, up the steps. I caught my foot on the last one, and found myself sprawling on the kitchen floor, bashing my head on the cabinet doors. There was a wet, slithering sound behind me, and I could see it coming up the steps, Abigail’s grinning skull barely visible in the half darkness.
Shrieking, I crabwalked my way back across the floor, and pulled myself to my feet. A blubbery parody of a hand caught the threshold of the cellar door, and the thing lurched clumsily into the kitchen, and paused for a second, just staring at me.
Then I heard my daughter’s voice, from outside the door: Daddy? I’m home! I dove for the door and latched it and said stay right there honey! There was no way I was going to let her see what her mother had become. It was moving faster now, finding its legs, and reaching for me with what used to be my wife’s hands. I grabbed the first thing that came to hand, which was a huge can of crushed tomatoes, and hurled it with all my strength at its head. The can hit it with a muffled explosion, and then just stayed there, jutting out of the side of its head. My wife’s skull turned a little to the side, looking at me with what seemed to be an expression of reproach. That last semblance of humanity disappeared, however, as the jaw suddenly unhinged and hung open like a snake’s mouth, uttering a silent scream.
After that, I threw everything I could at the thing. The groceries were still on the counter, and I bombarded it with canned beans, bottles of juice, spaghetti sauce. None of it even slowed it down, and I was backing up against the wall with this nightmare gaining on me. That’s when I grabbed the big white and red box, and hit the thing dead center with it. The box exploded, and a big black hole suddenly appeared in the creature’s chest. It threw up its arms in something that looked like pain, and there was a weird bubbling, hissing sound, and my wife’s skeleton suddenly disjointed, falling to the floor in a heap, as the jelly turned from white to a dark, viscous brown, spreading across the linoleum floor.
Everything went suddenly quiet in the kitchen. I could hear my daughter screaming and pounding on the door, but that seemed a million miles away. I just stood there and stared down at the black, bubbling mess, with a broken box of kosher salt jutting out of the middle of it.
* * *
And that’s it, really. I guess Emily must have run to a neighbor’s house and called 911, because the police showed up pretty quickly. After that, there were a lot of questions downtown; the cops didn’t seem to really buy what I was saying, but they had no ideas of their own. Emily stayed with the neighbors for a few days while I was under close custody, and it was nearly a week by the time I was allowed to go back home. The place had been thoroughly cleaned. There was no sign that anything had happened in the kitchen, and all of the jars of pickles were gone. I was told later that a bunch of people in HazMat suits had shown up, put a big tent over the whole house, and hit it with an array of chemicals. There was a memorial service for Abigail, but it was a closed coffin. Myself, I doubted she was even in there.
We just sort of get by, Emily and me. I still have my job at the gas station, and we manage to pull a little government aid, but we still have to be careful about money. Emily doesn’t sing or run about as much as she used to, and sometimes I’ll catch her staring into empty space. We scrape out a living, subsisting on mac and cheese, PB and Js, canned soup. It’s not fancy, but it keeps us going.
But we never, ever eat pickles.
No, wait. That wasn’t fair, and I wanted this to be fair. Truth is, Aunt Betty did just about everything a good woman should do after Uncle Eugene passed on. I mean, she could have just shut herself away, hid from her neighbors, wallowed in self pity. But that wasn’t like Aunt Betty – not a bit. She continued to put on a bright face, talked to the mailman, tended her garden.
It was the garden that was her pride and joy. She had what they called green fingers – she could raise almost anything in there – beets, beans, carrots, Brussels sprouts, peppers. She coddled and nursed that garden just like it was her child. And, when summer was just reaching its peak, she’d dig out that big boiling pot and rack of mason jars and start pickling away. Come September, she’d grab the whole lot, throw them in the back of her car, and take them down to the pickle festival over in Winchester.
Man, how’d she lord it there! The girl was in her element, beaming over her table stacked with jar after jar of comestibles. The flatlanders would cluster about her table like moths, money virtually falling out of their pockets. It was a rare event when she didn’t come home with at least three blue ribbons under her belt.
So, I guess you could say she died happy. Right in the middle of pickling, actually. They found her sprawled out on her kitchen floor, the pot still bubbling, a beatific smile on her face. There are worse ways to go.
And I ended up with the house, being the only relative left. A modest little place, right outside of the Four Corners in Richmond. That wasn’t a bad thing, really, me being out of work, married, and a five-year-old to care for. The house wasn’t big, but it didn’t need to be. Abigail was the happiest I’d seen her in months. I can still see her there, standing on the back porch in the last of the summer sun, beaming at little Emily as she ran about the yard.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Abigail lately – how she looked, how she stood, trying to embed that in my mind, trying to remember how it had all once been. She was sort of what you would call a gypsy type – all curls and cheekbones, and easy smile and dark, sparkling eyes. And my daughter, the same. I could see what a beauty she would become.
For a while, life was good. I got myself a job pumping gas down at the Four Corners, Abigail a part time gig at the Winchester library. As Emily was getting to be of school age, the need for babysitters became a little less urgent.
Well. It was one Saturday afternoon, and we’d just come back from Mr. G’s Discount Foods, and we had a whole lot of canned goods. Emily was off across the road, playing at her friend’s house. We were just about to put the groceries in the pantry when Abigail suddenly scrunched up her nose. She said she thought she could smell something.
For a couple of minutes, I couldn’t detect a thing. And then it came to me, faint but growing – the kind of whiff that you get when you leave some trash bags in the garage for a bit too long in August. That unholy stench of rotting flesh, ripe with maggots. We did a little scooting about in the kitchen, trying to find it, thinking maybe the cat had beaten something half to death and it had crawled off under the cabinets. But there wasn’t anything there.
So then, she opened the cellar door, and it hit us full in the face. There was definitely something dead down there. We soaked a couple of dishrags, put them in front of our noses, and headed down the wooden steps.
The cellar was pretty much what you’d expect; a furnace that had seen better days, a wheezing water heater in one corner, various piles of junk piled about the room, sitting under a thick shroud of dust and cobwebs.
And then I saw the pickles, all stacked up on little shelves on one wall. Row after row of mason jars, all labeled with those fancy little stickers you’d get at the feed store with the flowers around the edges. And, on each one, an indication of the contents and the date of jarring, in my aunt’s meticulous handwriting. There, in the middle of the floor, we saw the source of the smell. One of the jars had broken open, and there was a thick, greenish jelly stretching out over the floor.
I really don’t know why Abigail chose to reach out and touch that stuff – me, I was giving it a wide berth – but that’s what she did, and her expression of curiosity fell into terror and pain as it suddenly jumped up and grabbed her hand.
Everything is kind of a blur after that. I remember her shrieking it hurts! It hurts! She was whipping her arm around as the stuff devoured it right up to the shoulder. There were no words after that, just screaming. I could see her clothes burning away, then the skin, then the muscles, going right down to the bone. And she was still screaming, right up until it leapt up and ate her face. After that, she fell to the floor, and her whole torso disappeared into the sludge. Her legs were still moving out of some kind of motor response, pounding on the concrete floor. Then, even that stopped, as the jelly completely enveloped her, leaving just a skeleton suspended in aspic.
I have no idea how long I sat on the floor, staring at her. I could hear my own breathing coming in painful, dry, sobbing gasps, and it seemed to echo in that cellar as I gazed in horror at the thing that used to be my wife.
Then, it began to move.
It was slow, at first. It moved Abigail’s hand, trying to get purchase on the floor. Then, it rose up on one elbow, and turned to face me, and, I swear, I could see Abigail’s eyeless sockets regarding me with something that looked like hunger. I was frozen to the spot as it grasped onto a support beam and awkwardly staggered to its feet. It swayed on its new legs as it lumbered slowly toward me.
That’s when something broke in my mind, and I jumped to my feet and ran past it, making for the stairs. I could see the thing out of the corner of my eye, pivoting to follow me as I ran, panicked, up the steps. I caught my foot on the last one, and found myself sprawling on the kitchen floor, bashing my head on the cabinet doors. There was a wet, slithering sound behind me, and I could see it coming up the steps, Abigail’s grinning skull barely visible in the half darkness.
Shrieking, I crabwalked my way back across the floor, and pulled myself to my feet. A blubbery parody of a hand caught the threshold of the cellar door, and the thing lurched clumsily into the kitchen, and paused for a second, just staring at me.
Then I heard my daughter’s voice, from outside the door: Daddy? I’m home! I dove for the door and latched it and said stay right there honey! There was no way I was going to let her see what her mother had become. It was moving faster now, finding its legs, and reaching for me with what used to be my wife’s hands. I grabbed the first thing that came to hand, which was a huge can of crushed tomatoes, and hurled it with all my strength at its head. The can hit it with a muffled explosion, and then just stayed there, jutting out of the side of its head. My wife’s skull turned a little to the side, looking at me with what seemed to be an expression of reproach. That last semblance of humanity disappeared, however, as the jaw suddenly unhinged and hung open like a snake’s mouth, uttering a silent scream.
After that, I threw everything I could at the thing. The groceries were still on the counter, and I bombarded it with canned beans, bottles of juice, spaghetti sauce. None of it even slowed it down, and I was backing up against the wall with this nightmare gaining on me. That’s when I grabbed the big white and red box, and hit the thing dead center with it. The box exploded, and a big black hole suddenly appeared in the creature’s chest. It threw up its arms in something that looked like pain, and there was a weird bubbling, hissing sound, and my wife’s skeleton suddenly disjointed, falling to the floor in a heap, as the jelly turned from white to a dark, viscous brown, spreading across the linoleum floor.
Everything went suddenly quiet in the kitchen. I could hear my daughter screaming and pounding on the door, but that seemed a million miles away. I just stood there and stared down at the black, bubbling mess, with a broken box of kosher salt jutting out of the middle of it.
* * *
And that’s it, really. I guess Emily must have run to a neighbor’s house and called 911, because the police showed up pretty quickly. After that, there were a lot of questions downtown; the cops didn’t seem to really buy what I was saying, but they had no ideas of their own. Emily stayed with the neighbors for a few days while I was under close custody, and it was nearly a week by the time I was allowed to go back home. The place had been thoroughly cleaned. There was no sign that anything had happened in the kitchen, and all of the jars of pickles were gone. I was told later that a bunch of people in HazMat suits had shown up, put a big tent over the whole house, and hit it with an array of chemicals. There was a memorial service for Abigail, but it was a closed coffin. Myself, I doubted she was even in there.
We just sort of get by, Emily and me. I still have my job at the gas station, and we manage to pull a little government aid, but we still have to be careful about money. Emily doesn’t sing or run about as much as she used to, and sometimes I’ll catch her staring into empty space. We scrape out a living, subsisting on mac and cheese, PB and Js, canned soup. It’s not fancy, but it keeps us going.
But we never, ever eat pickles.