"Something happened here," Annabell answered the quiet. The sound ruffled the bugs, a fog of black lifting and settling.
"Look with eyes, not emotion."
Annabell could barely look at all.
Behind the slaughtering ground of the field, down the lane, an ominous aura hovered over the Johsson house and squat sheds. Too quiet. Empty. Annabella saw movement. A flash of wing. Death birds.
Moving along the fence line to the house, she searched for the family. That smell… Her stomach bounced, a visceral dread building. No Elder Johsson and not a single other soul. No sound but flapping wings and something knocking in the light breeze.
Closer, her eyes caught a bit of color on the fence. Blue checks. The kind of work shirt favored by many of the village men. She thought someone had taken his shirt off, discarded it over the side of the fence in the sun, but as she drew closer, she saw other colors.
Feet moving, hand over her mouth, Annabell walked up to the sight. She recognized the shape of a person, a man; his clothing turned to rags. Decaying, identifiable by a single clean corner of blue checked fabric, one of the Johsson men dangled on the pine fence, a grisly rag doll.
Annabell's thoughts stopped moving. Dropping her basket, she ran up the drive to the house. The yard was empty.
And then it wasn't. The lump of another Johsson, pants and shirt shredded. Another dead person. More than a week dead like the sheep.
The front door to the little wood house hung open, a silent scream, the windows turned to eyes in glass-shattered death throes. The pained moment settled hard, dared her to step into the next horrific sight and go into that house. Unable to turn away, to think, to ask sensible questions like who had done this and where was that person, Annabell's brain split. Her mind went silent as her feet propelled her forward.
She was not thinking. Only moving, seeing, experiencing. The world changed, reality disjointed and wrong. She existed outside of it, a confused spectator moving through a decaying fog of what was left of the Johsson farm and family.
The inside of the house was dark, lit with motes of from the sunshine outside, streaming yellow through the door and windows. Splayed out on the floor, half her body in shadow, was Elder Elmer Johsson's widowed wife. The poor thing was naked, twisted in angles, her head grown to the size of a melon. It must be the grandmother, not a youth. Half her unbound hair was missing, but there was more than enough of the dull gray streamers left to identify her.
Annabell didn't throw up until she found the Johsson children. Two of them. Untroubled by scavengers, but covered in rot and insects in active harvest, they lay at odd angles on the floor of a back room.
And then she was running, panting, body straining, going to her brother's house.
Her mother screamed accusations in her mind."Annabell Roe, what have you done?"
She stumbled and tripped, sobbed, two dead children in her mind's eye. Crossing over fields and behind her own house, climbing fences and approaching the back way. She ran until she saw Bidly, stretched out on his side, looking flat. The big, white wooly dog guarded the place. Bidly didn't move an inch. She stopped, sinking to her knees—fear and understanding filling her up—strangling her with the pain of it.
The house, the barn, the whole yard held its breath in the last gasp of something awful. It felt the same as the Johsson's. It felt like death. Like that moment when one entered a room expecting to find a person and instead found a discarded shell of what was. Annabell knew that moment very well. The mark of it was an ugly, obvious gash in time and space. She could feel it. Smell the toxic fumes. Pain and woe sucking up the air and leaving her with a racing heart and shaking hands. Questions yelled so loud she couldn't hear any of them over the roar of understanding.
Death.
She was going to walk into that house. See things she did not want to see. Bad things. The entire world was dead, and Annabelle Roe, Woman of Woe, the only survivor.
This was her family. Whatever was in that house, in the barn, beyond, they left her to clean it all up. Annabell whispered her mother’s words out loud,"Are you sure you aren't a little poisoned by the creeping dark? Are you stained? Then a little water does redeem."
Alone or not, there were things to do. She had to fix it. This was not the first time the world flipped and turned upside down, and it would not be the last. She had a big family, after all, and not one of her elder brothers knew how to take care of things that needed doing. They turned into lumps staring at walls, leaving Annabell to see to it. To keep moving.
"You should be the one to do it. Family is family,"Mama agreed.
Annabell did the things. She found the bodies of her brother's children. The basin for cleaning sat tipped over in the middle of the floor. Grabbing it up, she warmed water, found soap. She'd thought she would wash the bodies, like she washed her Mama, like she washed Mark.
She'd put them to bed properly.
But time worked fast. Touching bodies dead for more than a week challenged Annabell's skills and her stomach. She found a kerchief so she could breathe through her mouth and keep the death bugs from getting inside of her.
This house was empty. Nothing lived here. Spirits gone home to the stars and forefathers. With no spirit to hold them together, the bodies were returning to the earth in a mess of smells, gasses, and fluids. These were not people anymore.
Taking blankets from their beds, quilts made by a grandmother who never had the chance to kiss their cheeks, she transferred the children. Did what she could. The garden was just-plowed soft. She'd bury them with their parents.
Pinned to a wall by kitchen knives and garden stakes, Benjere gave her the same trouble in death as he did in life. She couldn't leave him and didn't know how to get the decaying shape down. Task at the forefront of her mind, Annabell kept moving. Step by step. Eventually dragging him out of the house on a hand-sewn blanket from his childhood, one so loved that the fabric pieces spelling his name no longer retained any color.
Looking for buckets and tools for cleaning in the barn, Annabell stumbled upon the two young men who worked for Benjere. Here, the walls looked blackened by fire, but she couldn't tell the cause of it. It was a spotty kind of fire, leaving pitted holes. There was more violence, more strangeness. The bones not as they should be. Two heads, sitting up on a workbench, facing the door, sightlessly greeting her. Nothing had feasted on these bodies. In the throws of high decay, she could still recognize every face she saw on Benjere's property.
All her senses focused on taking care of things, Annabell kept moving. She added the boys to her list of things to do. Step by step, methodical movements. Very much the way most days went.
