Our Father’s Were Good Men, Too

Dry branches snapped beneath their boots like brittle bones. Summer gnats swarmed at their ears, a constant whine in the hush between footfalls. The light had gone gold, casting long, aching shadows over their faces as they trudged, half-panicked, half-resigned, down the overgrown path they dared only once each year. No one spoke. Not even the littlest ones. Thomas leaned hard into his eldest son. Levi, just seventeen, carried him without protesting it. Already wide at the shoulder, already wearing the silent endurance of men twice his age, Levi clenched his jaw so tightly it might’ve been carved from granite. Behind them, Caleb bore the sack of chains, and two shovels. Jonah carried more of the same. Miriam held the keys tight to her chest, and a bag of food. Ruth carried the cloth and water. And Anna, their mother, brought up the rear, one hand cupped around her wristwatch, the other worrying the worn beads of her rosary, incense and another shovel. Thomas’s tongue flicked across his cracked lips. No one saw. He did it again, slower this time, tasting something faint and metallic in the air. “We waited too long this year,” he muttered. No one replied.

A bird wailed deep in the trees, something between warning and lament. Thomas staggered. Levi caught his elbow without looking, steadied him, and kept on. Anna checked the watch again. The second hand spun like a wheel unmoored. Then the barn emerged. Not so much built as left behind, sunken into the hill, half-swallowed by willow and pine. Its roof had collapsed inward, but it held. The door… the door still held too. That door had been welded, braced, and welded again. Thomas broke from the boys the moment he saw it. The limp vanished. He ran. “We don’t have much time!” His voice cut through the hush, sharp with fear, almost jubilant. He crashed through the threshold and the boys rushed after. Thomas fell to his knees in the center of the barn, where the anchor posts pierced the earth like the bones of some buried altar. The concrete pads, poured by Caleb’s own hands two summers past, had not cracked. They would hold. “Do it!” Thomas bellowed, already clawing at the posts, trembling fingers searching for the old grooves. “Lock me down!”

The boys moved without hesitation. Rehearsed. Efficient. Chains to the wrists, tight. Pulled upward to the eyelets in the rafters. Ankles shackled and drawn taut to rings sunk in stone. Four bands across the chest, secured fast to the spine of the post. Thomas bucked once. Levi bore down, teeth gritted, pinning him in place while Caleb cinched the final lock. It clicked shut. And the barn fell silent again, except for the sound of Thomas breathing. “Don’t look at his face,” Anna whispered. She said it every year. But Ruth had already looked and Miriam was crying, silent and doubled over, arms clutched around her waist like she could hold herself together that way. Thomas was foaming. Not spit. Something thicker. Membranous. The froth clung to his teeth, now blood-slick and broken from too much grinding. He convulsed in place. The beams trembled, but the locks held.

He bellowed, “I can smell them, Anna. I smell their blood. I smell the heat on their skin.”
“Turn him away!” Anna barked. “Don’t let him see them!” The boys moved fast. Years of doing this had trained them well. They dragged the cross-chain, hauling Thomas until he faced the back wall. He fought like something half-remembered from a cave painting, then let loose a scream, no words, just sound. Raw, animal, scraped from the root of the soul. “It’s time to go, boys! Now!” Anna shouted. The family fled. Their feet thundered across the earth. Eli stumbled on the way out, hands skimming dirt. He turned, just once, as he pulled himself to his feet. And that’s when he saw it. His father’s arched back, an impossible angle, his spine rearing through the shirt like a jagged ridge of stone. Then it split. A clean, violent tear down the center of his back, like a zipper yanked too hard. Something pushed out. Something wet. Bony and vast.

A wing, though it bore no skin, nor feathers. Only tendon stretched over bone, the width of it dwarfing the man who had been Thomas. Hooks curled from the tip like talons. It slammed down against the barn floor, and the entire building groaned. Thomas turned his head, all the way around. His face had begun to unravel. His jaw had unhinged and his eyelashes had grown into long, jointed fingers that clawed down his cheeks and brow, keeping his eyes pried open, so he couldn’t blink, nor look away. His mouth hung open, a black wound where language had once lived.

And then, he looked at Eli. Not past him. At him. And he laughed. It was not a human laugh. It gurgled, cracked and swelled, a perverted, knowing noise that seemed to mock the shape of love itself. Then Anna seized Eli’s hand and yanked him hard. “No,” she said. “Eyes forward. Don’t you ever look back again.” He didn’t. They locked the barn door’s and ran. It wasn’t long after they reached the ravine. The boys were made to dig. This year, the pit went deeper. It changed locations every time. They were never allowed to tell their mother or father where it had been dug. That was part of the rule. “Six feet’s not enough anymore,” Anna muttered. “We’re past tradition now.” Eli dropped into the pit beside his brothers and looked up. Anna stood at the edge, shadowed in dusk. She tossed down the canvas sack, cans, crackers, two jugs of water, two blankets. The boards were laid over the hole. The girls began shoveling dirt back in. “We’ll be back by dawn,” Anna said. “And not a moment before. You hear me? Just stay quiet, baby. Everything’s gonna be fine.” She smiled then. A trembling, beautiful lie. “I promise I’ll see you again.” The hole closed above them.

Aboveground, Anna lit the incense. She and her daughters circled the trees in the half-dark, arms raised, voices whispering prayers too old and broken to mean anything anymore. The smoke drifted around their dresses, thick with salt, sap, and ash. It masked the scent; of skin, of fear…. of sons. Back toward the barn, something screamed. Not a man anymore. Not entirely. But it still had Thomas’s voice and like every year, it was starved.