Rachel Rodman, Mutants and Hybrids
excerpt
Mutants and Hybrids Publisher: Underland Press Date: 2024 Length: 188 pp. ISBN: 978-1630230791 |
Once Upon an Armageddon
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!” cried War.
Exhaling, War toppled a cottage of straw and a cottage of wood and a house made of candy and a witch’s tower, which contained no door at all, only a single window. And an ensorceled castle covered in brambles, so that all its inhabitants died, crushed by the falling stones, without ever waking.
And the hill that Jack and Jill attempted to go up, but were instead flattened by. And a cottage-sized shoe. And all the rows in a pretty garden, which smashed in a confusion of tinkling bells, splintering shells, and terrified screams. And a castle in the clouds. And a clock striking 12. And London Bridge. And a great royal wall supporting a great royal egg, so that every part: stones, mortar, shell, and yolk, was shattered into fragments and hopelessly jumbled.
And once everything, everywhere, had fallen, and there remained not a structure on earth that deviated in the least from the horizontal, War loped forward, claws clicking in the rubble, and began to devour the scraps.
* * *
“You are just right!” cried Famine.
Spoonful after spoonful, she gobbled up the porridge of the three bears, ensuring that they would have no breakfast.
Opening her mouth still wider, she emptied a whole meadow full of clover, on both sides of the bridge, so that all of the Billy Goat Brothers, even the largest, dwindled, becoming small and skeletal. And the entire pantry of Jack Sprat and his wife (both the fat and the lean) and the pantry of another Jack, who, after selling his cow, became too weak and emaciated to ascend the beanstalk (which, in any case, Famine had already eaten).
And the curds and whey of Little Miss Muffet, so that, when the spider sat down beside her, the malnourished girl was scarcely conscious, and experienced no fear at all, only a nihilistic tiredness. And all the remaining vegetation, everywhere, so that the boy who had once cried wolf now instead whispered piteously to himself, “so hungry...so hungry...so hungry...” and Old MacDonald lost his farm, with a starvation event here and a starvation event there, EIEIO.
After Famine had stuffed herself, she became very sleepy. So she prepared a pillow out of a gaggle of emaciated bird corpses — a certain Goosey Loosey, Ducky Lucky, and so on, who had died as a result of her depredations. Their bodies were all feathers and bone, but no flesh. This made them soft, but not too soft.
Then, settling comfortably beneath a quilt composed of emptied grain sacks, Famine fell fast asleep.
* * *
“I am the fairest of them all!” cried Pestilence. But the Mirror did not agree. Instead, it returned to her a flickering series of faces: youths and maids and lords and ladies, all of whom — allegedly — were fairer than she.
Truly?
Pestilence shook back her sleeves.
Her fingers crackled. From her throne, she sent her lightning out. Through the sky it streaked, crackling over mountains and seas, until it struck a princess with hair like midnight and skin like snow, and a princess with golden hair, which fell in flowing waves, as long as summer. And a lovely peasant in a room full of straw and another in a pumpkin coach. And a charming prince. And a vain prince. And all the king’s beautiful horses and all the king’s beautiful men. And a dashing cat, impeccably dressed in hip-high boots. And a dainty man, fresh from the oven, whose perfect flesh was composed of gingerbread.
Where the lightning touched their vaunted faces, lesions erupted. A terrible fever coursed through their heads, burning their brains to cinders; another passed across their skin, inflicting deep scars. Their limbs fell off and their noses did too, and through the pits that remained they sneezed bloodily.
Pestilence shook down her sleeves. This time, turning back to the Mirror, she simply raised an eyebrow.
“You are,” the Mirror affirmed.
* * *
“Who will help me make the sky fall?” asked Death.
No one would, of course — no one ever helped Death — and so Death reached up sadly, with a beleaguered sigh, and proceeded to do it herself.
She pecked industriously. As she pecked, everything fell: sun and moon and the enterprising cow that was suspended above the moon, mid-jump, and the twinkling, twinkling little stars, about which generations of children had wistfully wondered (massive, was the answer: lethal and hot), and all the layers of nighttime darkness that lay behind them. As the pieces crashed to earth, they crushed her, and they crushed War and Famine and Pestilence, and they obliterated, too, all the wreckage of the world, until all was still, silently ever after.
*
* *
[Author’s note] This piece was first published in Kaleiodotrope in 2019.
© February 3, 2025 by Rachel Rodman
