Bleed Mean — A. Morgan-Penn

I was fourteen the first time I considered killing my father. Every night, I’d steeple my raw, red fingers and pray for him to die. I didn’t care how. I didn’t care why. I just wanted to be rid of him. To go just one day without his silver belt-buckle biting into the skin of my back. 

A darkness pooled in the pit of my belly that summer, as mean and tarry as a gator pit. Cut me and it could have slid out. 

Bleed mean, they call it. When you slit open a gator’s gut and black blood pours out. Means they’re tainted. We burned those. No use for tainted meat. 

I skinned my fair share when I was a boy, but the practice has since fallen out. Can’t make an honest wage off it anymore, though my Daddy never knew much about honest work to begin with. He lied and cheated for his living, existing as the bottom-feeder in every river he ran. 

Mama had left the summer earlier, taking JoDean with her. I guess she thought I was old enough to take care of myself. And I was, for the most part. I earned money whatever way I could. Sometimes I’d take my grandfather’s old hog-killing gun into the woods and come out with three or four possum skins. Sold each for a nickel. If I had a hunting dog, I could have sold a lot more. 

I never cared for possum meat, though. Too greasy. Rabbit was fine. Chicken was best, but I’d have to steal those. Got bit by many a guard dog in those days. 

Daddy never asked where I got the money. He only took it. I learned quick that if I wanted to keep my money, I couldn’t ever keep it on me. He’d tear me out of my clothes looking for a penny and then whip me for the trouble. 

I hid whatever money I made in mason jars and buried them out back, only digging them up once Daddy had drank himself to sleep. I didn’t buy much. Just the necessities. Maybe a cigarette here or there, though I mostly scrounged around for those. 

I realized I wanted to kill my father when I came home one day to find every last one of my mason jars dug up and smashed against the front porch. I had to kick the glass out of the way just to get in the door. Daddy beat me bloody that day, rawing my hide until my white shirt was soaked red. 

And somewhere in the stinging pain I found a tarry meanness and used it to patch my wounds. I festered with the dark thought for days, letting it sink into my mind like an anchor sinks into the Mississippi mud. 

I had pulled the trigger a dozen times over, always knowing that the creature on the other end would die. And yet… I couldn’t squeeze the trigger when faced with the back of my Daddy’s balding head. 

Staying out of his way entirely was the second-best option. The less I saw him, the better I could pretend he was already dead. I’d slum it in town some nights, sleeping in a back room of the hotel I laundered at. My hands would be cracked and aching from the lye, but I’d knot them into fists and fall asleep to the thrumming pain. 

Other nights I slept under the stars, lulled to bed by the steady hum of July flies as a fire crackled beside my feet. Still, I could feel the weight of the black organ forming within me, pouching below my taut, tan skin. 

It was August when she arrived and the organ erupted, forever staining my insides.

I knew her name and not much else. Mayella Mannard. She wore white dresses and straw hats and roomed at the hotel as her family stuck out the tail-end of their summer long excursion down the Mississippi River. I came with the maids to collect her sheets one day and found a perfect ring of red right in the middle of them. I had laundered an assortment of soiled sheets with a wide variety of stains. Piss stains. Cum stains. Even shit. Even blood. 

But never this. Never the half-dead blood from between a woman’s legs. And for some reason, it sent a jolt down to my cock to see it. 

Mayella cornered me later that day while I smoked out back. 

“Can I have a drag?” she asked, already reaching to rip the half-done cigarette from my mouth. 

“I don’t even know you.”

“I’m Mayella Mannard. You do the sheets, don’t you?” She leaned against the brick wall, kicking the side of my shoe. “You’re kinda cute, you know that?”

I handed her the cigarette and watched as she slipped it between her lips. A sort of kiss, even if indirectly. She talked and I mostly listened. She told me about her birthday and the plantation her family visited and their hellish trip. Sometimes my mind would drift as she spoke, but she’d eventually reel me back in again. 

“You ever have sex before?” she asked, flicking the cigarette to the ground. 

“Have you?”

“Yeah. Lots of times. It’s fun.” She shook her brown curls from her face. “We should do it sometime.”

I grit my teeth, feeling a tightness take over the bottom of my belly. 

“Only kidding,” she laughed, dragging a hand over my shoulder before patting my chest. Her fingers were as cold as ice. 

I only saw glimpses of her after that, her white dresses fluttering behind her like ghostly smoke. Running errands, she said. Her family had taken ill and they were extending the trip. No laundry from that room anymore. 

I didn’t really care. Didn’t really notice. Not until she found me in the back room, slumped against a laundry basket as I tried to catch up on lost sleep. 

She knocked over the kerosene lantern by the door, and I saw a snatch of red on the hem of her dress as she fluttered over to me.  She looked like a boo hag, all withered and raw-faced. Her eyes were sunken deep into her skull and her hands so red they looked as though they’d been skinned. 

Tears streamed down her face, carving paths through the blood and grime on her cheeks. She twisted her bloody fingers into my shirt, heaving right into my chest. I felt her teeth against my skin as she spoke. 

“I did something real bad.”

I led her through the woods, guided by moonlight as I tugged her under branches and through the brush. She was surprisingly pliable, like I could have led her by a hair if I wanted to. She didn’t speak. Didn’t so much as whimper until we arrived at the haint-blue backporch of my Daddy’s house. 

“This your place?” she whispered in the dark, the smell of blood wafting off her as strong as perfume. 

“You stay here,” I bade her, crawling up the porch to peek into the bedroom window. Daddy slept on the bare mattress, dead to the world. 

Inside, I hurried her to my room and ripped through my drawers for something she could wear. Everything had holes chewed through them, so I gave her the shirt off my back instead. 

“Your daddy give you those?” she asked, eyeing my back. 

“You go on and get changed now. I’ll bring you a wash rag to get the gunk off your face.”

I filled a wash pan and wet a rag from the kitchen cupboard. It still smelled of goat’s milk soap from back when Mama used to make it.

Mayella stood naked in the center of my room, her soiled white dress pooled around her pale ankles. She didn’t try to cover herself. Didn’t even try to hide the bruises all over her meaty thighs and doughy belly. She seemed multi-colored to me. White skin decorated with red and blue and yellow. Like one of those Paint horses they have at the county fair. 

She looked soft, too. From the swell of her breast to the curve of her ass. I imagined her to be at least a year older than myself, maybe even two, though it’s always hard to tell with girls her age.

I set the pan by her feet and turned away as she cleansed herself. I kept my eyes on the floor, counting every nail on my side of the room. I had counted to 17 when she dragged the washcloth over my back. Over my half-healed wounds. I seethed at the pain, jerking around to catch her hand by the wrist. 

“It’s all right,” she cooed, stepping closer. She wore my shirt now, her long brown hair falling over the front where her nipples should poke out. 

“Don’t touch me,” I said, but she was already stroking my cheek, thumbing away a bead of sweat. 

“Shh, baby.” She took my hand and slid it under the shirt. Up to her breast. “It’s all right.”

“No,” I whispered right as she pressed her lips to mine and stole my breath.  

My chest tightened, warmth dripping from my diaphragm down to my crotch. I felt a swirling in my center, like the feeling you get right before you squeeze the trigger. Right before the rifle butt kicks back into your shoulder, and you’re sore for days afterward. I felt it then as I feel it now. That secret apprehension that colors every second of an experience. 

She pressed me down into my bed, sliding on top of me with practiced ease. I wondered how many times she had done this. How many boys she had done this to. The rustling of pants. The dripping of sweat. The heat of her body on top of mine like we were made to do this. 

It made the black organ swell, swell until it popped. Until my lungs drowned in the black bile my body had been producing for the better part of the summer. I fell into a pitch black slumber, head throbbing as my body collapsed into the crevices of my bed like hell itself was trying to drag me through the mattress and into the earth. 

She was gone, come morning. I followed a trail of red foot prints out the house and down the back porch. Daddy swayed under the old oak tree, the rusted skinning-gambrel hooked through his ankles. Flies swarmed his flayed flesh, laying their eggs in the exposed muscles. Black blood streaked down from the slit in his belly and onto the pile of entrails beneath him. 

Those swarmed with life, as well, each organ supporting an entire ecosystem of insects. All except one. 

There on top laid the black organ, untouched by all the putrid life of the Mississippi bayou. No use for tainted meat. I guess she knew that too.

AUTHOR BIO:

A. Morgan-Penn is a Carolinian writer with intimate knowledge of southern folklore. She utilizes rural settings to explore themes of isolation and alienation in the deep south. Currently, she is pursuing her BSN in nursing and writing a full-length psychological thriller set in the 1980s in her free time.