The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron by Ross E. Lockhart, Justin Steele

up and going to bed, neverending meals, neverending shittings, neverending conversations with Mom about the same things.
    My mother—baffled. A baffled woman. Even after I killed my Dad she was always buried in who knows what fantasies. She and Dad’s sister made a feint of fighting over me, but without managing to be convincing. I wasn’t convinced, anyway. Mom had a way of forgetting all about me; every least fraction of her attention I ever received I wrung from her by trespassing on her dreams.
    “What do you want now?” she would ask me, as if I’d been hectoring her, even when I hadn’t exchanged a word with her for two or three days.
    Early one afternoon I woke up and found her gone. She’d taken nearly everything worth having, which wasn’t much, as there was never much in the house. I’d overslept so long that I had no mind to speak of, as I remember. She normally woke me up. I could get one thought to appear, but not to tumble over into another. Nearly a week, she was away, and when she came back, I was gone. Angela had tried to call and found the phone was out, then came by one evening and took me, plunked me down on the sofa between Brian and Stephanie.
    I know how to kill, already, but I suppose something new is meant.—Kill Brian.—And kill Stephanie. Just the one or the other won’t be enough. Each is nothing without the other, they’re a team, hateful word, a team and the one I leave behind will kill me.
    I’m old enough, why not let them kill me? It would make them happy, it would mean they could do more of what they always wanted to do. Death doesn’t scare me.
    I am old because I have never wanted to die, have always been careful—careful, and determined not to give up my life for nothing, and not alone. That’s no premonition. It’s a desire, with some of the externalities of a premonition, that’s what it is. If I go, I go sledding on your corpse, there’s too much of me to go alone.
    Is that the meaning of this little girl? At seventy-seven I have a lot left to learn, or does she mean at last, at last I am ready for the final lesson?
     
    ***
     
    Nodded off! How long was that? Everything looks the same. My boots, bony knees, knuckly hands. My chair. The window. Bare boards.
    Lessons from Dad. When I was about eight or nine, I decided, I forget why, to provoke my father. I was very contrary and then, I remember standing stock still shouting
    “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!”
    at him. He smiled at me, queerly. Then he went and shut himself up in his room. That was his sanctum. He padlocked it when he wasn’t in it. I wracked my brains for a way to get in, and I never did. With all my ingenuity, my genius for trouble, my intuitive sense of escape routes and infiltrations, when there was no hillside full of dense foliage I couldn’t wriggle inside somehow, to think, I never managed it. I never saw the inside of it, even after I killed him.
    That night, the night following the day on which I shouted fuck you, I dreamt about him. He was “going off to work in the morning.” In my dream, this entailed his putting on his jacket and tie and going over to a post beside the front door. The dream supplied the post, which was blackish, scarred, splintery. My father picked up a sledgehammer and began slamming it against the side of the post with a heavy crash that shook the whole house each time. This was his dream-work, hitting the same spot on the post with clockwork regularity. Tooth-rattling. In the dream. There was a dent he hit at, scarred white, where the post was more like metal than wood.
    I woke up screaming, flying through the air, and there was another scream, louder and deeper than mine, and angry. Dad had crept into my room as I slept, snatched me out of bed, roaring, and flung me up into the air. He caught me and began swinging me by one arm and one foot around the room, throwing me up at the ceiling and catching me, spinning and twirling me, bellowing at the top of his lungs, and I was