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Janice Leadingham
Hell’s Half Acre, 1876
Every night, God swallowed Olympia Springs, Kentucky, kept it safe in the darkness of their own pit, and every morning they threw it back up into the sunshine. That’s how Mary’s Mamaw explained it, the thick of the night as it ate up the valley. She also used to say, you can only know what you know—a truth, in fact, recited by mamaws since the first ever grandbaby was born.
Mary knew that it was 40 calm steps from her soap kettle out back to the screened kitchen door but she could breech it in 20 steps, hell, 15 if deviled.
Mary knew that animal fat and lye, given time to cure, creates a creamy lather, but fresh from the kettle that mixture sparks bare skin, puckers up welts, and over time that flesh from your finger tips to your elbows hardens over thick enough that it gives up on feeling anything at all.
Mary knew miracles in Kentucky, in March yet, were rare enough, but at the moment she realized she needed the animal fat from the barn, had, in fact, forgotten to render it down the night before, it began to fall from the sky.
•
Harrison Gill had been from here to there, allover hell’s half acre delivering mail to his neighbors atop his pony, Cob, and still he had far to go. It was too early in the year for the sun to scorch, still, sweat mingled between his body and the animal beneath him so that you wouldn’t know whose stink was whose, either way it was offensive. Between farms, past rows of sorghum and tobacco freshly sowed, he worried on the omens he’d encountered earlier in the day, chewed on them in the pocket between his cheek and the back of his gums.
In the afternoon, he set the Kerns’ porch chair to rocking with a clumsy bump from his hip—a call to spirits, an invitation for them to settle.
Before that, he walked through an orb weaver’s web, thankfully unoccupied, but you never can tell. If the spider had been present, lingering nearby, and it chose to weave his name, he could expect nightmares and restlessness.
That morning, worst of all, he woke to a bluebird flying around his kitchen ceiling. In all its anxious fluttering to be free, it knocked his good crockery to the ground, to shatters. A sure sign of death to come.
Cob spooked around the bend to Mary Crouch’s farm, his nose in the air. Gill smelled it too, something terrible on the cusp. Sure enough, it began to snow, the fattest flakes Gill had ever seen. Only, this snow fell to the ground with a punch. The thud of muscle, obscene. Oddly juicy. Just as it occurred to Gill that this was what he’d been waiting for, all that had been foretold, and he let out a life’s long of held breath, a lump of sky meat hit him right on his cowlick, sending him off the pony’s back, into the darkness and Kentucky dirt.
•
The farmers thought on it, poked at it with a hickory stick, eventually scooped it up into a glass jar recently emptied of apple preserves, and carried it over to Jim Skaggs, a skilled hunter known for his butchering. The meat was, yes, assuredly meat, two chunks of it in that jar, bite-sized perhaps for a child. The first piece layered with rich, yellow fat and the other stretched through with the white pith of tendon, both slick with moisture.
Jim Skaggs sawed through the mystery with his sharpest knife, tougher than he expected. He put a bit of it on his tongue, rolled it around his mouth. He chewed on the gristle and spit it out into his calloused palm, the dense meat held on tight to the impression of his teeth. Seeing that Skaggs survived this first act of tasting spurred the farmers on to bravery. They ripped at the chunks, tough as jerky but not salted or dried, no, very wet—as if they were not the first to have it in their mouths, only the most recent.
The first farmer proclaimed it bear meat, the second, venison. Jim Skaggs, silent all the time it took for the other men to chew, disagreed. He’d only eaten it once, during the meanest time of his life, the blizzard a decade before that wiped out a third of the county, but he’d never forgotten it. The other men in the room couldn’t agree, couldn’t rightly argue—they’d never eaten horse.
•
The God of Hollows, Carrion, and Caverns, a minor but beloved old god in the Appalachian pantheon, swallowed Olympia Springs up the night previous, the same way they’d done before there were ever even trees there that shaded the hollow, before there were humans to be cooled by their branches—before the first mamaw to witness the all engulfing darkness and explain it, simple, to the first ever grandbaby.
Only, that morning in March, when the ancient, urgent pull to hurl out the coves and all that they hold awakened the God of Hollows, Carrion, and Caverns’ stomach, they opened their great mouth, and—things just went a little wrong. A kettle of satiated vultures flying east were jostled off course just enough that they were forced to reckon with the existence of the God— a momentous consequence to be sure, especially for vultures who have notoriously weak stomachs. The dawn breaking revealed the fading stars to be in fact the God’s many eyes, the curves of the mountains to be the dip of their waist and the round of their hip as they curled to sleep around the hollow like a house cat content to sleep in the day’s full sun.
Janice Leadingham is a Portland, Oregon based writer and tarot-reader originally from somewhere near Dollywood, Tennessee—Exit 407 off of I-40. Her work has appeared in Reckon Review, HAD, the Northwest Review, The Bureau Dispatch, Bullshit Lit, Janus Literary, and Milk Candy Review, among others. She was nominated for the Pushcart and Brave New Weird prizes last year, and recently selected for Best Small Fictions 2024. She is @TheHagSoup everywhere and also hagsoup.com.
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