Scion (Short Fiction Gift)

A holiday yarn for a special secret someone

Happy holidays,

Keith Long

! This Historical Horror is an offshoot homage to your chilling and magnificent Old Root Tree serial. I hope you enjoy!

Scion

Transplanted Branch, 1846

Winter's wrath infiltrates every rend in his tattered coat, her multitude of craven tongues seeking warm flesh to lick into violaceous nubs. Jacob presses onward, praying in rhythm to his gliding feet upon the powdered drifts.

"Our Father..."

"Who art..."

"In Heaven..."

"Hallowed be..."

"Thy name..."

Maggie always said he could walk on water if ever he set his mind to achieve it. He had hewn these slender branches himself. Bound them in needled arcs. Strapped them to his feet with red silk ribbons. Like a gift.

Jacob remembers their purchase now with a touch of provenance. He had protested the frivolity.

"Children need their heads bowed to scriptures not bedecked in velveteen vanities."

Maggie burdened his soul with melancholy brown doe eyes. "It's Christmas, Jacob. Save a little charity for your girls."

A year ago. A lifetime. Before rumors of the vast fertile west beckoned him from the clamor and dinge of the wicked city.

So far their exodus had carried them! Across amber prairie purgatory where the endless miles inflicted sweat-infused nightmares of writhing grass. Through a rutted battlefield of sagebrush to which they lost axles and oxen and tempers. How much farther, oh Lord? Farther still. About the vicious caterpillar curves beyond the Great Salt Lake. Take the pass; it offers a fortuitous shortcut. The Lord provides.

Then the snows began.

---

Jacob stumbles upon a bramble patch. Pop! His knee lurches a bold departure from its proper cavern. He groans, limbs pressed into the biting white dune. One of his ramshackle snowshoes lies unknotted and askew. Ribbon spills into scarlet tendrils. An echo of the clearing behind the cabin. Forget. Forget. Oh, Lord, let me press on.

As his hands seek a steady berth to right himself, he finds the snow at his fingertips curled in eddying currents of black. Veins from some diseased wound in the earth. He recoils, eyes drifting up the spreading stain to its source.

A sapling. Perhaps. It looks unlike any tree born of this earth. Jet as a sinner's soul at midnight with two gangled limbs jutting in defiance of Heaven.

"It stands upon its head," he mutters, though he knows this cannot be.

With a grunt, Jacob regains his legs. Though pain cuts his breath into short gasps, he cannot tear his eyes from the blighted sapling. A step. Another. His legs sink to the thigh in the bruised snow. It calls, this scarred unholy thing. It knows.

He hears it. The cadence of his prayers to the axe blade's strike.

"Our father..."

"Who art in heaven..."

Hollow metal bites into his memory, leaking blood into the frozen outskirts of his mind. Flesh petrified to ice. Sinew and bone a penance in toil. They are gone, oh Lord. Surely, You forgive? Yes. Yes. The Lord provides.

"Hallowed be..."

"Thy name..."

A fetid reek trickles from the burnt and twisted boughs. He recognizes the sweet evil tang on the back of his tongue.

"I did what I must," Jacob pleads.

Tears steam blistering trails on the frozen planes of his cheeks.

"I did what I must."

The sapling makes no reply. It listens. Earth yielding and hungry at the roots. Sinking slowly. It too must survive.

The Lord provides.

---

In keeping with Keith’s series, this story is rooted in truth.

A special thank you to

Emily S Hurricane

for organizing this fiction exchange. Check out the rest of the gifts here.

To/From with ❤:

Scoot | Erica Drayton | A. C. Sanders | Paola F. Caravasso | Joseph L. Wiess | Alexandra Hill | Andy Futuro | Jude Mire | Thérèse Judeana | Nick Buchheit | E.K. MacPherson | Aysun G. (She/Them) | Michael S. Atkinson | ☕ KimBoo York | Keith Long | Jack Nagy | Jessica Neal | Emily S Hurricane

Happy Holidays!

---

---

Many thanks for reading!