Writer’s Digest 92nd Annual Competition Mainstream/Literary Short Story First Place Winner: “Her Teeth Marks Bones”
Congratulations to K.B. Winecap, first place winner in the Mainstream/Literary Short Story category of the 92nd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Here’s her winning story, “Her Teeth Marks Bones.”
[See the complete winner’s list]
Her Teeth Marks Bones
by K.B. Winecap
Snow isn’t white. Peony knows this. Snow has aquamarine and amethyst shadows, and when the sun shines through gray clouds the snow glitters. At night when the silver moon kisses the mulberry wine sky, the snow shimmers like diamonds twisted into galaxies. And in snow, blood melts crimson like rose petals, caving inwards to the frozen ground.
Snowflakes now gently tumble from a curtain of thick clouds, quiet and calming as they land on snow banks, grouped together until they become like mountains, growing around Peony as she stands in the forest. Lodge pines and Douglas firs are packed, weighted down by winter and the black-capped chickadees desperately digging for bugs inside bark frozen with golden sap.
Her breath fogs heavily in front of her. When she was a child she had called it “dragon’s breath.” She huffs it out repeatedly, watching the moisture rise up and vanish in the air as she pulls her jacket closer to her body. To her left, a gray-brown doe walks cautiously down the snowy terrain with her twin fawns who were born in early summer. They are small, but thick in their winter coats. She hopes the doe is able to find them food so they survive. She occasionally leaves out bread and apples, but not often. It’s illegal to feed the wildlife, to encourage them to adjust to human care, but she only does this from time to time when the deer have to resort to eating bark off the tree to keep from starving.
Peony notices something is different with the snow far to the left of her cabin. in the clearing outside of the trees. The snow has been trampled, dead wheatgrass underneath kicked up to the sky, exposed and naked. Ravens and crows dance back and forth from the ground to the tree branches above. The branches are covered in lichens and snow, draping heavily down to the earth like curtains. She sees the prints in the snow before the bright red blood, like crimson rose petals. The crime scene belongs to a mountain lion, who chased the buck into the grove of trees before killing, eating its fill, and then vanishing silently away, bloody paw prints the only voice to speak in the silence of the mountains.
The deer has been gutted—intestines gone, mouth horrifically gaped open, tongue dangling out, soft brown eyes glossed over like glass marbles in death.
Peony turns away and scans for the cougar. She can’t imagine it would travel far from a fresh kill. The safest thing for her would be to return to her tiny cabin.
“Yes, it would be wise if you left now.”
Whipping around, Peony looks for the voice. It’s just her this far up the mountain neighbor-wise, so a voice speaking out of the ether? Terrifying.
“No, no, not a person. Me. Down here. Dead deer?”
“Oh, God.”
“There. Less scary, right?”
“A talking corpse is less scary?” Peony looks down, making a face.
“Don’t look at me that way. It’s rude.”
“I apologize, truly, but, uh, it’s not the greatest sight.”
“You need to leave carefully. The mountain lion is stalking you and you’re too close to me. The ravens and crows are trying to warn you, too.”
Peony carefully makes her way back to the cabin, walking backwards, nearly falling over the entire time until she feels the reassuring thump of wood paneling behind her, a hard jab of the old brass doorknob into her back. She finally vanishes inside.
It’s nearly three days before Peony returns back outside. She has watched the cougar stalking back and forth around its kill, feasting on the deer with the aid of carrions. Once, a red fox appears when the wild cat was gone to take its fair winter share before vanishing forever, smart enough to know to never return.
The cougar has long since prowled away, the corpse picked clean, now barely a skeleton. The head remains, but most of the bones have been destroyed for their marrow. The bones are scattered; they’ve stained the snow around them red and pink. Ravens push the bones about like they’re playing with new toys.
Bundled up in several layers of jackets and scarves, Peony steps out, painful gasps escaping her lips as icy air plunges into her lungs. It feels like piercing ice crystals are growing and blooming inside her body. Her nose instantly reddens and runs. She wiggles her fingers inside her warm gloves and she crunches her boots through the snow and towards the buck. Standing nearby are the doe and twin fawns, sniffing at the bones, the mother flicking up her white tail, quickly moving on when the twins bolt forward and crash through stiff snow, desperately escaping the horrifying human.
“Those are my offspring,” The Skeleton chuckles once the twins have cleared Peony’s land and found a place to watch from the middle of dried snowberry bushes. “My last two I will ever sire.”
“They are pretty. Jitterish.”
“As they should be,” he says. “How am I looking?”
“Utterly destroyed. Bones picked clean.”
“That’s how I feel.”
“Do you hurt?”
“Not now. When I was dying? Absolutely. She was a young cougar, inexperienced.”
“You suffered. I’m so sorry.”
“I finally left the corporeal world when I bled out but she was using her canines on my hide. That was excruciating.”
“So, what…are you a vengeful deer ghost now?”
The Skeleton makes a sound somewhere between a deer snort and a dry laugh.
“Hardly. What could a ghost deer do to a cougar that a live deer couldn’t?”
Peony sucks her lips against her teeth, wishing for more chapstick. The air hits her gums like sharp, tiny pine needles.
“You have my antlers.”
“Oh?” Peony startles, glancing towards her cabin. The pair she found that December is now inside in mid-January. She has the antlers sitting on the dusty glass top table on her deck. They’re circled around a mason jar filled with dried lichen and one giant pinecone. The pinecone keeps a bouquet of dead, dried aspen daisies tied with wheatgrass twine in place. “Oh! I do remember that. You were very handsome.”
“Thank you. You should go back inside. You seem very cold.”
“I feel like I’m going to freeze like an icicle.”
“Come back and visit me.”
“I will.”
A blizzard whips through that night and the next day the crime scene has been buried and erased as if it never happened.
Peony stands at the same spot where she chatted with the Skeleton the day before. A raven sits at the top of the tallest pine tree. She clacks her beak and makes a raspy call before flapping her wings and flying away. A solitary black feather flutters down with the slow snowflakes. Reaching out with her gloves, Peony grabs the feather out of the air.
“Are you okay under all the snow?”
“Yes, I can see and hear you just fine. What a lovely feather. Are you going to put it in your mason jar?”
“You know what a mason jar is?”
“We pay attention to human business.”
“I believe that.”
“You do not feel insulted by my insinuating that some of your species lacks the intelligence or spiritual understanding to connect to nature, to my kind?” The Skeleton asks, his tone filled with malice and a bitterness Peony could taste on her own tongue.
“Not at all, a great number of humans do not connect to nature. However, there is a great amount who do and understand far better than I.”
“I suppose I can be satisfied with that answer, but you’ll feel my bitterness for an eternity.”
“So you are a vengeful ghost.”
“Perhaps so.”
It’s too cold to go outside for the next two days. Peony can feel the ice in her veins and spends a good chunk of the first day resting in a hot bath. That night the Skeleton calls to her to come to the window where chartreuse green and violet-magenta lights dance in the sky. Aurora borealis keeps both of them entertained until dawn presents herself. Peony sleeps far into the next afternoon, missing a full day of housework. Stoat siblings in their winter coats chase each other over the frozen blue-tinted snow. Several birds that brave the cold weather sit in trees searching for hidden bugs and seeds. The winter day is filled with the trills of snow buntings, house sparrows, and dark-eyed Juncos. Peony dreams of flying with feathered wings like a snowy owl, eyes wide and yellow-gold. She soars high over frigid clouds, unaware that outside her very window a dark brown and blond wolverine stalks through the snow with a purpose, panting heavily, wet nose twitching, searching for the faint remains of bone marrow in the Skeleton.
The Skeleton doesn’t even cry out for help as razor-sharp claws rake back the snow, massive canines clamping down and biting through the bones he has left. He’s lost all physical urges, panic and pain just fading, survival instincts that used to keep him alive. His ghost watches as the wolverine devours, her teeth marking his bones, shattering and swallowing, giving the wolverine a chance to live a little longer.
He is ethereal, floating above the massacre. She moves on to his skull, her hot breath enveloping it, vicious canines crackling and crunching. He looks away and sees all the others like him. Centuries, millennia of fellow animals of all kinds, their ghosts walking, flying, swimming. He walks, or kind of floats, through the wooden cabin. There lays Peony, curled up in layers of covers. He smells the room. It’s like a potpourri of cleaning chemicals, sweat, sweet-scented candles, and the oyster mushroom growing kit on her window sill. He bites down on the fabric of some of the blankets, pulling them over her exposed shoulder. She makes a face before settling back into a deep slumber. He knows she will wake up near nightfall and to search for his skeleton but it won’t be there – their way of communication all gone. He isn’t sure how their souls connected over his dead body. He’s a bit grateful, however, as he watches her stir and awaken a few hours before sunset, that they have their moment here. She hurries outside in a mix of her pajamas and winter clothing. He watches as she stands over his grave, her face crestfallen. She studies at the tracks and the rest of her surroundings She has to know a wolverine caused this mess.
He can’t tell her it’s been gone for half a day now, but he’s watching her. As she returns to the safety of her cabin he sees her see it – a single vertebra. She stares at it before scooping it up with a gloved hand, and taking it towards her cabin. He wrinkles his nose. He doesn’t want his last bone inside a human home.
She freezes and looks in his direction and for a moment he thinks Peony can see him. She turns away from him and places his lumbar with his antlers and disappears inside.