Da brought me back to my room.
“Stop your fussing and listen good,” he said. “When might a tottie like you hide under the bed?”
I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Fear’s gone and made you stupid. Think boy.”
“If I were afraid.”
“Aye, and what would be afraid of a snot-nosed wean like you?”
I wanted to say that nothing in the whole world was afraid of me, but that wasn’t what he wanted. Then a remembered how the little critters on the moor skittered at my approach. “A coney,” I said.
“The tottie and pathetic, true enough.” He stepped back, took a knee, and shouted into the dark, bed-bottom recesses, “Awa an bile yer heid!”
I giggled, and from the other room my step-ma called out Da’s name, reproachful and stern. I laughed harder.
He kissed me on the forehead and whispered, “Oidhche mhath.”
I didn’t ask him to keep the lights on when he left, although I wanted to, and the darkness swept in fully. I hurkled into a ball beneath the wee protection of my bed sheet, until I remembered the coney hopping away, all tottie and pathetic, and I stretched out my legs.
The silence held the shape of her, but I kept in mind the coney, whose tidy pelt I could never touch.
“If you’re afraid, you can sleep with me tonight,” I said.
She tugged at the sheet, and the mattress sunk a little lower beneath me.
I repeated Da’s words, tottie and pathetic, thought of the coney’s think brown coat, and reached out my hand to touch her. No warm fur greeted me but a harsh cold that radiated into the air long before my fingers met the soft resistance of something malleable, an instinctual feel remembered from days beyond remembering when I fed at my mither’s breasts.
Icy fingers slid along the back of my head and drew me into feed. Her milk tasted like morning mist, and I sucked it in, not down the throat but straight into my veins where all fear melted against the growing cold.
And she whispered, “Oidhche mhath.”
-END-
Thaddeus Thomas
Discover all my flash pieces here.
Fack.