By Maya Gardner

Marjorie knew to stay away from the fence line.

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She had learned this from the stern, repeated warnings her father would send down the hall whenever she stepped outside the red door of the farmhouse. The rusty hinges would call out through the walls, signaling him to his cue. Marjorie didn’t know what was so special about the tendons of barbed wire that divided their acre of land from the woods, but from the fear in her father's voice, she didn’t want to find out. She thought maybe it had to do with Uncle Vernon.

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Uncle Vernon was a man who took up splotchy patches of Marjorie's memories. She thinks he was there at her brother's birth, maybe her fifth birthday, but she has no recollection of him beyond that. For her, he lives in the times she’d see her father quietly cry to himself at night, his thin frame caved in on itself by the fire. He never knew she saw these rare moments, her small feet padding softly through the hall, transfixed as the harshness of his voice softened into sobs.

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She knew Uncle Vernon was her father’s twin. She knew he disappeared one day, around the time her mother died. And she knew that since that disappearance, her father hadn’t been the same. He was older, thinner, colder, and told the kids to stay away from the fence line.

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Today, he didn't give that warning.

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The sound had started just before sunrise: a loud, low, guttural moan from the side of the farm by the forest. The cows were screaming. Marjorie had been having a nightmare, the same one she always had, when the sound pulled her out of it and upright in her bed.

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She needed her father to make it stop.

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Marjorie padded down the hall to his room, an activity she took up frequently; on evenings when the nightmares were too much or she woke up surrounded by wet. Sometimes she’d slip in beside him, the scent of sweat and whiskey lulling her to sleep. She peeked through the wooden door at an empty bed. Her father was gone. She ducked, peeking under the bed; sometimes when her doll was lost, she’d find her there, but she did not see her father, just a boot, caked with crackling mud from the corral.

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Marjorie winced as the groan rattled her skull once more.

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This time, the cows didn’t stop; the screaming was in chorus, one after the other, after the other, after the other. Marjorie wanted to cry, but remembered the time her grandmother told her crying made the spirits in the house angry.

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Grandma, like her mother, had always been superstitious. Though her father laughed at them, he never broke one of grandma’s rules. Save for crying. Maybe that's why the cows were screaming, the ghosts were mad at him for breaking the rule. Marjorie, unlike her father, believed in ghosts. To her, there was no explanation more logical for all of the bad fortune that they had been having.

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The room grew very still, and Marjorie lifted her hands from her head. Silence. Her breaths grew quicker as her feet led her out of the room and down the hall to the front door.

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She stood at the edge of the house, looking towards the woods. The cows were gathered together, staring off at the dark trees beyond the farm. One lifted its head, crying out once more, softer, weaker. She waited for her father to warn her about the fenceline, but was met with silence as she stepped onto the splintered wooden porch. Her bare feet scraped on its old steps before hitting the soft prairie grasses below.

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Marjorie liked the cows. Her father wouldn’t let her name them, but they were never around long enough for her to come up with a good name anyway. The first drop of sun had been spread into the sky, she could see it crawling out of its bed towards the city.

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Marjorie had never been to the city before but knew it was a place of filth, where men were dangerous. Their only interactions with it were when her father rode into the bank or market or had to speak with the butcher. He always came back angry, saying the men in the city were thieves. He said the same of the men they’d sometimes hear on the radio, men representing states with names unfamiliar to Marjorie.

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Kansas was the only state Marjorie had been to. In fact, she didn’t have many memories beyond the fenceline besides the short trek to the schoolhouse and the trips to the river her father would take her and her siblings on when the weather turned fair. But now the riverbed was dry, and the air was cold. Ice filling Marjorie’s lungs with every breath. The dry grasses cut into Marjorie’s feet, freezing them as she crossed the field.

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Marjorie had reached the cows when she saw it, something black and white and twisted in the fence line. A calf was stuck in the barbed wire, its skin torn, turning the yellow grass below a bright, deep red. Its leg twisted backward, jagged bone sticking out in two pieces. Pure white mountains sticking out of a sea of ruby flesh. It made no noise, but its mother groaned softly as she sniffed around its leg, gently licking the scarlet off its face before staring at Marjorie. It was the look Marjorie would give her father when the arm fell off her doll. The mother needed Marjorie to fix it. To save her baby.

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The calf’s chest heaved in sync with Marjorie’s; quick, sharp, as it looked deep inside her. It was dying. Marjorie knew from the bittersweet stink that wafted off the calf that there wasn’t
much time. Marjorie had never seen something die before, but recognized the smell from the room next to hers. Formerly belonging to Marjorie’s sister, it was now only known as the room her mother and grandmother had died in.

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Marjorie’s mother didn’t want to risk spirits sneaking into the children, so they weren’t let in once their grandmother had gotten sick, and her sister moved into Marjorie’s room. But at night, the smell seeped through the walls as she heard her grandmother’s coughing growing louder and louder before cutting off completely. They carried her grandmother's body out in the morning, wrapped in her sister's pink sheets.

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Her mother died in the room two weeks later, filling the air with the same taste of metal. The crimson dribbling down the fence brought her back to the early morning when her brother was born, filling her lungs with a moment that regularly shook her from sleep. A pool spilled from her mother as her father yelled at her to get out, his words rattling her mother's gentle face as he shook her in his arms.

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Marjorie had not been in the room since. These deaths had been the start of their bad luck. Then Uncle Vernon.

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Marjorie put her hand out towards the calf, gently touching its head. It winced below her touch. She wished it would close its eyes. Or mouth. But both hung open in scared, desperate confusion, thick, bloody breath bubbling towards her. Its abdomen stretched, deep red marks on its skin rippling as the fresh sunlight touched them. Something had attacked it and tried to pull it through the wire. Leaving the crumpled calf as its only evidence. No broken branches or
footprints. No fur or scat. Just the deep claw marks, pulsing blood, and the screams of the cows. The mother of the calf nuzzled Marjorie, which only made her more panicked. She couldn’t save it.

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Marjorie knew what happened to creatures who had been torn up. Creatures with the dread and horror that filled the calf's eyes. Their dog, Bo, had been attacked by a wolf the summer before. Her father made Marjorie stand inside and face the wall as the gunshot rang outside. Her hands covered her brother's small ears as hers filled with the quick terror of the bullet. Her sister’s face turned pale white as she rocked herself on the floor beside them. They buried Bo next to her mother and grandmother. Her father bought roses and let her and her sister plant them to separate the graves. Her brother was too confused about where Bo had gone to help them plant. Marjorie wondered if they’d bury this calf there, too.

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The sounds of her father yelling cut through her thoughts as he gripped her arm firmly, lifting her off the ground as he became the divide between her and the fence. Marjorie stared through his legs as he yelled at her. Too fixated on the blood-soaked ground to hear him. “House” “Danger” “You never listen”. The words came in and out. Her father sank to her level, one hand gripping her arm tight, the other stabilizing his bad leg with his shotgun. Despite the harshness of his voice, the piercing blue of her father’s eyes calmed her down. Her dad was there, and it was all going to be okay.

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“Get inside. Cover your ears.”

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He waited for Marjorie to echo back with a nod before standing, already aiming the gun at the calf. The calf’s mother screamed again, the sound jutting through Marjorie as she ran off. She needed to get away from the gunshot, as far as possible. The thin clapboard walls of the house couldn’t smother the fear she was feeling. She did not want to hold her brother and sister when they inevitably woke up to the shot, the blood, the screams. She wanted to be held herself.

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The tall grass scraped against her bare legs as she ran across the field, her hands pressing into her skull as she tried to drown out the groaning of the herd. Marjorie did not stop as the soft
pads of her feet began to bleed; she did not stop until she found herself at the opposite fenceline. The barbed wire caught the threads of her dress as she squeezed her eyes closed tighter.

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The gunshot rang through her body, her muscles tense. The screaming finally stopped.

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Marjorie froze, feeling the breeze against her legs, grass tickling her calves. The morning birds started to sing. Marjorie tried to think of a way to get inside the house without turning around, without seeing the calf’s body sinking into the barbed wire, the distressed eyes of its mother, whom Marjorie had failed. Hesitantly, she uncovered her ears. Just the birds, the wind, the grass. Slowly, she let the early morning light shine in her eyes as she stared into the thick forest.

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Her father was waiting on the other side of the fence, in front of her. The calf’s blood on his shirt. Marjorie hadn’t heard him approach and waited for him to continue his lecture about the danger of the fenceline. Instead, he smiled at her.

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“It’s okay, Margie,” he stepped forward slowly, the forest floor crumpling below him. “It’s okay.”

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He approached her slowly, reaching over the wire to gently lift her up and hold her to his chest. Marjorie’s tears started. Comfort at last. Her father’s arms dimmed the image of the calf, the tear, the blood, the thought of what lived in the woods. He soothed her, rubbing her back.

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“Let’s go for a walk, okay?” His voice hummed through his chest as she buried farther into it. Marjorie nodded against his linen shirt, her tears and sniffles coming to a halt as she squeezed his form. She lay against him like the calf in the fence. Suspended. She pulled away to look at the sky. At the forest canopy, the birds, the treehouse they had played in in the days before her mother died.

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She watched the light on her father’s jaw. He was not as old as some of the other fathers she had seen at the schoolhouse, but he looked far older than he was before her brother was born.
The past few years had aged him. The deaths, the disappearance, the bad crops, and stillborn calves. Marjorie had prayed each night to a God she didn’t know for a break to come. She smiled at her father, wanting to give back some of the comfort that he had granted her.

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Marjorie’s smile faded as she realized those weren’t her father’s eyes.