Our first warning (and our first casualty), was our guard goose. While I can’t say he had much of my sympathy after he’d gotten my ankle tweaked, his last warbling honk echoed through the night and thus it’s fair to say he died a hero.

Mr Bottner was kill’t badly and fast in his bed. His little shack was knocked crooked such to make it a parallelogram, and all manner of caustics and tannins were spilt out of their barrels. The mess of it was such that after, we would have no recourse after but to burn it down. The fowl which’d been shuttered up in their coop - they were torn through and extinguished.

By the time I shot upright in my bed (and nearly clocked myself against the overhang), the hands were since awake and shouting the alarm. In haste, they’d dressed and armed themselves, and sent Christopher bound towards us, limping o’er the field. But of all our men remaining, ain’t none of them had the sight to see like dame Anne Hektor. Before Christopher (urgent and abound like a pogo1) could even reach the front entry, Momma and Mabel Jeminee were at the nursery’s.

Ashli’s head shot out over the upper bannister over me, and we shared a look just before our door flung open and the ladies of Ghost Perch swept in. All of us froze for a moment once we saw that little Cooper and Priscilla were already stood awake in the center of the room.

“Oh good,” Coop sighed, “I thunked’t we’d was dreamin’ it. I’ll get her shoes on, ma’am.”

Momma and Aunt Mabel spared a glance, but only that, and recovered their urgency. As good as faster than we could know it, were were all up and ushered into the cellar. The heavy, flat door lifted from the floor, and cracked tile steps pounded underfoot as our household was herded into the candle-parted shadows below. So, by the time that Christopher was knocking, and Auntie Hektor receiving him, we were already on the edge of sequestered.

She barked down orders from upstairs, such that Momma, Ashli, and I were tasked with fetching up a particular several of the provident sundries. There had been a narrow box of thick hide, which was stacked inside carefully with long bones; so from those I picked two sturdy femurs as best I could guess, having assumed that a carnivorous ancestry might turn their residues towards a useful proclivity.

As good as licketysplit those bones, along with an oppressive bottle of refined bile and a quintet of oiled, leather knife-belts made their way upstairs into Chris’s arms. Then the door shut behind him – and having been so furnished, he hobbled off into the night.

Now, you might think it sensible, particularly the youngest of us to be afeared, but this was neither the first nor last night that our family had sheltered in cellar. Our lifetimes had provided instances enough such that I suppose we had internalized a certain analogy of security to the underground. And markedly, I’ll say it had been the mode of our experience that none of our own had known harm in such a circumstance before.

But that kind of thinking was predictive of nothing: we met this moment in lieu of the Mister or his First. More than that, neither had I or my cousins been born before the Mister had come into the fullness of his munitions, and such to be subject to the tribulations of the wild absent of him.

Auntie Hektor shut the cellar as she descended into our company, and the shutter settled heavily. Her steps were heavy on the stair in the way that a person can be outweighed by their worry. Then she snuffed out her candle, taking her place such that the whole of us were sat in a circle around our [Argent Touched Kerosin]: the grease lantern which we called the good one. Su-Hope had carried down her needle-work, and was bright at work fixing them to the repair of trousers. Saleena was set to pestering her, insistent that some embroider of caterpillars would be a fine supplement. Ursula chided her sister and cousin both they’d be liable to go blind like that. Cooper was hunched cheerful and over a scrap of plank wood, with a shard of charcoal in his blackened hands. He was drawing a panorama of shapeless, toothful terrors dismembering the help. Ashli was petitioning in vain that the bourbon could be uncorked for the noble benefit of her elders, and was ignored. This was the flop.

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For awhile, the ladies spoke nothing more than the smallest of whispers, and the fewest of words. Such was the turn.

“You know,” I said.

“Absolutely not!” Momma shook. And abrupt as the river’d been dealt, we exploded into shouting. For your benefit, I shall prune some of the ancillary conversation.

“We don’t even know what’s going on,” I pleaded.

“Oh, don’t you even dare think it,” Momma hollered. She hopped to her feet, and Ursula had to lunge over to steady the lamp by its handle.

“Just for a second,” I lied.

“Whoa, there! Osbie, now he ain’t said nothing so bad,” Mabel laughed nervously.

“He wants to go outside.”

Mabel’s wrist went to cover her mouth. “Oh, well that’s just gosh danged insane, then.”

Priscilla Hektor began to honk like a goose and threw herself into her mother’s lap. “We don’t shout with the children,” Anne Hektor admonished, though she was overruled.

“If we’re trying to get eaten, I’d rather wait?” Ashli grumbled.

It went on like that for a good minute, then we were hushed as Vaunda Greene turned suddenly to rummage through the storage overflow and nearly knocked over Auntie Mabel. She faced us back shortly with a long-handled ax cradled in her arms. “We han’t got a skewer, I think,” Auntie Vaunda said, “but I can fetch you up a cleaver or sum’n, if this don’t work.”

“Um,” I did reply.

Whereas Momma was combobulated tout suite into an apoplectic redness. “Are you out of your FUCKING MIND?” She so inquired.

“Language,” Auntie Seung-Hee gasped, clapping hands over her daughter’s ears.

“Oh, mellow your withers, Osbie,” Ms Greene reproved. She next pushed the hatchet into my hands. Her voice rose and deepened, and the shine of her jewelry gleamed imperiously. “We all knew this was coming. What was he gonna do? Go off to university? Be an accountant?”

“Once things settle down a bit...” Momma sputtered, caught off balance.

“He’s gonna run off and be a dumbass,” Auntie Vaunda stooped just an inch or two to match my height. My hands gripped around the roughness of the handle, as my spear callouses settled into place along the grain. “Isn’t that right?” She asked of me.

“Well, though it is my opinion that a man must distinguish himself through feat of bravery in service of the meek, and further that it is yet early to make inalterable pronouncements in regards to the course of my future – I have done some small research to the matter of my adult profession and there are a number of respectable figures I’ve read on in the histories who found great satisfaction –”

“Raise your hand for the ‘Todd says five words or less’ rule,” Ashli called out (though she did catch an ear cuffing from Auntie Jeminee, for her rudeness). She flung her own hand eagerly into the air and shook it; the rest of my cousins did as well.

“I could learn architecture some,” I blushed and snapped.

“Oh, baby,” Momma sighed. She deflated, and reached out to briefly touch my cheek.

“See? Even worse. He’s completely delusional,” Vaunda concluded softly. “If the boy doesn’t earn his arms sooner or later, he’s gon’ spend the rest of his life mendin’ fence.”

The lantern continued to flicker us orange and shadow, and stank of the various oxidized descendants of triglycerides.

“Well he still can’t go out, he’s not ready,” Momma protested. Mabel Jeminee and Seung-Hee Kim nodded. Anne Hektor frowned.

“Well then just send someone out with him, then!” Auntie Vaunda laughed. “Dang, Anne can go on get her wizard knife and probably do more damage than half the boys in our employ.”

Auntie Hektor went rigid as all eyes fell on her. She cleared her throat in a rare moment of embarrassment. “Maybe twenty years ago, but those were different times and circumstances. I don’t think I can do that kind of thing anymore. Vaunda, you were a terror with that spear, you could go –”

“Hell no, don’t even joke; I’m old now. Osbie, he’s yours ain’t he?”

“Oh, I-I-I don’t know, I mean, my knees aren’t so good anymore –”

At that point, I’d had enough. “Well then, what if I promised that I’ll only help with the animals? Alright? Besides, we’ve been down here ages. I’m sure the fight’s already done.”

The ladies shared a look between them.

“We could send Ash out with him,” Auntie Mabel shrugged.

“What? Fuckin’ no, that’s not fair,” My cousin cried, leaping to her feet.

“I’ll go,” Cooper announced. He held out a hand, and we stared at it as he grasped impatiently. “Gimme a knife. Gimme two knives.”

His mother punctuated his request with a strangled choking noise.

Thus and subsequently, Momma assented and Anne Hektor objected – and by majority my Aunties withheld Coop into supervision, and sent Ashli and I out into danger.