BRUTUS

The land thawed. Row after row, Claytus continued singing as he guided the ox. The ox always seemed to be smiling, especially when he strained against leather strap and steel buckle, leaving upturned soil in his wake. As the soil turned, those with life mourned the death brought by the terrible chill that had swept the land. As the pillars of smoke rose skyward from the smoldering, piled up corpses, tears soaked the ground and lament filled the air. In seeking balance, freshly planted seed began to dream of birth from death, from darkness into light. Hope to grasp living days from the depths of earth’s stillness.  

As the moons passed, one after another, days mulling into night and back again, the seed continued growing. It sprouted limbs and a head the size of a plumb. He began making his presence known to his child-mother, for her bleeding stopped and her sickness started. 

Gayla whispered and cried into her pillow each night,

“Caelum, why? Why? WHY!”

“It can’t be! Please make it not so.”

“This can’t be happening to me! It cannot be!”

She knew Caelum couldn’t hear her pleas, though a part of Him remained within her since that night. IT, he, a bastard, continued taking shape, filling her womb, drinking the last of her youth and purity straight from her porcelain navel. A son.

On heavy feet, Gayla continued climbing the rebuilt spire each evening. She kept tending the altar fire in that desecrated place. There she always felt faint and angry as the dusk turned to darkness. As she poured hecatombs with shaking hands, her offered words to Him were not prayers. They were curses. 

“Caelum, you wretch! Why? Why! Why did you defile me? Why did you have to thrust your dripping phallus in my dirt? What will I do when the priests discover my purity’s loss? You swine!”

No immortal ears heard her words as her delicate hands worked in tremors, as the swine blood continued flowing, burning into smoke and rising into the air – an offering to a murdered father. All the while the son continued partaking of the uncooked blood of his father’s killer, the life in his mother’s veins. Nourishment blessed with salty spite. 

More moons came and went, and the signs of Gayla’s gravidity were reflected in her sisters’ mutterings and whispers.

“Just look at her. She’s getting fat.”

“She eats like a pig.”

Silently, Gayla swore to herself in her fright,

“I cannot be discovered by the priests. What will become of me? I’ll be put to the whip, hanged or stoned, or worse! I’ll starve the child from me!”

And her fright became hatred as her tears melted into greater spite. First it was hatred for Caelum, and then it became hatred for her son as well.

“How dare he do this to me! How dare THEY do this to me! I’m just a girl!”

She refused to eat another bite.

“Aren’t you hungry, sister?” the other girls began to ask as the days passed.

“Are you sick to your stomach?”

They were beginning to notice her frailness, as her cheeks became hollow, her eyes dark, and her breasts flattened.

“Something is terribly wrong with Gayla,” they whispered.

Her famine failed to starve the child. Once her blood ran dry and her smooth, girlish curves melted into jaggedness, he began sucking the very gristle from her bones.

“I’ll show you!” she seethed each morning, as she squatted in the latrine and gritted her teeth without success.

“Get out of me!” she raged.

In her dreams she would sneak into the woods and vomit the child’s stillborn flesh from her body. Leave it for the wolves and worms.

In the end, her skull began to shine straight through her face, and her bony knees and thighs became too weak to climb the temple’s spire. Yet her stomach had finally grown to the size that it belied the secret her famine had tried to conceal, or to kill.

The final night of Gayla’s stay at the temple, as she lay awake and waiting in the darkness of her chamber, the priests and the soldiers came.

“Take this whore away!” demanded a priest from the shadows.

She did not resist as the men roughly handled her weakened body. She did not mutter a word as they locked and bruised her wrists and ankles into chains and carried her away to prison.