The Starved and the Damned

We ate the oxen first.

We didn’t even need them anymore. The fields have been barren dust for nearly a year now. And they fed us for weeks.

But the meat eventually ran out, as it always did. And once again, our stomachs clawed away at themselves, with nothing to eat for days, days that were churning into weeks.

We ate the family dog next.

The children cried as I butchered the poor creature, but their tears dried as our small house finally smelled like cooking meat again.

But a starved dog has only so much meat.

I could tell that my daughter wouldn’t make it. She was weak, getting weaker. And my son was stronger—he just needed some food.

My husband was long gone at that point. No guidance. No help. No forgiveness. Just my husband’s quiet bones in the dust of our yard.

I begged God to answer me, to tell me what to do. He was silent as the night sky, silent as the slowly dying world around us.

I couldn’t lose them both.

I pulled out the large cooking pot. And the cleaver. There was no use in delaying the inevitable, stretching her timeline out, letting her suffer, needlessly collecting the dead until everything was dust.

I had decided to use the threadbare pillow on her. To walk into their small room in the dark of the night, as they tried to sleep off the pain of their empty stomachs, and put it over her face, pushing down, guiding her to some kind of final sleep. Lead her to the endless dark where there was no pain.

My hands shook, one on the knob of the door to their room, the other clutching the pillow. I whispered a plea–

“God, forgive me.”

A voice from the other side of the door spoke.

“He will not have to.”

I opened the door to find the job had been done for me. My child. Dead. My eyes welled as I looked upon the horror of my bloodied daughter.

My bloodied daughter, standing over the lifeless, slaughtered husk of her brother.