​Cellarsome

 

by Harris Coverley

 

        The beginning. That break. Torn out of you. Screaming out of you. You screaming back. The horror of birth.

       You thought it meant a debt, one that would take a lifetime to repay.

       You think I don’t remember? Really? Every insult? Every hit? Every denial? Every moment of infamy?

       I am the book you wrote, printed out of your own flesh.

       Your love like a choke-chain, your love like a vise.

       I’m a living, breathing creature of your husbandry. And I broke the fence and I ran. Oh, I ran far into the wilds.

       But I had to come back eventually. I don’t deny that. I came back, mangy tail between my sorry legs, brutalised by the sun, the other beasts, the deserts of the cities.

       And you smiled at my failure. Don’t think I remember?

       But then it came, came one night unexpectedly, and I took my chance.

       That soaring, overwhelming figure of punitive strength, reduced to a bundle of wicker. Easily shifted. Dry and dusty. The rusting of an iron will.

       Nobody made a record. You’d scared everybody else away by then.

       It’s just me and you, down there, down here. Out of the way. Untouched. Untouchable. Where you can’t hurt anyone anymore.

      Happy Mother’s Day.

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       Along with previously in Yellow Mama, Harris Coverley has had more than a hundred short stories published in Penumbra, Hypnos, JOURN-E, and The Black Beacon Book of Horror (Black Beacon Books), amongst many others. He has also had over two hundred poems published in journals around the world. He lives in Manchester, England.

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      Luke Lester is an artist and writer from Victoria, Canada. He has recently been published in Absolute Underground, Black Petals, Flash Fiction North, Paragraph Planet, Ultramarine Literary Review, and Yellow Mama. More of his art and writing can be found on his blog: The Other Place.

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