To Inhabit a Corrupted Body
Inheritance #2
This is the second scene of Inheritance: In a world where magic is forbidden, a carpenter stops by the town square to watch the execution of a hex. When he returns home, he realizes something of the hex has seeped into him.
Inheritance #2: To Inhabit a Corrupted Body
The heaping pile of rotten produce on the table had already begun to stink. Ingram paced the kitchen flailing his limbs. He grabbed a chair and threw it down the room. He opened a drawer then slammed it shut. The cutlery inside rattled. He opened it again and left it open. He swept his arm over the table and dozens of potatoes and tomatoes fell onto the floor. Corruption had crept into his body. The hex had cursed him with his final breath and Ingram wished him alive so he could kill him again, by his own hands this time.
He looked at those trembling hands, the two meatbags that caused everything he held to rot. With sudden resolve, he hurried to the fireplace and plunged a hand to its wrist into the fire. When the pain became unbearable, he pulled his hand out and squashed several tomatoes as he rolled onto the floor in agony, suppressing his yelps and grunts so as not to wake his wife. The air smelled sulfurous and putrid.
“Maybe now. Maybe this time,” Ingram said and he stood and placed his burnt hand flatly on a mullet he hadn’t yet touched. He closed his eyes and steadied himself as the throbbing pain made the world spin. When he opened his eyes, the fish had seemingly died another death. Its flesh had withered and become discolored. Ingram flung it away and wailed. He fell to his knees, nauseated by the pain, and considered the kitchen’s sharpest knife, how it could end his sorrows and release him from this tainted body.
“Ingram, what’s the matter?” came the sweet voice of his wife. She stood on the staircase, her emaciated figure a fragile shadow against the wall.
Ingram quickly stood and walked to a bucket filled with water, into which he sank his hand. The sensation nearly had him faint. “Burnt my hand, that’s all,” he said.
Her eyes swept over the thrown chair, the open drawer, and the foods scattered around the floor. “I can help with dinner,” she said and she shuffled deeper into the light.
“Stay there,” Ingram said and, as she stopped in the middle of the kitchen, swaying slightly with fatigue, he saw not his wife but the disease that inhabited her, a swirling blackness that pooled around her chest but had spread outward to her stomach and limbs too. He felt compelled to wrap his arms around his wife, not out of love or lust, but because the corruption wanted him to. “You’re too weak. Sleep,” he said as he kept his eyes locked on his blistered and swollen hand in the bucket of water.
“You’re in pain,” she said.
“Leave,” Ingram barked. He would resist the corruption’s orders for as long as he could, so as not to do unto his wife what was happening to him. When he looked back up, she had returned upstairs, having made no noise, her body a drifting feather approaching the ground. Ingram took his hand out of the bucket, righted the chair he had thrown, and sat down on it.
When she goes, so shall I, he thought, and with the admission of his coming death, he gave himself permission to examine the corruption. It required no concentration or willpower. Instead, all it needed was a mere act of release, as if he’d been holding his breath ever since the execution and could finally let go.
A thunderclap rippled across the heavens. Ingram held his burnt hand by the wrist and, for a moment, the pain faded. The corruption sheathed his hand in shadows and absorbed the pain. I am not your enemy, it said. I am of nature, inevitable and undeniable. I turn the wounded deer into its carcass, the forgotten tool into rust and crumble, and the fallen leaf into the soil that feeds the trees.
Ingram was taken aback by the ease of communication with it. Perhaps there was another way out. “You have no place in me,” he whispered, his eyes trained on the window for passerby who would surely spread rumors if they saw him talking to himself. Rumors that would swiftly see his head pressed against the chopping block. “I beg you. You’ll be the death of me.”
Ingram’s hand twitched as the corruption around it wobbled and squeezed in a strange mimicry of laughter. How human to believe death is no part of you, it said. Of all the life that comes and goes, only humans are foolish enough to believe in their own immortality.
“This isn’t natural,” Ingram said. “Hands don’t ruin what they touch.”
Your latent powers have come uncovered. That is all that has changed, it said.
Ingram shook his hand in anger. “How do I eat? How do I live?”
Death requires death. The chicken outside. Kill it.
Ingram frowned at the suggestion. He was a carpenter and bred no chickens. Still, he stood and looked through the window. In the pale light of the clouded morn a chicken clucked and shook its feathers under the rain. “How did you know?” Ingram asked, but the corruption had retreated and offered only silence.
The pain in his hand had returned, albeit less intensely. Ingram opened the front door and walked slowly to the chicken, which did not flee but only looked at him, head cocked, as if already aware of its fate. There was no one around. Where had it come from? With his good hand, Ingram grabbed the animal by the neck and rushed back inside.
He had feared the animal would die the moment he’d touch it, but it didn’t. He held the animal on the kitchen table and realized he had a degree of control over the corruption. It hadn’t spilled out of his hand and it wouldn’t unless he told it to. Still, his control was limited and, as he waited, the corruption grew impatient and pressed against him, eager for its release. Letting go was as easy as an exhale. The corruption flowed into the chicken, which shuddered before it turned quiet. Ingram felt an intense pleasure, and he struggled not to smile.
Inheritance #2: To Inhabit a Corrupted Body