Amelia M. Burton
GEMMA WOKE TO a terrible crunch. A series of crunches, really; a crescendo of smacks and cracks and other such sounds of collision. In her half-dreaming state, she imagined a box of Christmas decorations upended at the top of a stairwell, but by the time the glass orbs and smiling Santas reached the bottom landing, they’d transformed into wet slabs of Christmas ham.
She sat up in bed, the summer heat cloying between her skin and the sheets, evaporating all thoughts of holiday dinners. She could hear her sister cussing out in the hall; the real source of the sound was unambiguous.
Someone had fallen down the stairs.
“Mavin? What happened?” She opened the door to see her brother Benny was up, too. He stared down the throat of the stairwell with a blank expression and Gemma clung to the doorknob as she followed his gaze.
“Go back to bed!” Mavin tried to stop her seeing, but just because she was the oldest didn’t mean her siblings always listened to her. Gemma got a good, long look at the sagging heap of a body at the bottom of the stairs.
It was Aunt Tammy, of course. She was the only other person in the house all summer, except when Papa came to visit for Mavin’s birthday in August.
“Jesus, Mavin, she’s dead!” Gemma said.
“Don’t go taking the lord’s name in vain.” Mavin’s finger pressed her lips into two floppy lines.
“I heard you cussing,” she said, muffled. “That’s what woke me up!”
“Go back to bed. You don’t need to see none of this.” Mavin tried to cram her back into her room, the same room their aunt used to sleep in when she was a child, with the same pink wallpaper and walnut bed frame. The radiator was peppered with neon hearts and dolphins, stickers pulled from Gemma’s art books to plaster over the peeling white paint.
“We need to call the police!” Gemma said. “Or Mr. Davidson next door, he’ll know what to do!”
“We ain’t calling the police!” Mavin stopped trying to push Gemma, her hands now planted firmly on her shoulders. Something changed in her expression. For the first time since Mavin stepped herself into Mama’s shoes, Gemma thought she really looked like an adult.
“Listen here, Gems, and listen good. No one can know what we did. It’s tight lips for all three of us, you understand?”
“What’d you do?” Gemma felt a coldness in her fingers.
“She was an evil woman. She was doing bad things. It was—it was self-defense. It had to be done.”
“Aunt Tammy? She ain’t evil…”
Benny turned his gaze towards his little sister. His eyes looked dead. Deader than the body at the bottom of the stairs.
“Yes, she was,” Mavin said. “But don’t you go repeating it to nobody. We’ll all go to jail, yeah? You’re an accomplice now.”
“I don’t want to be an accomplice.”
“Tough shits, Gemma-Gee. Now go grab that half-dead flashlight from the kitchen. Don’t turn on any lights. We’re taking her body out back.”
Mavin gave her shoulders a pat, and Gemma felt her stomach sink with the same inevitable slowness of the mud pit down the hill. Benny used to drag her towards it by the ponytail, teasing that no one would ever find her down there if it sucked her in. She’d had nightmares about it when they first started spending their summers out there, but she was a big girl now, nine whole years old. She wouldn’t be a baby about it.
Mavin and Benny began to descend the staircase, and Gemma hustled past them into the kitchen. The silver flashlight sat on the windowsill, the big D battery barely breathing. It would be just enough light to see where they were going without waking the neighbors.
Gemma’s sister might be a dummy, but she could be real clever sometimes, too. She read detective stories all night in the summer because unlike Papa, their aunt never bothered checking if Mavin took her sleeping pills. She emptied the bottles into a shoebox under her bed instead.
“Get the door, would you, Gems?” Mavin said. She held their aunt by the shoulders while Benny had her at the ankles, and together they managed to carry her so only her arms dragged along the floor. Her head sagged to the side, the angle of her neck uncomfortable to look at.
The back door swung open into the black night, and Gemma held it with her foot while Mavin and Benny shuffled past her. Their aunt’s pants almost caught on the floor going over the threshold, but they lifted her a little higher to avoid any morbid indecency.
Gemma led the parade off the patio and down the sloping green of the hill. The ankle-high grass appeared flattened, shadowless under the weak beam of the flashlight. When the ground began to squelch under their feet, Mavin paused for a moment to catch her breath.
The mud pit wasn’t far off. It looked like a slab of concrete in Gemma’s phantom spotlight, but she knew what it was capable of. Their first summer there, she watched Benny throw a Bible into the pit as he declared he didn’t believe in God anymore, and the gray gullet sucked it right down.
“Where’s the edge?” Mavin asked. Gemma angled the flashlight towards the flat stone bordering the pit, and they made their approach.
“On three,” Mavin said. Benny nodded.
“One.” They swung the body back, rocked her forward.
“Two.” Tammy’s knuckles dragged against the stone and her hair kissed the mud.
“Three.” They both let go. She plummeted, airborne for a breath, then smacked into the surface. Gemma kept the light on her, and they all watched, silent, waiting for her to sink.
She was entirely still for an agonizing moment, then like the logs of a dying fire suddenly crumple with a great sigh, the Earth accepted her. Her legs and torso went under first, her head lingering on the surface as the mud bubbled thick and hungry around her.
One bubble popped close to her face, coated her lips in sickly silt, and Gemma swore she saw her flinch away from it.
“She moved!” Gemma pushed her way onto the rock between her siblings. “She’s still alive—we have to get her out!”
“She did not move!” Mavin’s arms roped around her middle.
“She did, I swear she did!” Gemma shouted, thrashing.
“Idiot, you’ll end up in the pit too!” Mavin warned, but Gemma didn’t fear for herself. She only saw a vision of her aunt choking in the mud, dying a second death.
She lunged again, and the flashlight slipped from her hands into the pit. The last of their aunt’s face fell under the surface, mud dipping then bubbling back up where her forehead once was. Not a moment later, the flashlight sunk under, the light snuffed out with it.
“No, she’ll die. She’ll die!” Gemma wailed.
Mavin growled in the back of her throat as she threw her sister into the grass.
“Shut up! The neighbors’ll hear you, idiot!” It sounded like Mavin slapped her hands over her face. Gemma shivered, skin wet from the muddy lawn, and began to sob.
“Why?” she said. “Why’d you do it?”
“I told you already—shit!” Mavin stiffened. One house over, a beam of light cut across the dark lawn.
“Get up!” Mavin hoisted Gemma up by her elbows. Wet grass squelched under heavy feet, the light looming closer and closer.
“Benny, snap out of it!” Mavin hissed.
He turned away from the pit, ambling off the rock and into the grass.
“What are you kids doing up at this hour?” the voice behind the flashlight said. The girls straightened up, recognizing their old neighbor’s low rasp.
“Sorry, Mr. Davidson, sir,” Mavin said.
“Nothing, sir,” Gemma said.
“You’re usually a good buncha kids… Go get on back to bed, or you’ll worry your aunt to death, you hear?” he told them.
The girls gave a round of yes-sirs, but then the flashlight moved to Benny. He nodded, the motion perhaps apologetic, though Gemma’s stomach felt sticky looking at him.
“We won’t make her worry anymore, sir,” Benny said.
“Good.” Mr. Davidson waited for them to trundle back up the hill, flashlight lapping against the back of their legs like a pack of dogs. Gemma’s hands began to shake. The house menaced up ahead, Papa’s childhood home, built by his father’s father. Empty now of all but its fourth generation.
Mavin pulled Gemma into her side. Her skin was warm.
“Sorry I pushed you,” she said. “You can take a bath before you go back to bed. I’ll start the water for you.”
The light slunk away from their shoulders, footsteps retreating towards the property line.
“And, if it makes you feel better—” Mavin pressed closer, voice hushed in the shell of Gemma’s ear. “She didn’t suffer. She just went to sleep.”
Amelia M. Burton (she/her) is a writer of queer fiction. Her work has been published in Uncharted Magazine, MENACE Magazine, and My Galvanized Friend. Find her on Substack at The Ace Lit Corner.
