Member-only story
Duck tales
It started three months ago. First the small coughing fits: harmless, almost polite, then the explosions came, wet, ripping, blood dragged up from somewhere deeper than it should exist, tearing through the sealed, enchanted four-story cell of building. Even then, he wouldn’t see a doctor. Your immortal ego killed you! — Flora exhales it more than says it, and the drizzle that begins to fall thins the black smear around her eyes. The tears themselves are already gone, filed away into some dim storage of forgetting. After thirty-seven years with Martin Langdale, most people would come up dry anyway.
As things got worse, she kept going back to the ducks. More often than before, then more than that. There was nothing else left that still responded. The palace — grand, overfed — had gone hollow, infected with a kind of polished nothing. But out on the artificial lake, the ducklings sliding in formation behind their mother, clean lines, obedient little bodies; it gave her something close to relief. Something she couldn’t extract from the rooms closing in on her. Then, just like that, the problematic period ended.
Martin met Flora’s family, the Hammings at twenty-two, on a hunt. Late June, the last bright weekend, guests everywhere, the private forest open, the condemned lined up in advance. Slaughter was the point. Not just animals, though. There was another thing laid out for the armed predators: the prettiest bloom just cracking open. Back then he was still Marty. He picked her, that’s the word for it, and stuck her in a pot.
