Tales Of The Gurrier

“Ke, ke, ke, ke….Ke, ke, ke, ke.” The Turnip baby’s yellowed body thumped against the wooden planks of the cabin. It’s wizened face curled into a frown. “Ke, ke, ke, ke” it said, in it’s thin, reedy, vegetable voice. The Turnip baby did not have much of a brain, it was out of the ground at least two weeks and by now most of it’s brain had withered away. What it had in the first place was little more than a highly developed set of reproductive instructions, hardwired into a pulpy mass of vegetable matter.

The instructions were simple.

Get up. Stagger. Fall down. Die.

The Turnip Babies arrived on clear spring morning in the the third year after the accident. Piotr had been digging in the turnip field, turning over the brown earth with the rusted metal tongue of his spade. He worked methodically, attacking the sods of frozen earth until they broke and crumbled into a clumpy loam. The downstroke of his spade connected with something hard and fibrous. Piotr cursed, the turnips were not due for another two months. He tugged the spade free and gaped with horror as the disturbed earth pulsed with a spasmic rhythm. The Turnip baby crawled from it’s dirtwomb and climbed to it’s feet on yellowed stumps of legs. It stood around one foot in height, a horrid, lumpy, purple torso with long fibrous limbs tapering into hairy roots. It had no neck and the head was an uneven tumourous globule from which various stray roots clung like lank hair from the lumpy dome of it’s skull and vestigial limbs and nodules sprouted at random. But it was the eyes that made Piotr scream; milk white, blank, pupil-less orbs bulged from it’s wizened yellow face. Piotr’s spade had sheared thorugh the top of it’s skull and a greenish fluid, stinking of turnip blight, dribbled down the blank face and into the black hole of it’s mouth. “Ke, ke, ke, ke.” it called, in a thin, coughing voice.

Piotr screamed and brought the spade down on the hideous thing again and again until there was nothing left but a mess of turnip guts steaming gently in the morning air. Piotr never returned to the top field and he swore to never again grow root vegetables. The land here was poisonous and treacherous. He would grow corn, only corn. Healthy corn, which thrived and grew in the light of day.

—–

Granny Yakovleva sat on the porch in her rocking chair watching the night slip over the hills. She took a long draw from her clay pipe and adjusted the Kalashnikov resting across her knees. Her good eye, bright as a wet stone, scoured the lengthening shadows of the twilight. The other was blind and milky with cataracts, yet beneath the white film the blind eye roved ceaselessly, like it’s healthy twin. She took a handful of black tobacco from a pouch around her neck and curled a finger into the densely packed weed. Curling it between thumb and forefinger she tucked the baccy into the hollow her cheek. It was a special blend of her own devising, a mix of Oblast black and the stringy Greenplant that grew along the banks of the Yaga where the Toadfish mate in Spring. It was dark and bitter and the juices burned her tongue, but Granny Yakovleva grinned to herself as the smoky taste of the Oblast gave way to the acrid fluids of the Greenplant. She felt a mild itch at the base of her skull, like spiders feet and the milky cataracts of her blind eye began to glow softly in the half light. She sluiced the bitter juice and spat. The shadows she saw in her left eye, the remnants of her vision, sharpened and cohered into a photo-negative world of black and white. She spat again and grinned, her blind eye now glowing with infra-red vision.

She patted the baccy pouch with a wizened hand and chuckled.

“Would that I had some of this in the war, eh Boney.”

The ancient hound by her side raised his shaggy head at the sound of his name. Granny Yakovleva reached out to scratch the brown fur of his head.

“I could have done with it back then, eh. Some of this and one of these,” she patted the Kalashnikov, “Yes, a fuck sight better than the shit they gave us to kill the Germans with.”

From the forest a long mournful howl drifted above the trees.

Granny Yakovleva scanned the edges of the forest, her not-blind eye a winking glow-worm of light. She wiped the brown tobacco juice from her mouth with a ragged sleeve and raised the machine gun to her shoulder. The hound by her side whimpered.

“You old coward Boney. Afraid of a few Wolves.”

From the edges of the forest Granny Yakovleva spotted a flash of movement. A hot, grey furred body, melting through the dim shadows and then swallowed up by the cold night.

The hound looked at his mistress and whimpered again. Granny Yakovleva sighed, “You are right little puppy. Would that it was a wolf, a whole pack of them. What fun we would have. Poor bastard wolves. Come, Piotr is still in the fields, the foolish boy. We must warn him.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.