hair and onto her forehead. It crawls down the bridge of her nose, and then her tongue pokes out of her mouth and reaches up and licks it off. There is a crunch as she closes her teeth on it.
Jack says, “You were a seed. I planted you myself. You can’t really be my mum. You’re just pretending. You’re like that movie. The one where the plants wrap up people who are sleeping and grow copies.”
“We are rooted in your blood, Jack McCourt. And in hers. We draw from her strength even now. Our roots are tough and hardy and grow fast, to find what we need.”
He thinks of the piglet and shudders. “You must be thirsty. We’ve been in a dry spell. Do you want me to get the watering can?”
“We’re not thirsty for that,” Mum #1 confesses.
“No,” he says. “Do you want another piglet?”
“Maybe something with a little more juice in it,” she says. “We’re almost strong enough, Jack, to pull up roots and have us some fun. We could paint the farm red tonight, boy!”
“It’s already red.”
“Redder,” says Mum #3, and she laughs a hoarse, smoker’s laugh.
“Tell me what you want,” Jack says.
“How about you walk that sow over here,” Mum #1 suggests.
“Sow!” says the one with ants all over her face, and her tongue lolls out, and she slobbers on her lips. “Sow—now!”
“Okay,” Jack says. “I understand. Mom? I don’t want to stay here one more night.”
“No,” she says. “You won’t have to. Just do this last thing for us? Bring us a sow to build up a little strength. And then, Jack—”
“We’ll help you do the rest,” say five of the six heads at the same time. The sixth head, the deformed mum, licks ants off her cheek and smacks her lips.
As he reels out of the graveyard, the first poisonous line of crimson light shows in the east. The edge of the world glows like an ember.
18.
Jack is in the kitchen when Beth wanders in, her hair mussed up from sleep and her feet bare. He always expects her to enter from the porch, through the screen door, but instead she lets herself into the kitchen from the front hall, doing up the top button on her flannel shirt as she approaches. Is it her flannel shirt? It looks like a man’s. It looks like one of his father’s.
When she sees him on the far side of the kitchen counter, her chubby, pale face darkens with a blush and her fingers lose their grip on the button. The flannel shirt springs open to show her pretty, freckled breastbone.
“Jack, I—” she begins, but Jack doesn’t have time for her explanations or, worse, her confession. He reels around the kitchen counter, holding his right hand up in the gesture that means “hello” but also “halt.” Blood falls in fat drops from the bright line raked across his palm.
“Oh, Beth. Oh, Beth, quick, quick, come with me. I did something stupid. I did something really, really bad,” he says, and is interested to find he is close to genuine tears, his eyes tingling and the world blurring.
“Jack! You’re bleeding. We ought to do something about that hand—”
“No, no, no, please, just come, just come see what I did, Beth, you’ve got to help me, please—”
“Of course I will,” Beth says, and clutches him to her, thoughtlessly squeezing his face to her bosom. Only a few weeks ago, such an intimacy would’ve dizzied him, but now he finds it as repulsive as a centipede crawling over his face.
With his uninjured hand, he tows her by the elbow to the back door. Blood plinks and plops on the tiles.
“I let her out of the pen, and she wouldn’t go back in,” he says in his choked voice. “I thought I could scare her.”
“Oh, Jack,” Beth says. “One of the pigs?”
“The sow,” he says, leading her out into the pearly, brassy light of dawn. He hurries her across the dewy grass, past the kitchen garden, through the open gate of the graveyard. “I’m so stupid. I think she’s going to die.”
He slows as they approach his mother’s headstone and the plants growing in a wild tumult before it. They’ve all cleverly sunk back into the ground, so nothing is visible except the disturbed earth and their tufted green branches. He lets go of Beth, and she takes another few steps forward, looking around, puzzled. When she frowns, Jack can see she has a small second chin, and it strikes him