Contest 1

A contest piece

PART I

 

The wind whistles in her ear, and gently brushes her badly burnt and badly bruised neck and thighs, relieving some pain. Although she shivers at every bitter cold breeze, she craves the tingling comfort it provides for her skin. With nowhere to go, nothing to do for her burns and bruises, she decides to shrivel up into a ball beside a shrub and attempt to sleep. She slowly gets into her position and feels discomfort. Everything burns, everything’s blurred and her hope of living the life she once believed she could live has completely died. It's a wonder she hasn’t attempted killing herself yet. Her thoughts go wild but actions never follow.

 

“Perhaps I still have some human part,” she thought as the cold lulled her into a sleep helped along by the drugs. She hadn’t eaten in days, small consolation, but at least the endorphins from hunger were kicking in and easing her pain on her neck and thighs. If only what was left of her emotional center could be numbed too.

 

The girl, about age fourteen begins to pray to a God long since dead to her: asking, begging, for His help. After her prayer, nothing happens and again her hope of life dies. What kind of “loving God” sadistic b*****d would allow what happened to me?

 

 Eventually, she decides to cover herself in the cold dirt to occupy herself as well as make the constant aching burns and bruises diminish. As she picks up handfuls of the bitter cold dirt and plops it on every burnt and bruised part of her body she sings a high pitched melody that has been in her head for a while now.

 

Her mind travels to every part of memory it could possibly travel and by the time she's finished applying her dirt, she is weeping about the vicious memories she just recalled.

 

Her name, is Mindy. However, no one refers to her as Mindy, they call her "it". She hasn't seen a human in three weeks.

 

She convulses on the ground as her mind relives the horrors that took place and put her here, in the deep woods of West Virginia’s Appalachian mountains…

 

PART II

Her father was a good man despite his rap sheet. He was a mountain of a man standing 6’3 and weighing 250 pounds. He was a moonshiner about 20 miles outside of Elkins, right on the edge of the National Forest, the nearest neighbor being over 15 miles away. The family had a small 3 room cabin there, no phone, with an outhouse and a cheap generator to provide some electricity along with an underground “storm shelter” which he actually used to distill his “white lightning.”

When she was 10 years old, she had traveled with her father to Elkins, dropping batches of white lightning along designated spots on the route. When they finally arrived, they stopped for ice cream at a local shop,

“Mindy, you know I love you, right?”

“Yes Daddy.”

“You know I’d do anything for you and your brother?”

“Yes Daddy.”

He stroked her long blonde hair and kissed her.

Joe had known for a while that his wife was prostituting. The Law had found enough of the drop spots to seriously impact the McCoy family income. They headed home…

Mindy had spotted a black sedan in the gravel driveway on the side of the cabin. Her dad also saw it and his jealousy and his deeply fundamentalist Protestant religiosity kicked in.

He grabbed his .14 gauge double barrel shotgun from between the seats in the old Chevy truck,

“Mindy, stay here. Daddy’s gotta do somethin’.”

He walked into the tiny cabin with both barrels loaded.

Eight year old Mark greeted him at the door, “Daddy!”

He picked the boy up saying,

“Mark! Run to the truck and sit with your sister!”

Mark ran out the door of the cabin and opened the truck door,

“Mindy, what’s happening?”

She reached out and held Mark, “I dunno Buddy, let’s stay here.”

“I heard: ‘You f****n’ b***h! Look at me when I f**k you!’ Then ‘No, I won’t do anal!’, ‘Fine! Then I’ll make you, you f****n’ B***h! And mommy screaming: ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhh!’”

They heard a shot.

Then the cabin door flung open.

Joe was dragging Diane by her long raven hair, tossing her in the dirt. His boots coming down all over her body,

“You harlot! You Jezebel! How dare you betray me! Open your filthy w***e mouth and bite that concrete block!” He pointed to it.

Her laying on her stomach and biting the concrete:

Joe’s heavy boot came down hard on the back of her head, and “just to finish the job” Joe thought, he turned the corpse over and put the shotgun over her breasts and fired.

With Mark and Mindy still in the truck, Joe went to the shed and got his chainsaw, he dismembered the corpse into very small pieces and fed them to the 4 Boxers the family owned, the chainsaw action was enough to turn a lot of her bones to dust.

Finally he drug Diane’s “john” out and did the same with the corpse, feeding him to the Boxers…

PART III

A year later, Joe was a different man. He fell into a deep, profoundly black melancholy, drinking more white lightning then what he sold. From early in the morning to late at night he was in a drunken stupor.

One day he wandered into Mindy’s room, “Mindy, I’ve never showed you how a Daddy should love his daughter.” His head spinning and words slurred he took his jeans off and laid down beside her.

He forced her head down, “Daughters should suck like this.”

She was crying as he forced her into the act.

“Daddy’s also do this to their daughters.”

He held her down and forced himself inside her. As he did so, she accidentally scratched his face with her fingernails.

In a drunken rage he slapped her hard, “You f*****g w***e! You’re just like your mother! I won’t have another w***e in this house!”

He grabbed her by her long blonde hair and drug her to “the storm cellar.”

He had a confiscated pair of hand cuffs from Diane that she used on her “clients”, he hand cuffed her hands behind her back, in the cellar to a 6 foot chain attached to the wall. In the oil lamp lit cellar, all she had was a bucket a dirty mattress and a Bible. Many bottles of white lightning were stacked neatly in a corner.

“We’ll keep you here. Read the Bible!”

Joe silently thought, “maybe it won’t be a w***e anymore,” as he pushed it on the bed and raped it.

“We’ll get the w***e of it yet he shouted!” as he slapped her repeatedly.

He handed her chalk and bellowed, “you will write 100 Bible verses on these concrete walls everyday you w***e!” then he went back to the house.

She laid in a fetal position on the mattress and cried, not knowing what to think.

The next morning in a drunken stupor he brought a dog bowl of food, she looked in and found a small slab of meat with a bone in it.

“That’s it’s w***e mother!” Joe Bellowed, “Now eat! And if it’s hungry later eat what’s in the bucket! W***e’s deserve s**t!”

He took his belt off and beat it until it ate it’s mother. Then he raped it again. Joe had depersonalized his daughter as “the w***e” making her an object, an “it,” the trauma of his wife’s repeated infidelities and death being projected onto Mindy, all Joe’s anger at “the w***e” being projected onto his daughter. He had to depersonalize her in order to do this.

PART IV

The depersonalization and rapes continued for three more years as “it” was fed dog food to survive and forced to eat her own waste from the bucket. He kept it docile with high doses of white lightning and roofies mixed in the food. Two forced abortions were also carried out in this time. Joe used nightshade and white lightning to make it’s insides burn, he put cigarettes out on it’s back, thighs, and neck while also biting it in those places. Then he stuck a wire deep inside it and stirred it around. It was remarkable it’s personality was still intact. One thing held it together in being subjected to it’s daddy’s personality change, John’s verse “God is Love.” But where is God here?

One day, Joe forced Mark to rape “it,” and when he couldn’t, Joe hit Mark so hard his skull fractured against the concrete and he died instantly.

In a drunken stupor, Joe hopped on top of it on the mattress, his keys dangling in his pockets. Mindy dodged Joe this time, and he hit his head hard on the concrete knocking him out temporarily.

She laid parallel to him and grabbed the keys and undid the handcuffs from the chain.

She took off for the house, grabbed twelve buck shots, a butcher knife, matches, and the .14 gauge double barrel shotgun. She was 13 going on 14, emotionless, and she loaded two shots into the gun and calmly walked back to the “storm cellar”.

She put both barrels right on her knocked out father’s head and fired. She then turned him over, pulled the rest of his jeans off and took his penis and testes off with the knife: stacking them neatly over the body.

She drug Mark’s body out of the cellar, grabbed a spade from the shed and dug him a shallow grave behind the house. He did not deserve to be a part of what happened next.

She returned to the “storm cellar,” grabbed several of the jugs of white lightning and poured them over Joe’s corpse and the mattress and lit it a blaze. She fired a shot at the rest of the stack.

The fire was all consuming and showed a brilliant glow from beneath the ground.

She then siphoned the gas out of all two vehicles around the house and grabbed the gas can from the garage, and walked into the cabin.

She spread the accelerant everywhere, lit a match and walked away with the shotgun, shells and matches.

PART V

She trudged further into the mountains for three weeks and survived with what she brought with her and exhausted, she finally broke through the seizure on the ground…

At the peak of the mountain she looked and could see for 20 miles in every direction. So, so tired and degraded, she had one shot gun shell left.

She looked at the rising sun and said, “God, if you’re there, please understand my situation and take me into your loving arms. I will be food for your creatures.”

She had both barrels in her mouth, one loaded and pulled the trigger.

Author's Note

Hope I win :)

Reviews

[KatDarkness]

I really enjoyed reading this; the descriptions and wording were wonderful, and the plot gripped me immediately. I have to disagree with most of what Alex said, as everything in your story seemed perfect, and such tiny technicalities aren't something a lot of readers would care about. I particularly liked the part where Mindy shot Joe, and how you captured the brutallity of Joe's actions. Excellent writing :)

[ValBonScallon]

Thank you Kat!

[Alex]

A few things...
1.moonshine needs running water. You didn't set a time frame, but I'm assuming it's the early 1900's (no later than 1960). It couldn't have been made in the storm cellar, because most houses didn't have indoor plumbing yet.

2.Moonshine was never "dropped" it was always a person to person exchange.

3.Why did he feed the wife to the Boxers (I'm assuming these are dogs and not sweaty, aggressive men that like to punch each-other) It seems far more reasonable that he would put the bodies in with the hogs.

4.The term "White Lightning" is an over publicized exaggeration of "mountain dew" which was made popular in a song.
"I asked my ol' pappy why he called his brew
white lightning stead' of mountain dew
I took one sip and right away I knew as
my eyes bugged out and my face turned blue"
As you can see it was a joking exaggeration of the potency. It was not commonly called that.

5. Why would he still have chunks of his dead wife a year later, I thought he's fed her to animals?

[ValBonScallon]

Actually you're wrong on the drops, maybe they did it person to person back in the early days but today's moonshiners have drop spots usually not far from a road in a wooded area with a marker for the spot and something camouflaging the product. Talk to any KY or WV cop they'll tell ya or watch Moonshiners on Discovery. With the running water and it being a storm cellar that was the clue to the time period (indoor plumbing).

As to using the term, "white lightning", I'm appealing to a general audience here not one of historians.

As to how he disposed of parts of his wife, are we talking about a reasonable man here? Quite obviously not, we're talking about and seeing one who's just had a psychotic break. I've already given up too much of this and lost its ambiguity, thanks.

[ValBonScallon]

And what makes you think hogs anyway? I didn't say a word about it being a hog farm. And I never said he fed the entirety of his wife to the dogs when he first killed her. Please read more carefully nex time.

[Alex]

I read carefully enough. I was a 7 year resideeent of VA and have actually run moon shine. Moonshineers is a dramatized documeentary of BONDED (legal) moonshiners. Don't believe everything you see on reality tv.

Given the time period eveeerybody in the hills had at least one hog or goat for trash disposal. Also, boxers are a rather odd (high end) breed of dog for poor hill people, blue tick hounds and mutts were more likely breeds.

With no refrigeration one would assume that the body would decompose, in fact given altitude, humidity and forest density (assumed wild life) decomp would excelerate. Furthermore, the sight of human decomp one year in and exposed to elements would be a digusting rotted mostly gray wormy mass if anything.

I'm merely pointing out some things that would make your reading more believable.

[Ryun Cushing]

While an unfortunate story, the writing was absolutely amazing.