Screamscapes: Tales of Terror by Evans Light

second handful of creamy clay from the streambed, sucking the goop hungrily from his fingers.
    The clay had a strong mineral taste, like the medicinal tonic his father forced him to choke down whenever he got the fever; the only thing missing was the warm sting of alcohol on the back end. He also thought it tasted a little bit like blood, though that may have been from the growing number of open sores inside his mouth, Micah wasn’t sure.
    He stopped eating for long enough to glance at the other children, who had gathered around, watching him intently. There was a total of nine children in their wayward caravan, including himself - although he hardly considered himself a child.
    He offered a forced smile to the children, clay smeared around his mouth like smudged lipstick.
    Micah shoveled out another handful from the bottom, and offered it to the kids with a silent shrug, to see if anyone cared to share. He couldn’t actually ask them if they wanted any, because the last mouthful had stuck to the roof of his mouth, gluing his jaws together momentarily as he struggled to swallow.
    Anna frowned down at him, hands on her hips as her ankle-length dress struggled to flutter in the gentle breeze.
    “No,” she muttered, rejecting his offer, her voice stern but glum. Her response was only half-directed at him, more at the other children.
    At sixteen, Anna was the oldest of the six girls in the group, a self-ordained authority who enjoyed pretending she was everyone’s mother. Even Micah’s younger sisters - Ruth, Esther and Chastity - followed Anna around like her very own little flock of ducklings, as did her own two younger sisters, Piety and Lydia.
    Anna’s brothers, Jacob and Nathaniel - also younger than her and Micah - weren’t quite so obedient. They looked up to Micah as their role model most of the time, not Anna.
    “I’ve been praying, and I’m confident God will provide,” Anna told the children piously, “He always does. If God had wanted us to lie on our bellies and eat mud like worms, he wouldn’t have given us arms and legs in his own image.”
    Her proclamation dimmed the bright look of hope rising in the younger children’s eyes at the prospect of having something to eat, even if it was only clay. When Anna said “no” to something, they usually listened or they ran the risk of her taking out her budding maternal instincts on them with a thin plank, when their real parents weren’t looking. She had her ways of making the young ones pray forgiveness for not respecting their elders – which really meant her .
    “I’ll have some, Micah!” shouted nine-year-old Jacob, Anna’s enthusiastic little brother, who thought Micah was possibly the most fascinating person on earth, and who also relished any opportunity to displease Anna.
    “God made me an animal, so I’ve got no choice but to obey the animal urges he gave me. Gonna have me a good couple helpings,” the ruddy-faced boy said mischievously, as he flopped onto his belly beside Micah. He began digging with gusto into the streambed, gobbling massive gray blobs of clay from his fingers with a hearty “mumsh mumsh mumsh” slurping sound, that he hoped was making Anna feel ill.
    Micah looked up at Anna and smiled sheepishly, but she only crossed her arms and humphed at him. The other children took a step back quietly.
    Micah knew that he and Anna had a sort of private truce between them, unspoken but always present whenever their eyes met. She had bossed him around relentlessly when they were younger, but since the unspoken agreement between them began, she hadn’t given him much grief.
    He liked to imagine that the truce between them was at least partly due to the fact that she genuinely liked him and respected his smarts, but deep down he really knew it was mostly because he caught her last summer, in the smokehouse, with two of her fingers buried up to the knuckle between her legs.
    He still remembered the moment like it happened yesterday.