Mercy (A Southern Gothic Short Story‪)‬

In this Southern Gothic short, a sheltered, impoverished teenager seeks to impress a neighbor boy, with destructive results. This story explores poverty, neglect, mental illness, and misogyny in rural Appalachia.


This story originally appeared in Printer's Devil Review. 


Excerpt:


“Your mama named you,” her daddy told her, when she was old enough to realize that the pale woman on the living room wall had once been real. “Said you was her only real mercy. You ain’t any kind of mercy, though. Neither one of you.” It took a few beers to make him talk about his wife—a Danish painter he’d met on a tour of New York after he graduated from the state teachers’ college. The woman moved in with him a week later, bringing with her a single suitcase and a cancer.


If her daddy did marry that woman, Merete wouldn’t stay with them. Her daddy could go live in town. She’d keep the house and the dogs. She could steal another chicken and sell the eggs in town for a living, could steal another cock and breed them. When the bills came she’d tear them up and scatter the pieces in the yard. When the woman from the state came she’d hide down in the cellar with a shovel in her hand.


Eli Mahoney wasn’t under the willow when she came to the chicken yard. One of the dogs, a mottled brown mongrel, left its post and followed, sniffing the dirt.


“You stay down there,” she warned from the side of her mouth. “This is a new dress and I won’t have you dirtying it up.”


The mongrel ignored her. It kept its nose in the ground, inhaling sharply and chuffing. She’d tried to copy it once when she was little. The smell of dirt still turned her stomach.


It was cold out. The dew hadn’t quite left the grass and her bare feet were soon wet. She hated her toes—crooked, inelegant stubs with broken nails, but she had only one pair of shoes and they would have looked ridiculous with her dress.


A second dog joined her. Her daddy called it a bulldog, but it couldn’t have been a purebred. Merete doubted there was any bulldog in it at all. She shivered against the chill. Little bumps appeared on her arms and her legs and she felt her nipples harden; she realized she should have worn a bra too, no matter how dumb it looked.


Merete stayed by the pen for an hour waiting. Eli Mahoney didn’t come. The dogs grew bored of her and sniffed their way back toward the house, pausing briefly to examine their hindquarters. At one point the balding cock squeezed through the wire and pecked her foot. She took no pains to pen it again. The cock always did as he wanted.


When the sun reached its highest point she sat on a great tree root to cry. The boy wasn’t coming. He would never come—she knew it, she knew it like she knew there was a God and there was a hell waiting for all girls who looked like their mothers. Maybe it was a school day. Maybe there was another girl, a girl with straight teeth and clear eyes. God Jesus, he wasn’t coming.


Merete moaned a secret obscenity and sank against the tree.