Lamprey Pie

Out beyond the upland scrub and shrubs and maple trees of sanguine leaves, past the stretch of lowland chalk and limestone, bedrocks treading towards the hedgerow and trees enclosing the wild grass fields which yield into woods of aspen, beech, and rowan, cherry, alder, and ash, of rich autumn hues, the burning fires and smoldering embers of ochre and oranges, flanked by gray bark and golden draping of the weeping willows, there is a swampy pond of murk lined with water shields and lilies, weeds, and fallen leaves and twigs, where the slain body of a black-faced bull moose lies on the side of its humpbacked shoulders, velvet bones spreading across palmate antlers and coiling horns, the great beast’s legs lost in the roily waters like broken boughs of axe-felled sycamores.

In silence, sings the song of the forest.

The boy finds it there, rambling through the brush. A basket in his hand for berries and mushrooms and herbs of catmint and chamomile, lavender and dill, lamb’s ear and lemon balm, feverfew and sage. He stops and assesses the body, boggled eyes, sagging dewlap, tongue slung out over incisors and licorice black lips. He grabs a stick off the ground and approaches the body, wading into the shallows, when the song of the forest thrums to a heavenly crescendo.

The woodland flora is the sweeping glissando of a harp entering a dream.

Strawberry-blonde marigolds, rose-flowered rushes, yellow water flag irises, pale lady’s smock. The rigid hornwort’s flowing coontails call beneath the water, where the aquatic mint and the violets are choked out by the loosestrifes.

Dip your feet in the well of thine death! They sing. Lo’, draw your pail and kneel at the flesh of thine nest!

Their blossoms pluck the wind like strings. They are brushes which paint the swell into a pink violet smear which gusts towards the tired sky. The boy wades further into the pool as the birds of the boughs sing their beaks and fluttered wings into trilling filagree like that of ethereal flutes.

The goldfinch and bluetits and black grouse and goshawk and buzzards and black birds, spotted woodpeckers and song thrush flirt with gold crest, grey partridge, and herons, and warblers, nightjars and nightingales team with redpolls and robins.

Gather thy branch like the plume of a quill! Hark! Pen the bull’s body and stories will be told…

Then the beasts guffawed like the blare of brass horns. Tonal excrement of angels. The thundered dark clouds of God’s rancor.

Badgers and martens, bank vole and roe deer, sly foxes, slick adders, dormouse, spry beaver. Brown hares thump their feet like drums and sprint into the brush. Hedgehogs and rats scatter under the flush of butterflies and death’s head moths.

Go! They trumpet. On with it then! To bloody hell! Pierce it, lad! We ain’t got all day! Slice it like mutton! Like liver! Like tripe! Cut the corpse! Coward! Rip the heart from its chest and hold it in your bastard palms!

So he does.

The boy grasps his branch and pokes into the bull’s gut, and like the explosion of spring upon the dirt blanket of melting snow, the four stomachs of the creature burst into piles of flailing lampreys. Oral discs of vampire’s fangs, blood sucking tongue, their forms an anomaly of eel, snake and leech. Hell’s breath, Satan’s phalli, tongues of witches, digits of rapacious kings.

The bull moose deflates into a sack of skin and drooping antlers, measles of white tape worms soaking from the dripping slippery slop of meat under chartreuse lily pads. They are pedestrians turning blind eyes made of the flowering of blushing roses.

The boy bends down and rips the tender moose heart from the puddle of loose skin and holds it in both palms above his head like a relic, the last light of day beaming down from the closing canopy of frowning clouds.

He thrusts it in his basket. Looking down he sees the lampreys have already attached themselves, hooking on to his clothes and skin, draining blood from bruised abrasions, growing plumper by the minute, as they squirm and writhe and slip and hang and quiver, indulging in the pleasures of the young boy’s good health.

One by one he rips the leeching creatures from his body and drops them in his basket. He sweeps his hands through the gloomy pool and catches their sucker fangs on his bare arms, and tears again and captures them as they wriggle in a pile enclosed in herbs, berries, fungi, and wicker.

On the way back to his village he gnaws the moose heart like an apple. Blood juices spritzing on his lips and soiled knuckles. With a threshing jaw, swirling tongue, he minces the loose meat of fibers and tissues and arteries and veins. His belch is like the beat of life. Bum-bump! Bum-bump! With a hop in his step, he makes way through the hedge and scrub past the maples and limestone through the dirt rows kept by farmland wooden fences, leading to cobblestone, market squares, butchers, taverns and factory walls.

Smokestacks in the distance. Smog as black as the devil’s tongue. Soot in the lungs of the laymen. Industrial corridors masoned with bricks as red as bricks could be. The gray old land with strings of glinting sunlight, though not enough to blind one eye. Sullen clouds above stone cottages with wood thatched roofs and slated windows, some half timbred painted white with chestnut crossbeams.

The boy looks like any other boy in the town. Downturned cap above unwashed hair and sooty face. Pale eyes, the brightest thing about him, already dampened into a phlegmatic adult gaze. Rose lips chapped white, dimpled into a subtly clefted chin. Linen undershirt beneath a short collarless jacket of dark wool. Knickerbockers and black stockings tucked into heavy boots with hobnailed soles. The only difference is today he smiles. The heart of a moose in his swollen belly. And tonight, he will eat the lamprey pie.

Outside his mother’s cottage, he scrapes the wet filth from his boots on the cast iron decrottoir. He unlocks the hatch of the door and heaves his bucket of plundered herbs and lampreys up above his waist to place it down on the bristled rug. He throws his coat on the rack pressed against floral pattern block print wallpaper losing its adhesive kiss in the corners, curving out like the fluffed wings of royal swans.

Through the den he walks, where the pussy cat sleeps and snores in a loaf atop arm chairs furnished with antimacassar cloths. The half sleep trance of a living room predator, where one misplaced creak of a floorboard can trigger such instinct to shock the little beast into the stark alertness of a crowing cock in the rising sun.

A fire blazes in the hearth, brick chimney adorned with tongs, poker, shovel, and a pail of extra coal. On the mantel a wood crucifix, sea shells and coastal souvenirs, family heirloom trinkets, faceless children’s dolls in blue dresses, instant lucifers in small tins next to images crocheted in circular frames.

The smell of stew from the frowzy kitchen. A pot cooling on the sideboard, rising with steam. The table dressed with pewter silverware atop the polyester runner, a deep crimson faded to vermillion. And with pouted face, strapped apron, and ladle in hand, his mother.

“Roight…What’s all this then?” she grimaces. “A bunch of bloody rubbish?”

“Tis’ lampreys, mum.”

“Lampreys, innit? Well whoiy din’t yer say sohr?”

“Can we makes a lamprey poye t’night, mums?”

“Christ! With’is much lampreys’ll feed tha’ole neighb-a-h’od! Ev’ry jollocks and hedge-creeper’n tha county’ll wont baye me lamprey poyes! We’ll be thick as thieves ‘n feast ahs kings! Your pops may’ve ben a gibfaced flapdoodle and a roight common foozler, but ye m’lad’ll bring me wealth, health, and foinally sum peace! By jove! Jus tell meh laddie…Where dost ye foind’em?”

“In the marsh yonder ‘ose dark woods.” The boy tells her, cap in both palms.

“Herrmmmmm…Best oi test’m oot, eh?” His mother says, dropping the ladle in the pot and reaching for the basket. Sallow swollen hands like the paw pads of lions, she grips a slithering lamprey tight with a peculiar innuendo of phallic pleasuring and shoves the four-eyed vampire into her gob, teeth first, clamping off its head with what is left of her blackened teeth.

Moose blood sprays from the lamprey’s throat. The boy starts to laugh and chokes back into a frown, covering his face with his shielded forearm. His mother’s apron is dotted red. She wipes her chin and throws the raw cartilage back into the basket where the other fish suck and gnaw on its gaping wound.

“Tastes roight…” his mother nods, licking the juices from her fingertips. “Let’s git ta’ werk.”

The boy and his mother separate the lampreys into different piles on the wood counter. The first they cut the navels and drain them into a pot to boil in their own blood. Others they beat tender and smear with berry jelly, butter, or marmalade. The mother cooks more lampreys in thick syrup and foraged herbs and bakes them into crisscrossed pie crusts with red wine poured in mixed with an amalgam of spices. When golden brown she butters the crust, slicing more lampreys into bits to slather them across the top. Satisfied with this, she thus begins to sing…

T’was an olde wumun ‘ho baked lamprey poye! O me! O moye! M’love lamprey poye! And t’was’n ol’ wumun ‘ho cooked lamprey stew! She dain’t knowr wot t’do! M’love lamprey stew!

“We eatin’ loyk ‘enry tonight, boy! JESUS- CHROI…”

The mother pauses her oath upon seeing her boy dancing a gay jig, lampreys stuck to his cheeks and necks by their suckers. He laughs and spins, and their tails spin with him. His mother cackles and slaps him upside the head for his levity, ripping the lampreys from his face, leaving little love bite bruises behind. He smiles bashfully while she tosses the extra back into the pot of boiled blood.

“E’res the deal. We take these poyes down t’the fact’ry gates in the morrow and sells ‘em ta every two-bit workin’ stiff and their mummas fer two shillings’a gob! Ye boye a lofa bred and brings the monies backs ta me. Roight?” She stares him in the eyes, pointing a finger towards his nose.

“Roight.” The boy agrees.

In the morning the boy walks through the shops and markets and alleys and gates to the entrance of the corridor of ceramic factories and textile mills; the source of all black clouds depressing the countryside as far out as the cliffs and widow’s peaks of the brooding ocean shores. Two shillings a pie, he sells his stock to the laborers in less than an hour. He returns home with an empty cart, purse full of coins and a thick loaf of bread. Purring cat with coiling tail pushed against her breast, his mother sends him back out to the woods to gather more.

For three more weeks, it works like that. The boy peddles the fish pastries and returns the coins. His mother drapes herself in new clothes and shiny jewelry. A nice bell collar for the pussy cat. A gold ring upon her finger where her late husband had planted one of cheap silver. Over time a wick of resentment glows into a flame, and the boy finds himself not wishing to retrieve more, until he is paid his due.

“No more? No more!?” his mother shouts, boxing his ears and slapping the top of his head. “What ye means ‘eres no more?”

“I shan’t git ye any so long as oi i’nt getting’ paid moye due.”

“Dues? Dues? I’m ye mummy, not’a strumpet! Now grabs thyself by the whirlygigs and take me to thy mud pond!”

“But mum…”

“By gum!” she thwacks him upside the face again, drawing blood from his nose. “Oye need not ask thee once more toyme!”

So with a basket each, they walk out of the village across the lowland chalk through the scrub and brush, fields of wild grass and hedgerow, to the thick of dogwoods and blackthorns, hollow trunks of major oaks rotting next to willows amidst the marshland. At the pond’s edge where once a bull moose lay slain, was not a trace save two palmate antlers coiled at the ends, thrusting through the lily pads and dank weeds like sunken logs.

“Roight then, laddie. Les grab ‘em lampreys for me poyes.” His mother orders. She kneels in the soil and swishes her hands beneath the water. The boy hesitates behind her listening to the low thrum of the forest’s song.

The aquatic pests are the nimble push keys of a harpsichord. Pomp and revelry. Bounding bass and twirling treble.

The common frogs and newts, bats and purple dragonflies, water fleas and diving beetles, nymphs and larvae of caddisfly, snails, and raft spiders, mayflies, and translucent shrimp, the fish below the surface, and the ovular jaws of swirling lampreys all call out to him.

We want no more of this business! O! Let us rejoice in the return! Tell me, who painted the lion? May we paint back the perspective? Feed us your squab mother! Thornback hoydon and voracious whore! Viler and of more villainy than any beast among the bush! Feed us lad! This dismal game!

So he does. The boy knows he has to.

His mother kneeling towards the pond, the boy shifts his knickerbockers and draws his leg into a ferocious kick which propels the old woman into the pool with a thunderous splash of laughing water. And they are on her.

She resurfaces, choking for breath, lampreys stuck to her face and neck and arms and hands, up her dress and down her stockings. Her whole body is swarmed with vampire eels. More leech than fish. They are consuming her. Sucking her veins dry. Where she once was a rotund woman, she is now shrinking into a pile of cartilage, just like them. When her body is dead and shrunken, the boy wades into the water and plucks his mother for his basket.

He carries her home across the moors and fields of slate. Past the autumn maples and the twirling thrushes plunging for insects in the reeds. He makes his way past the factory gates down the cobblestone through the market square. He wipes his boots on his irons and enters the home, and sets a fire in the hearth of the house.

Sound sleeps the cat that knows no worries save the timings of his meals. A cat that catches mice for sport and eats the roaches and crickets like salted snacks for squirming children. He drinks warm milk and cool water as he pleases. His fur by the fire is warmer and tamer than the pure hearts of Christian saints. His tail floats and curls and snaps back and wraps around his body’s loaf. He blinks slowly at the boy and releases short chirps and bubbly coos. He rolls and exposes his belly, extending his paws and claws and drops them back in and out like he is kneading dough.

The boy scratches the pussy cat’s belly and lifts him up to stroke his chin. He sits in the arm chair and draws it closer to the fire. The cat slips back into that veil of deep sleep and acute awareness, and purrs and purrs, a rumble so deep that it massages the aching legs of the boy who walks so far everyday fetching lampreys from the woods.

The two rest like that with their eyes closed, faces toasted in the wake of the window’s draught. On the sideboard of the kitchen spiced with herbs and filled with sweet wine, is a pie that cools, releasing whispers of steam. Crisscrossed in the crust, the memory of his mother.

***

Adam J. Galanski-De León is the author of the novella, "The Magpie Funeral" (Querencia Press), and the novel, "Szarotka" (American Buffalo Books). His work has appeared in various journals and anthologies. Adam maintains a website at http://www.adamjgalanskideleon.com. He lives in Chicago, IL with his wife and four cars.