The August Second Selected Writer is Rachel Coles

You can email Rachel at: rachel.coles1@gmail.com

THE LITTLEST FURY
by Rachel Coles

Kubeia could hear the wet tearing noises her sisters made, out of the corner of her ear, as they ripped through the murderer’s lower ribs, and then his lungs. He abruptly stopped screaming. She fiddled with the hem of her chiton, wishing she were anywhere else, as her sisters feasted.

After a few moments, she was still daydreaming when Tisiphone brought her out of it by smacking the back of her head with a sticky clawed hand. “Kubeia! What is wrong with you! This was supposed to be your kill. You’re late…again.” Tisiphone shook her head, the black serpents darting around her angry eyes and hissing at Kubeia accusingly. Her other sisters Megaera and Alecto joined Tisiphone in shaking their heads disapprovingly at Kubeia.

“Well, you got him, so what difference does it make?”

Megaera rolled her eyes. “Because after thousands of years, people are supposed to get better at things they do every day, learning. You are the only goddess I have ever known who’s had to train for her own job, and hasn’t gotten it right after millennia! The mortals never even mention you, let alone fear you. They don’t even know you exist. You’re not mentioned in any myth anywhere. That’s how much of a disgrace you are! Are you trying to get Hades to demote you permanently? Do you like polishing bones in Tartarus?”

Kubeia didn’t answer, because she did like polishing bones. She could ignore the terrible surroundings when she dived into the menial work. The bones were pretty once they were polished. Hidden in the folds of her chiton were a handful of tiny figurines she’d carved out of them with her knife and was rather proud of, though she couldn’t show them to anyone, especially her sisters: A puppy, a kitten, a pony, a tree, and a flower basket.

*****

On their last mission, to the house of a man who had killed the girlfriend with whom he had been cheating on his wife, there had been a whole collection of figurines arranged on a polished black coffee table. According to the packaging they were still in, they were called Littlest Pet Shop toys. Her sister Alecto had found, when she’d pored over the Judges’ parchment, that he’d bought them in an attempt to bribe the daughter he’d ignored until his divorce to spend more time with him. The daughter was now in high school and ignoring him back. “How pathetic!” Alecto had snorted as she regaled her sisters with the litany of the man’s sins and mistakes as she devoured his heart.

After the man had been slain and his soul sent to Tartarus, Kubeia squatted next to the little figures for several minutes and studied them until her sisters yelled at her to hurry up since they had so many missions to complete and they were behind. She had snatched three of the figures, torn off the wrapping and stuffed them in her chiton when her sisters weren’t looking, and followed them.

Back in high jewel-encrusted black walls of Palace Erebus, she found an unoccupied room to examine her treasures. Unfortunately, King Hades had taken that particular time to have one of his alone moments. She read up on his personality type with one of those mortal magazine quizzes. Introvert, all the way.

And that night, he conveniently picked the room she’d chosen, in which to be introverted. As he appeared, towering in the doorway, she gasped and shuffled to bow before him. And all of the Littlest Pet Shop toys clattered to the floor. King Hades hadn’t said a word—he never usually did, unless Queen Persephone was around. But his usually beetled brows climbed until they were almost hidden under his crown. Then he frowned so deeply they almost completely covered his midnight eyes, uttered something between a grunt and a growl, and left without another word.

The next day, she was sent to Tartarus, and her sisters had taken her toys and thrown them in the Acheron. She took an old scuba mask and ratty fishing net from one of Poseidon’s drowned souls, and tried to dredge the river bottom for the figures. All she caught with the net was a regret-fish, a sobbing black fish whose body was mostly eyes. She was careful not to touch it or she’d be paralyzed until she ruminated over every stupid thing she’d ever done, so she’d be stuck there at least a thousand years.

She hurled it back, far away downstream, and kept trawling. After a short while, the mask and net melted. The souls leaning over the side of the Acheron Ferry were giving her very strange looks. She gave it up and returned to her cleaning job in Tartarus before Charon could tattle that she’d been away from her post, and decided to carve her own toys.

*****

When they alighted in the darkness beyond the patio, the target was a man who was humming a song in the kitchen.

Megaera blew a puff of breath into the air and the motion-sensor lights sparked and failed to go on. Tisiphone shoved Kubeia forward. “Your turn. You begin the torment. I want to see your conviction.”

She put the skin parchment firmly in Kubeia’s hand. Kubeia reviewed the crime that had forfeited him his life and soul. The gory Greek letters that were written in his blood that she would spill soon, formed on the page: he killed his ex-wife’s boyfriend.

Tisiphone hissed in her ear, “See, he’s like the other one. He’s a murderer. Give him what he’s earned!”

But words were still forming on the page, and Kubeia got that funny shaky feeling in the pit of her stomach that she’d gotten so many times. “I can’t,” she whispered, miserable.

“Why not?” Tisiphone hissed again, her voice rising in aggravation.

“Because look. There’s more to it. The boyfriend hit this man’s daughter. Maybe it wasn’t murder.”

“The Judges say it is. Look, here, it says right there.” She stabbed her sharp finger at the word. “Murder. Can’t you read?”

“I can read just fine!” Kubeia retorted. “I just don’t agree with you!”

Megaera joined in. “You don’t have to agree, sister, you just have to do what you’re told!”

Alecto said, “You don’t question the Judges, girl! They say he’s a murderer, so we punish him. Go!” She pointed at the man through the window, who was now peering out the window into the darkness, scratching his hair, perhaps wondering if a neighborhood cat had gotten into the yard to make noise. He shook his head and went back to the frying chicken.

Alecto spat, “Go do it now!”

“No.”

The man’s head turned again, his attention focused sharply on their shadows.

“This discussion is over,” Alecto whispered, her voice quiet and deadly. She darted forward, oozing through the window screen and re-forming on the other side. He screamed as his eyes took in her terrible face, her infernal eyes.

Her voice bored into him even though he covered his ears, though no other mortals would have heard her. “You know why this is happening. You are a murderer.”

It was all she needed to say. He bellowed, his own voice full of insanity already, and stumbled back into the stove-top, tipping over the pan with the hot chicken and grease. His wails grew hoarse as he clawed at his arms covered with hot oil.

Kubeia couldn’t watch any more as her sisters moved in to finish him. She flew into a neighbor’s yard, sobbing. There, she crouched, trembling, in a garden with flowers a little bit like Queen Persephone’s, until her breathing slowed.

Something moved and she jumped. She could imagine her sisters now, screeching with derision, a Fury, getting startled in the dark. Her face flushed with even more shame when she saw what it was that moved. It was a little girl, a tiny girl, no older than four summers, in Snoopy pajamas.

The little girl was staring at Kubeia, unabashed. When she registered Kubeia’s actual form, the snakes that darted by her forehead, her bat wings, and her strange face, she drew in a scared breath and backed away toward the door. But after a second, she paused, and crept back, her curious eyes roaming over Kubeia’s tear-streaked face.

“Are you a monster?” the little girl asked.

“Yes.”

“Monsters aren’t supposed to cry.”

“I know. I’m not a very good monster.”

“Oh. Why are you crying?”

Kubeia sighed. “Aren’t you supposed to be in bed? You are a child.”

“No, I’m not! I’m a big girl. I don’t wanna go to bed yet. Besides, Snoopy wanted to put the lightning-bug back.” She pointed to the Snoopy on her shirt, and then to the long slender insect on the tip of her finger. “Daddy said it would die if I kep’ it. I don’t want it to die. So, it can go now, and I’ll catch it again tomorrow. I hope.”

Kubeia blinked back at her, at a loss for words, and shoved her puppy toy-figure into the girl’s hand to replace the lightning-bug. It kind of looked like the dog on her shirt. “Here.”

The girl’s face lit up with delight. With a rustle of bat wings behind her, Kubeia began to turn but not soon enough to keep one of her sisters from seizing her by the serpents at the back of her head and hauling her up into the air, shrieking. The snakes coughed venom at their assailant, which of course had no effect.

The girl dropped the puppy figure and ran screaming into the house.

Kubeia heard the rushing wind and the howling of her irate sisters, until they dropped down to the black volcanic soil of the Underworld in their lair between the Rivers Cocytus and Phlegethon.

“King Hades wants to see you now.”

Kubeia swallowed a lump in her throat. Strands of fear writhed in her belly like the serpents on her head. The wails of the Cocytus seemed to portend her own doom. The little creatures flew around her, their hands on her arms, as if escorting a damned soul, and entered the palace at Erebus, and dropped her at King Hades feet. She cowered there, her head lowered, on her knees.

His face was as still and hard as the stone all around him until he moved suddenly. His voice boomed through every room in the palace and probably to every corner of his realm. “You disobeyed the Judges, challenged their verdict, and in doing so, challenged mine. They judge with my authority. You are an Erinye, from the blood of Kronos. Your purpose is to punish crimes, not decide whether one has been committed. You are out of your place, and not for the first time.”

His great hand convulsed around his black beard, as if he wished it was around her throat. His eyes were as dark as the bottom of the Styx as he leaned over to put his face into hers, his voice full of rage. But he spoke in a whisper that carried farther than his shouting had gone, and was a hundred times more frightening. “Do. Your. Job.”

He snapped his fingers and she was back in the lair. She collapsed onto her back, staring up at the veined rust and black stalactites jutting down from the ceiling, wondering if one of them was going to suddenly break and impale her.

Her sisters didn’t come back for a while and when they did, they were silent. After some time, they sat up from the skins they had laid down on to sleep, and Tisiphone put her hand on Kubeia’s back. “You cannot fail again, Kubeia. King Hades will end you, because you aren’t what you are supposed to be. He’ll cast you back into Chaos and you will stop existing.”

It was as though the weight of the ceiling suddenly fell on Kubeia’s head. Stop existing? She was immortal. She had seen centuries pass as if they were years, and endless centuries more had stretched out before her, until now. She never contemplated the possibility of just ending. And somehow, the prospect of nothingness was more terrifying than the worst torture she had ever seen in Tartarus.

Tisiphone sighed. “Look, we know you’re ‘special.’ But you have to see things from his point of view. King Hades is in charge of souls. All of them, bad or good. He needs us. And believe it or not, mortals need us, too.”

Kubeia twisted around to stare at her. “By the fiery balls of Phlegethon, how do mortals need us?”

“That little girl you were befriending? know there are monsters in the dark waiting for her if she does bad things. What are the chances now, do you think, that she'll grow up and do bad things? We saved her soul tonight. If half those murderers, cheaters, and wife-beaters out there knew what she knows, maybe they wouldn’t have done things to damn themselves.”

“You really believe that?” Kubeia said, skeptically.

“Sometimes.”

Tisiphone hauled her sister up from the ground and swatted at her dirty chiton to knock the dust off. “Come on.”

They flew to the mortal world, another mission. Kubeia's belly sank at what she knew was coming. They landed on a ledge outside the penthouse of a man at a computer. He took a long sip from a glass of scotch that she knew from their investigations in the mortal world cost more than the homes of some of the mortals she had seen. He rose and padded into the bathroom, undressed and slipped into a happily bubbling jacuzzi the size of Charon’s ferry, leaving the screen of the computer open.

But instead of pushing her to attack him, Tisiphone nodded at his computer. “Go look.”

She did. It was a securities report. There were a few screens minimized in the tool bar. She opened all of them, and then began studying them. The securities report looked wrong, and she’d seen enough cheaters to know that he was insider-trading.

“Follow me,” her sister said. But Tisiphone made no move to enter and kill him. Instead she flew off over modest homes, west in the city. She dropped down to a withering lawn and a small poorly-kept house, crept up to the window and peered in, taking care not to be seen. There was a little girl inside, watching television and drawing pictures of hearts with wings and other unintelligible designs on colored paper.

“You liked that little girl back in Tulsa?” Tisiphone asked.

Kubeia nodded. This was a different little girl, but she reminded her of the lightning-bug girl, around the same age.

“Well, in a couple of days, this girl’s father is going to lose his job because he works at the stock-trader man’s company, which was just sold, while Jacuzzi Man bought up trades somewhere else that just made him a half billion dollars. This little girl’s life is going to change. The Fates only know what will happen to her. But that man,” Tisiphone pointed back toward the direction they’d come, “doesn’t care whether she’s here or sitting in a homeless shelter, as long as he gets his money. Does that make you angry?”

Kubeia nodded vigorously. And it was true. Anger boiled in her belly like lava, filling all of her limbs with hot blood as if she were on fire. She just stared inside.

They went back to the Jacuzzi Man’s penthouse.

Tisiphone handed her the parchment as they perched again on the ledge. “Can you live with it if you get some missions like these? You never paid attention before. You never wanted to hear prophecies, or proclamations from the Fates. You always thought you could make things different than the Fates said they would be. Now you get it, don’t you? The Jacuzzi Man did horrible things by tricking people. Maybe that's your area. Punishing trickery, especially when it harms mortal children. You are kind of soft like that.”

Kubeia nodded silently, took the parchment and went inside the penthouse, and killed the man as she showed him the depth of his error.

“Let’s celebrate! To Kubeia, finally fulfilling her Fate! Protector of Children, Punisher of Tricksters!” They managed to spend their celebration relaxing in the man’s jacuzzi and finishing off his expensive bottle of scotch before their next mission.

*****

Weeks later, Kubeia passed a child’s soul by the Asphodel Fields, looking confused and lost. She didn’t know whether the child had seen the Judges yet and belonged there, or was waiting and had wandered off. The girl looked up at her with wide, terrified eyes, cringing. But Kubeia dropped onto her haunches beside her.

“What’s your name?”

“Tory.”

“Hi, Tory.” She didn’t ask what had happened to the girl, why she was there, or how she had died. Kubeia just smiled at her, making the girl look even more confused. She pressed another little bone puppy figure into the soul’s hand. “This made me feel better when I rubbed its ears.”

The girl looked down at the figure, and a faint smile broke across her face. “Oh. Thank you.”

Kubeia flew off before anyone else could look over, except Tisiphone, who rolled her eyes. “Are you at that again?”

“Do you think Hades would be mad? I like making them.”

“I don’t think he really cares what else you do as long as you do your job.”

Kubeia nodded in satisfaction. “Okay.”

And it seemed Tisiphone was right when a few days later, Queen Persephone planted a tiny curvy bone kitten in the black horse-hair crest of his Helm of Darkness next to him, as if it were trying to peer into the eye slits. She sat next to King Hades in her throne with a tiny lift to her full lips that was almost a smirk. She was absentmindedly turning a tiny bone flower basket with delicate flowers, in her long white fingers.

“No,” Hades said firmly, glowering, removing the kitty figurine and handing it back to his wife. He just sighed as she folded it into her robes, smiling openly now.

Rachel Coles is a medical anthropologist living and working on public health in Denver, Colorado. She lives with her husband Adam and young daughter Rosa. She started writing horror stories because her daughter loves scary stories.

Rachel is the author of Pazuzu’s Girl.