"Flood," Stephanie Frazee

Today on Midwest Weird: “Flood," by Stephanie Frazee.

Stephanie Frazee's work is forthcoming from Variant Literature and has appeared in Marrow Magazine, Pithead Chapel, The Evergreen Review, Bayou Magazine, Juked, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is online at www.stephaniefrazee.com and @stephieosaurus.bsky.social.

Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

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Episode Transcript:

This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.

We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

Today’s episode: “Flood," by Stephanie Frazee. Read by the author.

We called the cat Jesus Christ, short for Jesus Christ what did that fucking piece of shitdo now. Her fluffy backside, anus exposed under a tail in flag-pole position, disappeared behind a chokeberry bush at the edge of our property. She had lost an eye in a fight last year and was now heavy with kittens but didn’t seem bothered by any of it.

My mother was also pregnant, and she was bothered by it. She kept getting pregnant but not having the babies or more like, having them before they were babies, just bloody gray clumps in the toilet or bathwater or bedsheets, and by this one, she wasn’t even talking about it and no one asked her the questions about how she was feeling or was she excited or wasn’t she so blessed. Her stomach was huge but her face was caved-in and unsmiling and told people what they wanted to know.

My stepfather hated Jesus Christ and hoped she’d go into the woods and die having her kittens so all the kittens would die too, because he didn’t work all day every day to feed a bunch of vermin, and now I worried over her all the time. I came out on the other side of the bushes. A large crow, feathers so black they seemed to suck up all the color around them, stood on the bank of the creek and stared at me with a shiny bead of an eye. I stared back until I was sure: it was Jesus Christ. She had a way of switching bodies if she wanted, which made me think both she could take care of herself and she’d only get herself into more trouble. The creek was running high and fast because of a terrible storm the night before, the kind of storm that shook the whole house. The ground was soggy. The crow flapped up and flew, in a bumbling sort of way. Somewhere nearby, the real crow must’ve found itself in Jesus Christ’s body, all fur, kittens, and no wings, trying to fly off to someplace better but stuck to the ground.

The creek surged. Sticks and branches had gathered to cause a bottleneck the water strained against. The creek rushed and roared and said fuck this and flooded itself over the blockage and into the sedge.

I stepped back as the water swelled. I stepped back again because it kept rising and then I was getting scraped by the bushes and running back to the house and the creek was not a creek anymore but an angry, overflowing river and the yard was a swamp, as if the water was coming up from the ground itself, and my foot sank into the mud. I tried pull myself free but got sucked deeper and I pulled until I felt the squelch of my foot coming out of the earth minus my shoe. I splashed through the yard to the house where the water was seeping through the floor and my mother was screaming from upstairs.

The screams sounded like she was being ripped open, because she was. I could feel her screams in my bones and in my blood. And there was blood. She screamed at me to call someone, call anyone. She was so pale, which didn’t match her wailing. I picked up the phone. The line was dead, but I pretended to dial and I talked like someone could help us. Please come. She needs you. Baby’s on its way. Rain crashed against the roof, loud as a stampede. The water sloshed at the stairs. My mother moaned like a cow on its way to slaughter.

The baby came out, alive this time. Greasy and blinking its puffy eyelids like, what the fuck is this shit? My mother was white as the part of the sheet without blood on it. I held the baby and waited for something to happen but all that happened was my mother cried, bled, slumped back against the pillow, and stopped crying. The only sound was jagged breath, rain, and the water lapping into the hallway. Jesus Christ wasn’t yelling at me to feed her or for someone to open a door. No tires on gravel or feet on the stairs or leather against skin. The baby wasn’t even crying. I held it awkwardly because it was still attached to my mother by the cord. But I couldn’t look at my mother after I felt her slump onto the pillow. I looked at the baby. It looked back at me with its mouth in a very serious line and its eyes hard as stones. Blood crawled across the sheets and touched my leg. The baby had a divot in the center of its chest the size of my fingerprint, so I placed my finger in it. The feathery flutter of a heart. Under the grease, its skin was gray as a corpse.

The rain came in through the open window onto the oak chest where baby things had been untouched since I was little. The water had risen nearly all the way up the stairs. I knew Jesus Christ had flown off but her body had stayed down there, somewhere by the creek, with a crow inside it not knowing to climb the highest tree to get away from the water, and I didn’t know if she needed her body nearby to switch back or maybe she wouldn’t switch back maybe she’d just keep flying. The baby’s eyes didn’t look right; they looked like the pictures they showed us at church of babies conceived in sin. I’m sorry, I said, to the baby or maybe to myself.

And then I nearly jumped out of my skin, because the closet doors parted, and there was Jesus Christ, nosing the doors open like nothing. She walked prissily across the wet carpet to the bed. Her belly swung. She tried to jump, but she was too heavy with all those kittens. I set the baby down next to my mother. Water seeped into my socked foot. Jesus Christ’s belly was damp. I rubbed the spot between her eyes that usually made her purr.

But she didn’t purr. She scratched me, the little fucker. I dropped her onto the bed, and she reared back like she was going to pounce, ass shaking, tail flicking. She bared her teeth and hissed at the baby. The baby hissed back. I scrambled off the bed and into the water, which was up to my ankles.

“You think he did this to her, but I did it. He could never. I did all of this, and everything before it.” The baby flipped over onto all fours, opened its mouth to reveal a set of teeth and set to biting its way free of the cord that tied it to my mother. I wanted to throw it out the window, watch it sink like a rock, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. “I loved being inside her, making her sick and miserable, feeding off her blood, living in the perfect comfort of her body. I could have stayed inside her forever, but the chance to split her open, to destroy her from the inside out.” The baby shivered with ecstasy. His mouth was bloody from the cord, his gray skin glistened. He smiled a bloody-toothed smile at me, and I went cold. I could no longer look at him, or my mother’s pale body. It felt like he had won something in making me turn away, but it

was all I could do. Jesus Christ stared at me, like she could see inside me. It hurt, the way she stared, with her single shining eye, like she expected something of me but I was useless. I closed my eyes and wished for something, so many things I wanted so badly I couldn’t put words to any of it.

When I opened my eyes, I was on the bed. My heart was too fast. I felt heavy and low. My vision was a tunnel. I looked for Jesus Christ, but I saw myself. I saw the girl. My belly roiled with kittens. The girl looked at her mother and the baby, the wicked baby who was laughing. The ripe iron smell of blood flooded the air. I was so hungry. The girl reached for the baby. He tried to scuttle across the mother, but the girl caught him by the legs. He clawed at the mother, the sheets, the girl. He scratched, kicked, squirmed himself around and bit her wrist. He pulled away and licked his gray lips. “You’re next, you delicious little bitch.” She struggled to keep hold of him, possessed as he was by a strength so much greater than his size. “Maybe during one of your stepfather’s nighttime visits, he’ll leave you with me as a little gift.”

She heaved him off the bed by his ankles and hurled him out the window. His screech echoed off my bones. The water was nearly up to the sill. The baby rose to the surface, bobbed with his little fists pounding, legs kicking. The girl slammed the window shut and got back onto the bed. She smoothed the hair from her mother’s forehead and brought a palmful of water to her lips. It streamed down her chin. I moved closer to the mother. There was a pulse, faint, deep within her. I licked blood from her leg.

The water seeped into the mattress. But I was comforted by the repetition of licking,

calmed by the taste of blood. The girl would take care of the water, she would take care of me. She always took care of things. Something, a little fist maybe, banged on the window. Water eased its way through the window frame. Lightning, thunder. The water kept rising and the banging grew quieter. I felt a twinge in my belly. Not all of the kittens would live. One of them was much stronger than the others. He would live even if it meant sacrificing his siblings to do so. I kept licking. I was hungry, and the blood was so satisfying. I began to purr. I couldn’t help myself.

Stephanie Frazee's work is forthcoming from Variant Literature and has appeared in Marrow Magazine, Pithead Chapel, The Evergreen Review, Bayou Magazine, Juked, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is online at www.stephaniefrazee.com and @stephieosaurus.bsky.social.

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