The Llungruel and the Lom

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  “Curse them all!”

  Moriah screamed the next morning upon her discovery behind the bedchamber’s door. Her children wept while she slumped and pulled at her hair. Caleb feared his wife might morph into a beast wilder than the llungruel that had claimed his son.

  “Go and get the doctor Elloch and Malek,” Caleb sighed.

  Moriah pulled her face out of her hands and locked the twins where they stood with fury lighting her eyes. “Neither of you take a step out of this cabin! I don’t need any doctor telling me my boy is dead! I don’t ask for any sympathy from an outsider!”

  Talson’s body curled in the room’s corner. Battered pieces of furniture spread about the floor. The bed’s mattress lay open and torn, its stuffing dusting the chamber’s wooden floor. Talson’s eyes remained open, and the morning’s death stiffly locked them. Talson had clawed at the walls through the night in search of a weakness - perhaps an exploitable seam, or a loose patch of plaster – at which the llungruel’s instincts may have scratched and scraped until fingernails might open a hole for escape. The effort left blood streaks on the cabin walls. Talson’s curled body lay naked, his clothes having been torn free during the fever. Locks of his hair drifted into the corners.

  Moriah cradled Talson’s head and rocked on the floor. The llungruel’s venom had turned her boy so wild that he could not even recognize the mother who had nursed him, had turned him so wild that the fear and the fever extinguished his life. Talson had only toiled in the fields so that the lom could be harvested to keep hunger away from his family’s cabin, and the lizard had cruelly punished such duty with its bite.

  “It is the law that the doctor must be summoned, Moriah,” Caleb yearned to reach out to his wife, but he withheld his touch, feeling so powerless to give any kind of comfort. “Go on Elloch and Malek. Go and bring the doctor to our door.”

  Elloch and Malek soon returned with the doctor the outsiders stationed in the village. The doctor knew much of the lizard’s awful venom, and he followed the ritual of attending to the llungruel stricken with an efficiency that told much of the village’s suffering. Fingers checked the wrist for a pulse. A stethoscope pressed to the chest searched for the sound of a heart. Blood was drawn to gauge the venom’s potency that felled another child. Like the lom, the doctor’s protocol was a staple of the villagers’ lives, one that numbed their hearts like the lom numbed their tongues.

  “My condolences,” the young doctor with the thin arms whispered to Caleb. “Your boy’s heart was just too young to handle such wild fear. The llungruel has already bitten many this season, and I fear your boy will not be the last. We’re doing all we can to soothe your village’s hurts.”

  Caleb nodded slowly. He did not know where the doctors took the poisoned blood their needles gathered from the dead. He did not understand the sciences of antidotes and poisons.

  “But the lom is getting harder and harder to swallow.”

  And then the doctor nodded slowly at Jacob, his face as pale as the lost boy’s father. The doctor did not fully understand Caleb’s meaning, and the doctor exited the cabin without a glance behind his shoulder.

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