Don't Whistle

Writer's Weekly 24-Hour Fall Short Story Challenge Entry

Prompt: The sagging porch faced east. Beyond the field of rotting pumpkins, a blood moon was rising. After a long day of moonshining, the two men alternated swigging from the same jug. They’d both heard the stories. They knew they had to get inside before the moon turned orange. Then, they noticed a little girl in a white dress skipping in their direction...

Stories need only touch on this topic in some way to qualify. And, they could not exceed 900 words.

Trigger warning: Implied drug manufacturing and child neglect.

Zach made a mental note to yell at Penny for not washing the dinner dishes yet but noted the bucket by the back door was missing, assuming his niece must be fetching water from a well half a mile away. He could have spent the $15,000 to have a new well dug, since the one behind the house ran dry, but it was something he was putting off until he delivered one more batch.

Zach and Trent were renown as the local meth manufacturers. They called their work, “moonshining,” giving it a more old-folksy harmless feel to it instead of the grim reality of dealing with chemicals that could blow their dry rot riddled ramshackle shack of a domicile sky high in a ball of fire not seen since the Trinity test.

“Where are you, Trent?”

A shrill whistle came from outside. “Out here!” His voice carried through the punky exterior clapboards.

Zach found his brother sipping from a jug of mescal. Off in the distance, the whistle returned on the wind, like a call and response. He chalked it up to the breeze whistling through a fence post hole.

Ambling across the sagging porch, he snapped, “Hand it over.”

It was a command, being the oldest who was put in charge since their parents and older sister died four years ago when a drunk driver killed not only them, but any decency left in Zach’s soul. He inherited his older sister’s six-year-old daughter and an old house with property taxes due. Zach did what any man would do to provide for his younger brother and niece, and no local employment prospects; he turned to cooking meth.

Their reputation with local residents, including those who lived on the reservation, was that they were a scourge, providing meth that was decimating lives, adding to the regional problem of alcoholism.

When Zach was in town the day before, one elderly Navajo woman, known around town as Nana Makawee, made some hand gesture at him that he figured was some Native American version of the middle finger.

On his way driving out of town, he slammed on his brakes as a coyote crossed his path. Local superstition among the Navajos says that a coyote crossing one’s path is a sign of bad things to come.

Taking a long pull from the jug, Zach hissed through his teeth, choking down the harsh elixir.

Gazing towards the east, across the pumpkin patch Penny was growing but had begun to rot due to the well running dry and the squash withering due to lack of water, Zach noticed the golden moon began to turn orange. He figured it was due to a local wildfire and not as the locals believed: a harbinger of evil coming.

Seeing a small figure in a white dress skipping in their direction empty handed, Zach barked, “Where’s the water, Penny? You better not have lost that pail!”

It was only as the figure was nearly at the edge of the porch that the brothers realized the girl in the white dress may have looked like their niece, but it was not her. Soulless black eyes stared at them with a cold and calculating detachment.

“What the fuck?” Trent gasped, stumbling up and out of his chair.

“What’s the matter, Uncle Trent?” the creature asked, its voice a slight facsimile of Penny’s but with the undertone of a low growl befitting a timber wolf as a counterpoint to its delicate child-like voice.

“What are you?” Zach asked, his voice quivering, wondering if he was going to piss himself.

Its face began to morph, the nose elongating becoming more wolf like as long canine-like teeth appeared with a feral smile.

~o0O0o~

“Would you like another cup of hot chocolate?” Nana Makawee offered Penny.

Staring at the bottom of her empty cup, she didn’t want to be greedy, but it had been years since she last tasted chocolate and had forgotten how good it tasted. Casting a nervous eye to the bucket full of water by the door, she answered, “If I don’t get back soon, I’ll be in trouble.”

“You really should not go, the moon has turned orange, and you know what happens when the moon is orange, right?” the elder Navajo woman prompted the girl.

Penny shook her head, her eyes wide sensing it was something that wasn’t good.

After pouring Penny another cup of hot chocolate without her even accepting, Nana Makawee sat next to her folding her weathered hands in her lap. “If you’re going to live here, you should learn the stories. When the moon turns orange, the skin walkers come out of the shadows. Like all predators, they seek to cull the herd of the sick and diseased, like a wolf pack chooses the weak deer. Also, you are never to whistle in the night; it calls evil to you.”

Penny’s eyes drifted to the door, then to the window where a bright golden light glowed briefly before fading. Off in the distance, there was a rumble like the distant sound of thunder and the glass in the windowpane rattled slightly.

“What was that?” Penny asked.

“It’s nothing dear. Just burning the trash.”

Despite being only ten, Penny was an old soul wiser than some women four times her age, grasping the gravity of the situation. For the first time in four years, Penny felt safe.