Residential
by Victory Witherkeigh
There was a man who dwelt by a churchyard.
The problem was, only we could see him.
I remember little before I came to this school. I only remember the sound of my mother’s screams as they put cold metal cuffs on my wrist at five. They told me it was for my own good—the priests and the nuns that unloaded me from the overcrowded bus when I first arrived at this “residential school”.
The man was smiling, waving from the churchyard then. Or he would have been if he had all his fingers…
My bunkmates were quick to warn me never to speak of seeing him.
When our teachers punished us for trying to remember our sacred dances to mother earth, they left us outside, frozen to the point that our cheeks would turn blue. If we ran away or tried to find our siblings, lashes came until we bled.
They tried to teach us hymns. So many teachers who watched us looked for the most beautiful, boy or girl, to take their first intimate touch, whispering that it was their own fault for being unwilling to conform to the new god and this fabled boy in a manger.
As we grew older, we realized many of us who were reaching adulthood were disappearing. The priests would say they’d gone to work or earn penance for their sins, even extra credit.
It was only after so many of my classmates disappeared on Christmas Eve, when the skin hanging from the man’s neck was the loosest, his face the gauntest, that I realized his actual name—Wendigo. He was the beast who fed with an unquenchable hunger.
I’ve sought him out my last Christmas here—snuck out to his churchyard in the dead of night.
Even as my heart slows and my bones crunch, being gnawed away bit by bit, I don’t scream. I’m smiling, laying in the dust and rot of corpses, my brothers and sisters dumped in the unmarked graves on school grounds.
I’ve made a bargain—Flesh for Power. Death for Vengeance.
Merry Christmas.
Victory Witherkeigh is a female Filipino/PI author originally from Los Angeles, CA, currently living in the Las Vegas area. Her first novel, set to debut in December 2022 with Cinnabar Moth Publishing, has been a finalist for Killer Nashville’s 2020 Claymore Award, a 2020 Cinnamon Press Literature Award Honoree, and long-listed in the 2021 Voyage YA Book Pitch Contest.