The Jackal

By Sharon Eberhardt

They autopsied my mother yesterday. They do that in some states to confirm the cause of death, even if they know what the murder weapon is. They were quite surprised to find the body encompassed the skeleton of a jackal. I was not. In fact, I had suspected it for quite sometime now. I could have told them what they would find and saved them a lot of mystery. But the medical field loves a mystery and who was I to deprive them? Besides, only the walls would hear me now.

I'm waiting for the doctors to come and examine 'me'. As if, perhaps they might find this to be an inherent condition. But is evil inherent? Some people would argue that it is. And would these same people also argue that to put an end to evil is, in itself, evil? Because that is all that I was doing. I ended something that to me, had no natural end, no clean or good end. And it "had" to be ended. It was contaminating the very forces of nature. It chewed up my siblings and shredded them like so much wasted paper. That's how I see it. And it did the same to me. It didn't stop chewing, even when the shredding was done. Machinery breaks down. Bodies break down. But evil for evil's sake, just keeps tearing and shredding. Cutting and chewing. To go in-depth about this particular atrocity would take a novel and the guards would not allow me the pencils. So I'll be brief. It stared when I became aware of what was happening, not only in my own life, but in the lives of those people I truly love. Watching is the hard part, I think. And hoping when there just "isn't" any hope.

I watched as my brothers and sisters slowly disintegrated while they matured. They tried so very hard to hold themselves, as if a mere self-hug could stop their minds from imploding with all the ugly memories she had left us. That was our legacy, these memories. That, and nothing more.

To me, we are the culminations of someone else's memories when we leave this earth. We can either leave them love and goodness and sweetness and they cry because they will miss that which we gave in life. Or we leave them hatred, anger; an overall picture of one who has failed . . . But mothers, I am told, usually leave their children soft, rainy-day memories of sweet childhood and closeness in young adulthood. My memories are not so. Neither are the memories of my siblings, who are themselves, so full of goodness and sweetness. Our legacy is one of torment for power's sake. Torment that, throughout a lifetime, we waited for an end. But no end would come. Seventy-six years of waiting, and no end was in sight.

So I ended it for them. Or so I thought? When the cleaver hit between her nose and stuck there for the whole world like it grew out of her head, I thought I ended it. When the river of blood ran down her shocked eyes, those eyes that were always so grey, so cold that even the oceans would shirk back from their stare, I thought it would end. When I sat watching that withered body, finally lifeless . . . no more tearing from her fingernails into another's flesh, no more brutal kicks from those tiny feet, no more fowl words from that shrunken mouth, I thought "This is where it ends. Here. Now. It is done." No more pain for my darlings who I had, in my own way mothered. I failed, I know. I failed because she was always there undoing what I tried to do.

Unloving who I tried to love. It was all so useless. But perhaps they knew why I left. Perhaps they knew fear is an escape also. There are many different kinds of fear, are they're not?

It was done and I was relieved at the time. I sat in her too clean apartment, ludicrous really, comparing it to the ones we grew up in. There were no smells of half-consumed rubbing alcohol, old cigarette butts and that particular smell of bad walnuts when someone has just urinated in their drunken induced sleep. The apartment was amazingly like that of some ordinary old woman. Religious pictures adored the walls. Pictures of a sad Christ, witness to my act, looked down on me with no condemnation. Only sorrow.

I looked around and tried to find one speck of dust. One tiny grain that would give her away. That would talk volumes of what she really was. But there was nothing. Clean is amazingly clever. It hides a multitude of sins, does it not? If one is clean, if one puts on a persona of 'clean' then everyone feels that 'someone's soul must also be clean? I've never trusted clean, to tell you the truth.

It proves to me that people are always hiding something in that smell of Javex, that twinkle of silver, that polish of luster. I've learned not to trust even my senses. I protect myself now.

It was easy when the police came. It got easier after the questions were answered and a calm faced man steered me here. This place has no lies. It just simply . . Is. I find that comforting.

But now, laying here at night after the autopsy is done and the questions asked and the blood samples given, I wonder. Will they x-ray me? I run my hands over my body and feel a firm rib cage, a normal rib cage, a normal pelvis, a normal skull. But I wonder, as I lay here. Are my brothers and sisters doing the same? I want to tell them there is no need. They are pure. The Jackal has been slain, and they are pure.

Sharon Eberhardt writes: "One of the many joys we, as writers have is the sheer ecstacy of freedom to go beyond that which has boundaries, that which has limits-even into the human psyche of madness itself! This is the story of a woman driven insane by the brutality and neglect of a mother and finds nothing but evil, becoming evil herself. Heredity, you ask? You, the reader can decide."

THIS WORK IS COPYRIGHT OF THE AUTHOR.