#bratovich

I love revenants ........ I need to make more of them

Mary-Anne Bratovich sketch progress shots

took the head out to focus more on her.

Maybe I'm defective Or maybe I'm dumb I'm sorry, so sorry for what I've done Maybe I'm bad natured Or maybe I'm young I'm sorry, so sorry for what I've done

I've waited for this I'm ready for it I've waited for this I'm ready for it

Your uncle stares through liquor-dulled rheum and grins at you. He says it's time to show you how the Bratoviches get made; this is the first time you see the meat used for houndmaking. The meat screams and begs in its various cages. Your uncle says to pick one. He shows you how to shape the meat and bone. You stare into the hound's eyes and watch it cry. Uncle says he usually removes the ducts, but the big guy out in them fuckin Cawrpathians likes em to cry.

Ma passes down the sacred rule of hospitality. Three days, three nights. You give em bread and salt and meat and water. Make em at home and nevermind the way these folk stare at you with disgust. Third night, tell em they best be gone before the sun rises (if they're not one of the Dragon-Men, of course). You ask what happens to the visitor on the fourth morning and Ma just chuckles, says: "whatever we want t'happen, sweetpea."

There's some friends who only visit at night. You learn them by smell, by sight. Some of them don't ever seem to see you. Others turn your stalking into a game of predators. You always lose, but the leechwolf grins at you with glee anyway.

Your oldest sister puts a rifle in your hand. She ruffles your hair, calls you honeysuckle and bumblebee. She takes you out in the woods, the deep trails, and tells you to wait before she vanishes into the foliage. Not like you know why. Not at first. But soon enough, you learn. There's a group of campers, running and screaming, flushed towards you like them gamebirds you learned to shoot. So you take a breath in. Long. Deep. You pull the trigger. Fella up front jerks back, gasping, chest blown open by a round that fells deer. Don't need the meat alive, you suppose. Shame. That girl with the red hair is pretty as the sun.

The Dragon-Man is a woman, you learn. You must always please her. She opens your mouth and counts your teeth; she dictates additions to the family's diet. You see her three times before she takes you to bed on your eighteenth birthday; you call her Voivode. She lets you drink from her wrist the following night. You don't know what you've done to deserve the honor.

There's a wolf skin you carry like a war banner, stretched at the end of an iron spear you fashioned out of junk metal. You stroke the fur and smile fondly, remembering how the wolf tried to change and beg for its kin-lives once you filled it with silver buckshot.

The second wolf skin is nailed to a tree. You don't like to look at it. You remember, when you close your eyes, the look of agony as it spoke to you and said "We failed you, child."

Two things happen the summer Pa bites it: the Voivode takes one sister into the meat shed, and your kid sister is found naked, covered in blood, in the new moon night. Ma sends her off to some relatives down in N'Orleans. She never talks about Pa.

goretober - bisected

Rattler Bratovich taking care of a failed fleshcraft creation. Presumably all that remains of a traveler who got lost too close to the Bratovich estate.

Alternatively -- and none of the Bratovich girls like to talk about this -- this could be one of their cousins, sent in a wooden box marked DESTROY for displeasing one of the Tzimisce who oversee the family. You just don't know, when you're someone like Rattler.