Fed at the Wake
The call came at 6:12 in the morning, which was a cruel hour to tell someone their grandmother was dying.
Cain let their phone ring twice before answering. Their mother never called unless somebody needed something.
“She’s asking for you,” she said.
No hello. No how are you. Just a plea from their mother about a woman Cain had spent the last nine years missing—now reduced to a reason to come home.
By noon, Cain had packed a bag. By evening, they were driving into the red country of their childhood, past sandstone walls and cattle fences and a billboard advertising a casino two hours away. The last stretch of road had no shoulder. Their phone lost service where it always had.
Welcome home, Caitlin, they thought.
Their grandmother had never called them that after they asked her to stop.
When Cain was thirteen, before they had a word for what felt wrong, they’d told her they hated being somebody’s granddaughter. She had been peeling oranges at the kitchen table.
“But you’re still mine,” Grandma smiled.
“I know,” Cain said bashfully.
“You can also be more than that.”
She’d told Cain that some Native people called themselves Two-Spirit. That among Diné people, there were ways of understanding gender older than the church down the road, older than the government forms that made you pick one box and stay in it. She was careful with the words. Two-Spirit wasn’t hers to hand out like a nickname, and Cain didn’t have to claim any word before they were ready.
Their grandmother had grown up during the years when missionaries came through the reservation and Christianity took hold in nearly every household. By the time she was a girl, the chapel had become the center of public life. People still carried older ways of understanding the world, though most only spoke of them inside their own homes.
“You don’t owe anyone an explanation before you know yourself,” she’d told Cain.
Then she’d pushed an orange slice across the table.
“You can figure yourself out while you eat. You’ll do a better job anyways.”
She’d been the only person in Cain’s family who made uncertainty feel like room to breathe.
Cain reached the house just after dark. Their older brother Ouray met them on the porch, still in his work boots, dirt caught in the lines of his hands. Tears stained his dust covered cheeks.
“She passed this afternoon,” he said.
Cain felt their stomach drop as they looked at the porch light over Ouray's head. A moth had died inside its plastic cover.
“I was already on the road.”
“I know bud.”
“Then why didn’t anyone call?”
“We tried.”
Their phone had been in the cup holder the entire drive.
The funeral had been that evening, Ouray told them. Their grandmother had asked to be cremated, and the family had honored her wishes at a private service outside town. The ashes were already placed beside her husband’s grave.
Cain had come back for a woman and arrived in time for a jar.
They went inside long enough to set down their bag, then told their mother they were leaving in the morning.
“You drove six hours,” she said. “Stay the week.”
“But I missed her.”
Cain meant that, both figuratively and literally.
“Yes,” their mother said. “You did.”
Cain’s father came in from the chapel while they were arguing. He had been its pastor for almost thirty years, though the job extended well past Sundays. He visited people in the hospital, helped with funerals, lent money he didn’t have, and gave terrible advice with enough conviction that people mistook it for wisdom.
He hugged Cain as though they were a difficult parishioner.
“We’d like some time with you,” he said.
It had been nine years since they’d all sat in the same room. Cain agreed to stay until Friday. They hated how easily that made their mother cry.
The first funeral Cain attended was for a man named Leonard Yazzie, who had spent their adolescence asking whether they’d found a boyfriend yet.
There were forty people in the chapel. Leonard’s grandchildren filled the front pew, and someone had brought a foil pan of potatoes that smelled good enough to make Cain hangry.
The next day, a woman Cain had never met was buried with six mourners.
The day after that, Ouray dug a grave for Mr. Arctos, who’d lived in the pale yellow house near the water tower. Cain watched from the road. Ouray was alone.
“You sure do have a lot of funerals,” Cain said that night.
Their mother looked up from her paperwork. She was a nurse at the local clinic and still wore her scrubs at dinner.
“Well, it’s an older community sweetheart.”
“I remember.”
For a while, Cain accepted it. Plenty of people here had been old when Cain was young. A shame about Mr. Arctos, who’d once fixed their bicycle for free. Less of a shame about Leonard.
Three days brought three funerals. Four, if Cain counted their grandmother’s. The deaths came up over dinner as casually as road closures.
At the chapel, old Mrs. Tsosie squeezed Cain’s wrist.
“Caitlin. Your mother says her prodigal daughter has returned!”
“Cain,” they corrected her. “And I use they and them.”
Mrs. Tsosie looked directly at Cain’s mother. “How long is she staying?”
Cain thought, with a meanness they didn’t regret, that the wrong elders kept dying.
By Wednesday, the chapel smelled like flowers left in a hot car.
Their uncle Peter handled the bodies. He’d been a mortician in Gallup before moving back to help their father. Now he worked out of the little preparation room beneath the chapel, where the stairs were so steep Cain had fallen down them twice as a child.
Peter had always been kind to Cain in an absentminded way. When they came home, he’d hugged them, called them Cain, then stepped back and examined their face.
“You look rested,” he said.
“I’m not,” Cain laughed.
“I suppose none of us really are.”
At dinner, Ouray fell asleep with a fork in his hand.
Their mother nudged him awake. He apologized and kept eating.
On Thursday morning, Cain noticed the window across the street.
Mrs. Tsosie stood behind it, looking into their childhood bedroom.
Cain had woken late. The sun was high, the blinds open, and there she was in a blue housecoat, one hand resting against the glass.
Cain raised a hand.
Mrs. Tsosie didn’t respond.
The next time Cain looked, she was still there. Her eyes were red around the edges. Cain could see that much from across the road.
At the chapel that afternoon, Mrs. Tsosie sat in the back row. Her gaze stayed on Cain through the service.
Cain looked away first.
People had been talking about a gathering on Saturday. Their grandmother had fed half this town at one time or another; Cain assumed the neighbors were planning a memorial meal. They heard their mother on the phone asking about whether the clinic could spare its folding tables.
"Folding tables Jen? How many people do you think are coming to this thing?" Cain's father asked.
“You’d love it if they kept it small, wouldn't you,” Jen smirked.
“Is that an option?”
“No.”
Cain found a note from their grandmother tucked into the pocket of an old coat that evening. It was on the back of a grocery receipt, written in the shaky block letters she’d developed after her stroke.
Please ask them what they’re serving.
Cain read it four times. On the front of the receipt was a list: oranges, coffee, batteries, and a large foil roasting pan.
They took it to their mother.
“When did Grandma write this?”
Their mother studied the note without touching it.
“It could have been anytime in the past couple weeks. She worried about everyone toward the end,” she said.
“What’s being served Saturday?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Cain folded the receipt and put it back in their pocket.
At a little after midnight, Cain went to the chapel.
They told themself they were going to look for their grandmother’s Bible. Their father kept the personal belongings of the recently dead in his office until their families collected them, including the personal effects from his own family.
The chapel’s side door had been left unlocked. Inside, the hallway light was on, and the air smelled sharply of disinfectant.
Cain passed their father’s office. At the top of the basement stairs, they stopped.
Something dark ran along the edge of the wall and down the first step. Cain crouched. It had dried on the tile except where a fresh line cut through it.
Blood.
From below came a dragging sound, followed by a hard knock against metal.
Cain put one foot on the stairs.
A voice said, “Hold that end.”
Peter.
Another voice answered too softly to make out. Then came a wet, tearing sound. Cain gripped the banister.
The preparation room door opened.
Cain backed into the hall as light spilled up the stairwell. Peter climbed two steps, carrying a white plastic tub. Blood striped the sleeve of his work shirt. Behind him, Ouray was visible for a moment, holding a stained sheet around something roughly the size of a person.
Cain ran.
They took the long way home, cutting through the yard behind the clinic and climbed into their bedroom window. The screen stuck, just as it had when they were sneaking out at sixteen. Once inside, they locked the window and called their fiancé.
Noah answered on the second ring.
“Cain?”
“There’s blood in the chapel.”
“What?”
“I saw Peter and Ouray carrying something. Downstairs. There are funerals every day, and Mrs. Tsosie has been staring at my room, and Grandma left me this note—”
The signal cracked.
“Slow down. Are you safe?”
“I’m at the house.”
“Can you get to your car?”
“The keys are in the kitchen.” Cain pressed a hand over their mouth. “I think they heard me.”
The line hissed.
“Cain, listen. I’ll come get you in the morning. I’ll leave now.”
“But you’re six hours away, and it's dark.”
“Then I’ll be there in six hours. I'm not afraid of the desert at night.”
Cain sat with their back against the bedroom door until the call dropped. Through the blinds they could see Mrs. Tsosie’s house.
Her living room light was on. She stood in the window again.
A little after three, Cain saw other lights come on down the road. People stood at their windows in robes and T-shirts, looking out at the dark. None seemed to move.
Cain watched until their eyes hurt. Mrs. Tsosie never blinked.
Their mother woke them at eight.
Noah should've been there by now.
“You’re coming to the chapel.”
“But Noah’s picking me up.”
“He can pick you up afterward.”
“But he might be here any minute.”
Their mother’s face tightened. “Your father is speaking about Grandma today. You can give us an hour.”
Cain had spent the whole night waiting for morning. Now that it was here, leaving without hearing one person say her name felt impossible.
They went.
Mrs. Tsosie’s usual seat was empty. So was Mr. Begay’s, though Cain already knew why. Three entire rows stood vacant. A few people sat with their heads tipped toward the ceiling, their mouths slightly open. Cain searched for familiar faces and came up short.
“Where is everybody?” they whispered to Ouray.
“At home.”
“Are they sick?”
He stared at the aisle. “Some of them.”
During the service, a woman near the front began to shake. Her shoulders went first. Then her hands. She bit down on her lower lip so hard blood ran over her chin.
Cain’s mother reached her before anyone else. She helped the woman outside while their father kept speaking.
Afterward, Cain checked their phone. One bar. Three texts from Noah.
Crossing the state line.
About ninety minutes.
I’m close. Call me.
Cain called. It went straight to voicemail.
In the chapel kitchen, someone had laid out rolls, paper plates, and a tray of meat wrapped tightly in foil. Cain recognized the roasting pan from their grandmother’s receipt.
Peter came in behind them.
“You hungry?”
“No.”
He moved between Cain and the tray.
For one stupid second, Cain thought he was being considerate.
Then they saw a pale shape beneath the foil. The rounded end of a finger. A knuckle.
Cain looked at Peter. He looked old enough to fall over.
“What did you do?”
“I helped your father.”
“With what?”
Peter’s eyes filled. “At first? With the funerals.”
Their mother found them both in the kitchen and took Cain to the infirmary. She kept looking toward the windows as they walked. On the far side of the road, a man stood in his doorway with both hands pressed over his eyes.
In her office, she locked the door.
The clinic had received its first patient in April, she said. Mrs. Tsosie’s husband. He hadn’t slept in nine days. At least, that was what his family reported. He was sweating through his clothes and couldn’t remember where he was.
Then two more people came in. Then seven.
Cain’s mother had sent samples out. She’d suspected an infection, then a toxin. One specialist raised the possibility of a prion disease when she described the neurological symptoms. He’d also told her the timeline made no sense. Diseases acquired that way could take years to appear, and the rare fatal insomnia diseases had causes of their own.
“I know what the charts say,” she told Cain. “I know what I’ve seen.”
She opened a folder. The first page held a photograph of tissue under magnification. Cain knew almost nothing about brains, but they could see the little empty spaces in it.
“Why didn’t you call anyone?”
“I called everyone.” Her voice rose. “County, state, the people who run the lab. They’re coming. The samples are still being tested.”
Cain remembered Mrs. Tsosie behind the glass.
“What happened at the gathering?”
Their mother sat down.
Six months earlier, their grandmother had hosted a meal after a church fundraiser. Cain remembered her cooking from childhood: enormous pots on the stove, enough food for whoever came through the door. This time, according to their mother, she had supplied the meat herself.
“From where?”
“I didn’t know then,” Jen trailed off.
“And now?”
Their mother closed the folder.
Peter had discovered the first missing body while preparing a man for burial. He checked their records. More bodies had been disturbed. Their grandmother was ill by then, and he’d gone to her house to ask if she knew anything. She was practically the town's matriarch, and had a tendency for gossip.
She’d admitted taking from them. She said something had asked her for food when she was young. For years, she had given it what she could without hurting anyone, then it began to ask for more.
“She said that?” Cain asked.
“Yes.”
“And you believed her?”
“I believed the bodies.”
Their grandmother had made the fundraiser stew herself. People began getting sick weeks later. Cain’s mother looked at the photograph on her desk.
“She said it would make them ready.”
"Ready for what?," Cain asked, but their mother either didn’t know or couldn’t bear to answer.
The first of the sick had died in the infirmary. The next had begged Cain’s mother to stop his hands from moving. Then a woman who hadn’t slept for twelve days tried to bite through the flesh of her own arm.
Their father said they had to protect people. Peter knew how to handle bodies. Ouray knew where he could dig.
Some deaths had been natural. Others had happened after the patient became dangerous, or after the family said they couldn’t keep them home. Cain’s mother had administered the drugs.
Cain looked at her hands.
“You chose who was too sick?”
She nodded once.
“You didn’t tell them about the meat?”
“No.”
“You kept feeding it to them.”
“I stopped after that meal.”
Cain thought of the tray in the chapel kitchen. Their mother saw their face and began to cry.
“It won’t eat food we make any other way,” she said. “Your father thinks if we give it Saturday’s meal, it will leave the rest alone.”
Cain’s phone buzzed. A text from Noah appeared, delayed by the service.
I see the chapel. Where are you?
Cain ran for the door.
Their mother caught their wrist. Her grip was startlingly strong.
“It’s after our family now,” she said. “Since she died, I can hear it when I try to sleep. Peter hears it. Your father says he saw her standing beside his bed.”
Cain pulled free.
“What about Ouray?”
Their mother looked away.
“He’s slept every night,” she said. “So have you.”
Noah’s truck stood outside the chapel.
Cain found him behind it, talking to their father. Noah looked relieved when he saw them. Their father put a hand on his shoulder.
“We were about to come find you,” Noah said.
Cain grabbed his arm. “Get in the truck.”
Their father’s hand slid away.
“Cain,” he said.
It was the first time he had used their name since they got home.
Noah heard something in his voice too. He opened the passenger door for Cain and hurried around to the driver’s side.
The truck wouldn’t start.
Noah tried again. On the third attempt, the engine turned over. Ouray stepped out from behind the chapel, holding a shovel. Peter followed him. Both men stopped when Cain’s father raised a hand.
“I am trying to keep people alive,” he told Cain.
A woman screamed inside the chapel.
Cain looked toward the open side door.
The woman from the service had staggered into the hall. She was holding her jaw with both hands. At first Cain thought she was trying to keep herself from biting someone.
Then her mouth opened wider than it should have.
A thick fold of flesh pushed against the inside of her cheek. It moved when she didn’t. She drove two fingers into her mouth, trying to hook it out, and her teeth closed on them with a crack.
Their father started toward her. Peter caught his sleeve.
“Don’t,” Peter said.
For the first time, Cain saw fear on his face.
The woman went still. Her eyes fixed on something past Cain, past the truck, past the road.
A voice came out of her mouth.
It was their grandmother’s.
“I told you it would want more.”
Their father made a sound Cain had never heard from him before.
Ouray dropped the shovel.
The woman fell against the chapel door, and Cain saw what was pushing out through the side of her neck. A small, wet hand, no bigger than a newborn’s. It opened and closed against the air.
Noah reversed over the curb. The truck clipped a fence post and lurched into the road.
Cain kept watching through the back window. Their father knelt beside the woman. The little hand reached up and touched his cheek.
Noah drove too fast. Neither of them said anything until the chapel disappeared behind the ridge.
“What was that?” he asked.
Cain’s hands were shaking so badly they couldn’t unlock their phone.
“I don’t know.”
They did know some things. Their grandmother had fed people pieces of the dead. Their family had killed to conceal it. Whatever lived inside that woman had used their grandmother’s voice.
Cain called 911 when they reached the high part of the road. The connection held.
They gave the dispatcher the chapel address, their mother’s name, and an account that sounded less believable every time they spoke. They described the deaths, the meat, the woman’s neck. The dispatcher didn’t interrupt. When Cain finished, she asked if they were injured.
“I don’t think so.”
“Keep driving. Officers are being sent to meet you.”
Their father called. Cain let it ring.
Then their mother called. Then Ouray.
The road dipped between two red ridges, and the call to 911 broke up. Noah reached for their hand.
“We’re getting out,” he said.
Cain wanted to ask how he knew. Instead, they held on.
They passed Mrs. Tsosie’s house.
Noah slammed on the brakes.
The truck stopped in the middle of the road. Ahead of them, the chapel stood under the bright morning sky. Its side door was open. The fence post Noah had struck lay broken beside it.
“No,” Cain said.
Noah stared at the dashboard. “I didn’t turn around.”
They had followed the road the entire way. Cain remembered every bend.
From the chapel came the low sound of people singing. Cain couldn’t make out the words.
Noah put the truck in reverse, but the engine stalled.
“Try again.”
He did. Nothing.
Something heavy struck the underside of the truck. Noah jumped. A second blow rocked Cain’s seat.
The singing stopped.
Cain opened their door. Noah reached for them, but they were already out and running.
They headed for the chapel because it was closer than the house and because Cain could see the open side door. Noah caught up on the steps. Inside, the pews were empty. The woman lay in the aisle with her mouth open and her fingers bitten down to the bone.
The little hand was gone.
A dragging sound came from below.
Cain knew where the basement stairs were. They also knew the thing under the truck had followed them, though they couldn’t have said how. They took Noah’s hand and went down.
At the bottom, the preparation room door stood open. Stainless steel tables lined one wall. On the nearest, beneath a sheet, lay their grandmother.
Cain stopped.
Her hair had been brushed. Someone had dressed her in the green blouse she wore to Sunday services. There was a split in the skin below her collarbone, neatly closed with black thread.
“The ashes,” Cain said.
Noah pulled back the sheet. There was no mistaking her face.
Peter came out of the storage room carrying a bucket. He set it down when he saw them.
“I told him not to put her here,” he said.
“Who did you burn?”
Peter looked at the floor.
Cain couldn’t get enough air. “Who was in the pyre?”
“One of the people we couldn’t save.”
Beyond him, the storage room door swung against its frame. Something inside pressed it open again.
Peter saw Cain looking. “Your grandmother kept it away from the chapel for years. When she got sick, she thought feeding it all at once might satisfy it.”
“Feeding it what?”
“The dead, at first. Then whoever ate the stew.” Peter’s mouth worked. “It gets hungry inside them. Your father thought we could stop it before it grew.”
The storage room door pushed wider.
There were no shelves inside. Just an old cistern sunk into the floor, its cover lifted away. Cain had played in the basement as a child. They’d never known it was there.
Something shifted below its rim.
Cain could smell the stew from the fundraiser. They could smell the funeral flowers, too, and the sweet, foul air of the preparation room. Beneath all of it was a breath coming steadily from the dark.
Noah backed toward the stairs.
The thing rose far enough for Cain to see a shoulder. Then another. Skin stretched between them in folds. Faces showed through it where the flesh was thin: a cheek, an eyelid, the press of teeth. A hand reached up to the cistern’s edge. Other hands moved beneath its skin, trying to follow.
Their grandmother’s face appeared among them. Her eyes were closed.
Cain couldn’t tell whether any part of her was truly there.
The thing spoke in her voice anyway.
“Come here, baby.”
Peter began to cry.
Cain had loved their grandmother with the kind of love that survived distance and missed calls and all the small ways a person could disappoint you. For one sickening moment, their body wanted to obey her.
Noah caught their wrist.
A hand struck the floor beside the cistern. It bent in the middle of its forearm, pushed against the tile, and pulled more of the thing into view.
Cain grabbed the bucket Peter had set down. It held cleaning fluid. They hurled it into the cistern, took the lighter from beside Peter’s worktable, and flicked it.
The first spark died.
The thing opened its eyes. There were too many to count.
The second spark caught.
Fire ran across the surface below. Peter threw himself against the wall. Noah hauled Cain up the stairs as heat pushed after them.
Their grandmother screamed. Several other voices joined hers.
At the top of the stairs, Cain fell hard enough to skin their palms. Noah pulled them through the side door. Smoke spilled out behind them.
The truck started on the first try.
This time, the road took them past the ridges.
Cain waited to see Mrs. Tsosie’s house. It didn’t appear. They passed the casino billboard, then a gas station they recognized from the drive in. Fifteen miles later, they met two police vehicles heading toward the reservation with their lights on.
Noah pulled over. Cain spoke to an officer through the open window while another one checked the truck. Cain told the story again, leaving nothing out. The officer wrote down their name correctly. When she asked for pronouns to pass along to the hospital, Cain said, “They and them.”
“Okay,” she said, and wrote that down too.
Cain nearly cried over it.
An ambulance met them farther down the highway. A medic cleaned Cain’s hands and checked Noah’s eyes. He shone a light into each one, then said they both needed to be examined at the hospital after possible exposure to human tissue.
Cain watched Noah blink three times while the medic spoke. It was such an ordinary thing to notice. They held on to it.
By late afternoon they were in separate hospital beds. A doctor came to ask Cain what they’d eaten at the house. She explained that a prion disease wouldn’t cause what Cain had described in a matter of weeks. Tests would take time. They were investigating other possible exposures and sending a team to the chapel.
Cain didn’t argue. They gave her every date they could remember and the names of everyone who had been at the fundraiser.
Noah came in after his examination with a vending machine coffee and a packet of crackers. He sat beside Cain’s bed. His hand was warm. His eyes were tired, and every so often, they closed.
“Your family?” he asked.
“No word yet.”
“We can wait here.”
Cain nodded.
Outside, traffic moved along a four-lane road. They could hear it through the window when a truck passed. The air smelled of bleach and coffee. At the nurses’ station, someone laughed at something on a phone.
Cain ate one cracker. Then another.
Noah fell asleep in the chair. Cain watched his chest rise and fall. At some point they slept too, deeply enough that a nurse had to wake them to take their blood pressure.
It was dark outside when Cain woke again. Noah was still beside them, his forehead resting against the edge of the mattress. His coffee had gone cold.
Cain picked up their phone. It showed a strong signal. There were messages from the officer, a missed call from the hospital’s social worker, and a text from an unfamiliar number asking them to confirm their grandmother’s full name.
Cain set the phone down and looked out the window, not blinking.
