Revenge14 min read
The Jar Under My Bed and the Night the Snakes Came
ButterPicks15 views
I have a name now on my papers: Emery Ortega. But at home I was nothing but a body to test, a smell in the house, the "girl who takes up space." My grandfather, Paul Cruz, and my grandmother, Leticia Dickerson, wanted a grandson for the family line. My father, Ian Chapman, wanted one too. My mother, Eve Griffin, wanted him more than anything; I think that is why she let them try to take a child out of every hole they could find — hospitals, prayers, pills, superstition.
"Come home for a few days," my father said on the phone the week before the holiday. "We found something from the old house. It might work. Grandma says—"
"No," I said. "I have work. I can't—"
"Your mother will be so grateful," he said. "Your mother is forty-five. This could fix everything."
I came because they offered me money. "Two thousand," my mother said. "Two months' work saved, Emery. Just stay at home, sleep with the jar. One drop of blood each night."
"That's disgusting," I said.
"It's a tradition," my father said. "You are family."
The jar was old. It stank of wet earth. It had been dug from a mound with a story: a jar from the ancestor that had once "brought sons." Every part of that story was a lie made to look true. The jar had snakes carved into the clay. Two snakes twisted and met at the mouth, mouths open, like teeth ready to bite. They had clay eyes. It looked like a child's toy that had grown teeth.
"Just a little," my mother told me. "One drop on the lip at night. You sleep, you don't move. It will help your mother carry a son."
I pressed my finger to the small slit on the needle they brought. The point was thin. "This will count?" I asked.
"It must be family blood," my father said. "Not blood from outside."
They made me put my hand inside the mouth of the jar. The rim was cold and sticky with dust and old things I didn't want to look at. When my finger touched something inside, it felt like wet lips. I screamed and they laughed.
"She doesn't like it," my mother said, and then she laughed too.
They put the jar under my bed that night. "You are the older daughter," my grandmother said. "You have to receive the bed for the younger brother."
I slept badly. I told myself it was nonsense. I told myself it was superstition. But that night I dreamed of a child curled like a pebble under the bed, small hands like roots, pale skin like a lantern. "Sister," the child whispered.
"Stop it," I told the dream. "Stop."
My finger where the needle had pierced it never stopped aching. It felt as if tiny teeth sat under the skin. It throbbed and burned. They made me go through it every night. "For your future, Emery," my mother said. "For the family."
"They want me to buy a house," I muttered to myself, and took the money.
A month later, my mother told me she was pregnant. She moved with the lightness of someone who has stolen sleep. Her skin looked strange — white and oily in way that made me think of fish. She ate raw fish and little live river fish with the head and tail moving in the bowl. She sucked eggs raw. Once, I saw her taking the blood from a piece of eel and slipping it into a cup like medicine. She put it to her lips and drank.
"Mom," I asked once, "what are you eating?"
"Food," she said. "For the baby."
She was not the same woman. She licked at the rim of a bowl as if it had been a candy, and then she looked straight at me with bright eyes.
"Stop being hysterical," my father told me. "You are the one who is selfish."
The first time I saw the jar react, it hissed. The clay of its mouth steamed as if someone had breathed on it. Two snakes on the side of the jar looked like they were writhing. My father laughed until his mouth shook with relief. My mother cried and called the jar "good." I wanted to throw the jar away.
"It is old," my father said. "It is strong."
I stopped sleeping in my own room. I moved to the city and worked, but then my room smelled like the jar because my parents took it with them whenever they could — to bed, to the kitchen, to the living room. They washed it carefully every night, drinking the rinsewater like a tonic. The smell grew in my head.
One night, my period began heavy as a flood. I woke and the blood had soaked the bedding and dripped through the slats onto the jar. The jar drank without opening. That night, I saw my mother lick the bloodstained sheet like she was tasting honey. She had already been eating raw eggs, raw fish, even animal blood — but this, this was different. She put her face to the fabric and let her tongue press the stain. I stood at the bathroom door and watched like someone watching a train crash.
"Eve," I cried. "Stop! Please, stop!"
She raised her head slowly. "Hush," she said. "You're not a daughter. You're our way."
I ran out. I called the only person I could think might understand the smell of superstition and the look of things that are old: Clay Khalil, a local man everyone called a "folk helper." He taught exercise at the park and did small rituals for old people. He had a grin like a weathered coin.
"Let me look," he said when I told him what was happening. "Don't sleep there tonight. Bring me samples."
He came into the house like the sun comes into a dark room. He patted my shoulder. "Don't worry," he said. "It will get worse before it gets better."
He was right.
When I tried to sleep that night I imagined teeth, the thin white things under my skin. I saw a child's face under the mattress, tiny and bright. "Sister," it said again.
Clay came each night to check the jar. He spoke to me as if I were a frightened child. "We will take this out of the room," he told me. "But you must keep away from your mother."
"Do it now," I pleaded. "Please."
He was always kind but secretive. He set coffins of paper and white matches. He drew little red marks on paper and whispered lines I couldn't quite remember. He told me a story he barely let out: years ago someone had made a jar with ash of snakes and bones and blood of those who had been forced to abort. The jar was a trap, he said. "They used the jar to make a promise," he said. "The promise turned into hunger."
"Will it make my mother die?" I asked.
"Maybe," Clay said. "Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. But those who made it used a price. The price is not cheap."
We found an older woman, Ellen Ward, who remembered the jar's first time. "It came from a family who wanted a son very badly," she said. "They used many things: prayer, pills, late-night doctors. They made a jar from snake ashes and mixed it with bone and blood. It was meant to be a promise for a son, but it fed on daughters. The daughter in that story..." Ellen paused. Her face turned to stone. "She was found under a hill, covered in cuts and little white worms crawling in the wounds. Her mother held the jar and begged."
Ellen's voice made my mouth go dry. "Who kept the jar then?"
"People buried it," Ellen said. "Or they thought they did. These things are made to be moved from hand to hand."
Clay found my mother one night with a bowl of raw eel blood and asked her to stop. She laughed and bared her teeth. "You don't understand," she said. "It will make him come."
"It will make you thin," Clay said. "Stop. Give me the jar."
She would not. Instead, she grabbed a cleaver and held it like a staff.
"You're wrong," my father shouted from the doorway. "This is for our son!"
"Give it to me now," Clay said. "Please, stop. I will bind it."
They fought. It ended with my father bleeding where he had sliced himself trying to take my mother's hand. The jar sang like a throat. "Sister," a voice inside the grooves whispered.
"Take her," I told Clay. "Take her, lock her up. Do anything."
But we could not do that. That night, things got worse — I felt a crawling from my left hand like a thousand ants. Clay had to cut my skin in a way I would later never forget; he drew blood on paper and burned it, and from my wound came a thin white thread that looked like a snake's offspring. It slid into the bowl and hissed. We burned it. The hiss rose and dissolved.
That was the beginning of a battle. The jar was hungry and it was waiting.
Two weeks later, the jar moved.
I had gone back to my small teacher's room in the city. I had tried to keep my distance, but that was not how blood works. At midnight my roommate called. "Emery, someone left a jar by your bed. It's making noise."
I drove back. The jar had been left there, wrapped in cloth. It huffed like something breathing under a cover. Clay came with me, and so did a team — unexpectedly — Clay had run to find help. He had called Denver Mancini and Bianca Alston and others. Denver — he was quiet and strong, not the kind who spoke much. Bianca watched with hands folded. They had friends. They would be the people with power I did not have.
We unwrapped the jar and saw movement: tiny hands, pale and thin, like the beginnings of fingers, drifted along the outside as if a nest of newborn things were pressing at the clay. When we tried to lift it, the jar fell and cracked. From the crack spilled long pale loops that looked like skinless snakes, and embedded in those loops were many small faces.
"Don't touch!" Denver shouted.
People lit paper. The faces screeched. The faces had voices like children and like anger. "Sister," they whispered in a hundred tones. "Feed. Feed."
It was at that moment everything broke.
My parents were waiting in the shadows as if called. They had come to find the jar. They came like people needing bread. My mother clutched a basin of meat and blood. "He is hungry," she cried. "Feed him! Feed my son!"
"Stop!" I screamed. "Stop! He is not—"
"My son!" she screamed back and lunged. She moved like a person controlled. In the street under the yellow light, she sank her teeth into a raw piece of meat and devoured it like a starving animal. My father raised a knife.
There were witnesses. Street cleaners. A pair of drunk men leaning on a car. A woman pushing a stroller stopped. Someone called the police. The jar writhed and made a sound like a hungry throat. At that exact moment, the town had been pulled into the old story we had tried to bury.
"Stop them!" I shouted. "They're sick!"
"Call the police!" someone said.
Clay and Denver moved with businesslike speed. Denver tied ropes and held them. Clay threw the binding papers — yellow strips — and chanted. The faces on the lost jars looked like mouths. The crowd backed away.
That night, in public, my parents were punished. It wasn't a legal punishment at first. It was a community unraveling, an old shame made visible.
"Look at them!" a neighbor cried. "They ate meat like wild dogs! They let a jar rule them!"
"They used their girl," another said. "They gave blood like coins!"
"Shame on them!" a woman spat.
People gathered. Phones came out. Lights from cameras painted the scene white and hard. Clay took the jar's light and the small menacing things and set them in a ring of fire. Denver tied my parents to the lamp post so they could not stagger toward the jar. Someone in the crowd shouted for an elder from the local council. Within minutes, a small but furious group of villagers had formed a line.
"Who buried the body of a child for a jar?" one old man yelled. "Who would do this?"
A woman screamed and pointed to my grandmother's faded house across the street. "They sold a house and wanted a boy!" she cried. "They traded a daughter!"
A young man took out his phone. "I am recording," he said. "This is the truth. They made her give blood. They made her do it."
My grandfather, Paul Cruz, tried to say something, but his voice broke. "We prayed," he said. "We only wanted..."
"Only wanted?" someone answered. "You let a child die!"
I stood there trembling with a paper cup of salt water. The police cuffed my father and demanded his name. "Ian Chapman," he said in a small voice. The neighbor laughed; some people clapped, not in joy, but in relief that wrongdoing had a face.
"Public judgment," someone said. "They won't sell another daughter's life for a son."
The crowd did something I never knew neighbors would do. They organized a public hearing right there in the street. The council secretary wrote a notice, and people who had been hurt by similar stories stood up. Ellen Ward told her memory of the buried girl and the snakes. "We thought we'd stopped it," she said. "I thought burying the jar would close it. But they dug it up again. They think money can buy a living boy."
"I did what my parents ordered," my father said once, so small that I almost left. "They told me to make it right."
"Then you made wrongs right wrongly," someone shouted. "Tie him up. Make him listen."
The penalty the town imposed that night felt both primitive and final. They would not kill my parents. They wanted them recognized for their cruelty. They wanted witnesses. A woman sprayed water on the ground and set a cardboard altar. The old women of the street came and spat words of shame. For twenty minutes they listed the names of others in other towns who had used superstition to hurt children. They read the story of the buried girl like a newspaper. People took photos. They called the social services line and the news. My parents' faces appeared on small screens.
"Look!" the man with the phone said. "They made her drink that water. They wanted a son."
A circle of people took my parents' photos and posted them with the label: "Parents who traded their daughter." The images spread. People in other neighborhoods started calling my grandmother's old house. An old customer from my mother's market came and spat into the yard. "You bought death," she said.
My grandfather fell to his knees and wept. My grandmother covered her face and screamed. They had expected quiet. They had expected that, in shame, the town would bend its head. Instead the town flung their deed into light.
The punishment was not only words. It was a ritual of disgrace. My father and mother were declared unfit. They were made to publicly confess in the park the things they had done. They were required to stand before the crowd and say each day's work they had forced me to do. My mother was asked to hand over the jar. She had held it like a child. She resisted, but people pushed. A local woman snatched the jar from her hands and smashed it on the road. Clay burned the pieces. The little pale snake-skins squealed and turned to ash.
For a long, long time, I thought that smashing the jar would end it. But some things are made of more than clay. The villagers cheered when the jar broke. "Out with the old," they said. "No more bargains."
My parents begged for forgiveness in the center of that crowd. "We were wrong," my mother said, her voice a ragged thing. "We did this for family."
"No," the crowd answered. "Not for family. For superstition."
They were taken to the hospital that night. The doctors saw wounds and bone lost from my father's arms and the strange swollen belly on my mother. "They have been feeding themselves to something," a doctor said. "They were eaten inwardly by obsession."
I kept quiet at the hearing when some of the town proposed a civil action. I didn't want money or revenge. I wanted the memory of the small girls to be saved from them. But I went along when people said their names aloud and forced them to face what they'd done. Cameras recorded everything. When the relative who had tried to steal my inheritance later came to demand burial money, people showed him the video. He was stopped by neighbors and laughed out of the lane.
That public punishment lasted for hours. People called it "the reckoning." They listed not only my parents' crimes, but also the older line of asking for sons and selling daughters' lives as if there were a market. It was ugly and it was necessary. At one point the angry assembly demanded my grandparents promise to help me instead of plotting more tricks. They were humiliated. My grandmother's voice cracked into a prayer and no one answered.
After the jar was smashed and the police took reports, my parents' bodies were taken for hospital treatment. They did not die on the roadside that night. That could have been a mercy, but the hospital's sterile light held new horrors: wounds and lacerations, skin eaten by strange things, lungs weak. They were, in the end, broken people, not monsters made whole.
"Will you press charges?" I asked the officer in the morning.
"We will open an investigation," he said. "There will be follow-up. This is not the end."
"I don't want revenge," I told him. "I want them to be stopped."
He gave a small nod. "We will do that."
Afterwards, the relatives who had tried to claim the house in the name of a phantom son came back. They demanded money for funeral fees. They wanted ten thousand dollars now. They were a small crowd but loud.
"Pay up," they said. "You're their daughter. Must give for the rites."
"They sold the house," I said. "The house was sold by the old will."
"Girl," a man said, "family rules are family rules."
"Show me proof," I said.
He couldn't. The crowd around us grew. People had heard how they had been caught in the street. One of the neighbors stepped forward, a man who had recorded the breaking of the jar. He put his phone on the table and spoke clearly.
"This is the video," he said. "You demanded money for a lie. You almost brought a girl to death for a son. Now you will be judged in public."
I surprised myself by standing up and asking for the loudspeakers from the council. They brought a tiny speaker and a microphone. I spoke.
"You all saw this," I said. "You know what they did. You will not take my money for their crimes. You will not sell their lies as a funeral."
A murmur ran across the gathered people. The relative who had come to demand money turned red. "She is a child," he said. "We are family. We have the right—"
"You asked me for money after they died," I said. "You wanted me to pay for what they did. You expected me to buy silence."
"Emery," someone whispered in my ear, "you don't have to humiliate them."
"I will," I said. "If you think my parents' corpse is a coin, then let's make them public."
I played the video. It was a painful loop: my mother on the street, my father with a knife, Clay holding the jar. People gasped. Voices shrank.
"Now explain who buried the bones," I said. "Who helped them dig up the jar thirty years ago? Who sold this a promise?"
The relative's mouth worked. He had no answer. People started to shout his name and demand he remove his claim. A neighbor with a loud voice — one of the older men from the jar-smashing night — stood and said, "If you continue to demand money, we will post your name and the story in the market. We will tell everyone what you did." He looked at the relative and the relative looked at the phones.
The rest of the punishment was slow and social. Market owners refused to serve him for a week. A small circle of neighbors organized to boycott any store run by him. Letters went to the water association and the landlord groups. People came by and demanded they apologize publically. They had to stand in the square with a sign that read: "I demanded money from the daughter of those who hurt a child." The sign was not long but it hung there for days. Children pointed. The man was forced to call my aunt and say he was sorry. It broke him small; his pride was cheaper than the price he wanted.
This was a punishment of shame and public exposure. It showed me that small towns can do something hard: they can deny a hiding place to those who profit from grief.
Afterwards, the police and social workers took the jar pieces for analysis. They called it "the bone-jar case" and wrote a report. It spread. People who had told the story for years came and said they were glad. But there were parts they would never tell in public — the way my mother looked when she licked the blood, the way my father cut at his own arms until the meat came loose. Those images stayed in me.
Clay and Denver did not leave. Bianca sat with me and made tea. Denver held my jacket and didn't try to say much. "We will stop this," he said once, simply.
"You did," I said.
"No," Denver answered. "You did."
We visited Ellen Ward and the others. We found the old spots where jars had been hidden. We burned paper prayers and threw salt on the holes. The old women in the market told stories of daughters who had been sent away. We laid down a line of small lights for the ones who could not speak.
In the weeks that followed, I took my classes. People came with small gifts. A neighbor bought me a used mattress so the jar could never be under my bed again. Clay came sometimes and handed me strange paper charms. "Keep this," he would say. "And if ever a jar returns, burn it where the river meets the bridge."
The nightmare had turned into a new kind of work: cleaning memory and telling truth. I wrote names down. I helped village women make a small board — a list of things to never do again — and we posted it in the square. "Never trade a daughter," it said. "Never bury a child. Never use a jar."
But the whole time, something remained: the shape of the jar in my head. A mouth under the bed. The whisper of little faces. And the red, narrow thing — what Ellen called the "snake head" — a bright sliver of carved clay like a child's tongue stuck to the side of the jar.
One night when the wind had emptied the square and the small cameras were off, I sat by the window and held a scrap of cracked clay that Clay had kept from the broken jar. It was no bigger than my thumb. The old faces were gone, but there in the dust I could still see the red of a little carved head.
"Do you think it's gone for good?" Bianca asked, standing behind me.
"I don't know," I said. "I only know I will never let it sit under my bed again."
She nodded. "And if ever it calls again, you have friends."
I closed my hand around the tiny red piece and felt its coldness. For a long time I listened to the street and to the memories. The jar's hiss had been put out, the public had shamed the people who had let superstition be their god. But the scar, the lesson, and the sound of a child whispering "Sister" live in me.
At dawn I put the shard in a box that Clay had wrapped in paper. "Keep this safe," he said. "It will remind you of what to protect."
I put the box on the shelf above my bed where I can see it. At night I still dream sometimes of a child curled under a mattress, but now the child does not call me to feed him. He looks up and says, "Thank you." Then he turns and walks toward light.
The jar is gone. The snake-head shard is boxed. The town remembers the smashing in the square and the faces on phones. And when I open the box in the dark, I can see the tiny red snake head and know exactly where that jar once sat.
The End
— Thank you for reading —