Okefenokee Night #2

Across town. The streets of Waycross, Georgia, on the Okefenokeee as the streets ran cold with the torrents of rain’s insanity bleeding down. Inside, she was stirring the Burgoo pot. “Y’all ain’t never seen crawdads pissed like this,”

Outside, the rain smacked against the tin roof hard enough to drown out the wailing cicadas, but inside the kitchen, the air was thick enough to taste—garlic, cayenne, and something deeper, blood-warm. “This hoodoo, ain’t a rehearsal,” Musette muttered, flicking a pinch of crushed indigo root into the pot, where it hissed like a gator sliding into bayou water. The steam coiled up around her wrists, leaving damp trails like phantom fingers mapping her veins. She was naked due to circumstance—the stove’s heat had peeled her sweat-soaked dress right off her shoulders earlier—but she wasn’t modest in ways that mattered anymore. Her dowager’s clit, pulsing like a frog’s throat rehearsing hymns, was the only part of her still slick enough to shine.

Mama Musette, was speaking in tongues that twisted words. Somewhere between English and something older. The words slid past teeth and lips with a rhythm that didn’t belong to any textbook, cursing the shadow behind her back as she stirred the steaming iron pot. The tails of crawdads curled tight as fists in the broth, their red shells cracking under the heat like secrets popping loose. “The proof is in the puddin’…” Roosevelt, her lover was masturbating his sauce in his snifter of bayou cognac—smooth motions, like he was coaxing a tune from a fiddle nobody else could hear. His grin was half-lit by the light, casting knife-edge shadows across the kitchen. “Hear that?” he asked, though she hadn’t. The rain had stopped. The silence was worse. The coven was screeching outside, their bare feet slapping the mud like wet hands on a drumhead. She had known they were coming, RSVP’d in chicken blood and broken rosaries. The pot bubbled—one last crawdad burst open, spilling its guts into the broth. Her dowager’s clit twitched. The coven was hungry. So were the dead—and the social media.

The knife in Roosevelt’s belt was trembling like a divining rod over oil. His hands were slick with more than just cognac now. “You gon’ let ’em eat?” he asked, slow, deliberate. Musette’s response was to spit into the pot. It sizzled. The broth turned a shade darker. “Ain’t about lettin’,” she said. “They eat what I feed ’em.” The coven’s chanting rose, a sound like nails dragged down a slate. The scent of burnt sugar and wet dog fur seeped under the door. The dead didn’t knock; they just leaned. The whole shack groaned under their weight. Musette’s pulse hammered in her throat, but her fingers stayed steady. She stirred once more—counter-clockwise—and the room temperature dropped ten degrees. The spoon in her hand frosted over. Roosevelt’s grin widened. “That’s my girl.” The coven outside screamed in unison. The first knock came. The second never did—the door was already open, awaiting the orgy.

Outside, the mud bubbled like tar where the coven’s feet had been. Their leader, a skeletal woman with teeth filed to points, pressed a palm to the doorframe. The wood blackened where she touched it. She was smiling. Inside, the last of the crawdads dissolved into the broth, leaving no penis regrets floating like communion wafers. Musette’s clit throbbed in time with the coven’s pulse.

Roosevelt’s knife stopped trembling—it was singing now, a high, keening note that made the dead tilt their heads like dogs catching a whistle. The leader stepped inside, her bare breasts swinging low as a cow’s udder. “That pot got no lie in it,” she crooned, voice syrup-thick. Musette spat again. This time, the broth foamed pink. “Eat or be ate,” she said, and the coven’s laughter smelled like wet matches.