the fall of mammon

by Mei Backof

Oh, little thing—what can an old, misshapen farm dog tell you?

Lord knows I had no business on a farm. I weren’t bred for it in the slightest—cranky old Carl Devlin called me a “squat thing with a pumpkin head,” my legs all bowed and bent real short. I ain’t got the stride for this line of work, ain’t got that skinny face neither—that’s why when I’d shown up on the farm as a stray, the Devlins named me Potbelly—fat little pit bull that ain’t cost a penny. Carl cropped my ears himself.

You laugh now, but I were young once. I could tell you how I scrapped with coyotes faster than me, taller than me. Came back one night with one of their scruffs dangling out my teeth—in return, Carl Devlin wrapped a collar round my neck, little spikes all about the outside of it, and called me good boy.

The Devlins couldn’t keep much on that farm. Just those silly fainting goats—the ones that smacked into the grass when they’d spook themselves, legs stuck straight out, rock-solid. But I dodged their hooves, their horns, nipped at their legs. Oh, the old days, little thing, when I stamped and pranced and boasted myself all about that little farm. And let me tell you, I ain’t lost a single goat to the coyotes. Not to the coyotes, no.

I could tell you things, things about the town of Mammon.

None of the men swam Mammon Lake, not after the family down the street lost their little girl to the swallowing waters. Even so, the men still went there in the heat, dipping their toes in the lake like fish bait. That were the wise thing to do—but Harvey, well, he were long-grown but he were never the sharpest. He were diving for mussels, he’d said. Carl Devlin dropped one in front of me; a little oblong thing colored like goat manure, ribbed with a wet-bone-shine in the sunlight. He pushed his knife through its lips, wrenched its shell apart, exposing the delicate insides. The oily, sweet-smelling organ jiggled and sunlight danced in its flesh. Carl prodded at me, insisting, but something weren’t right about a meat I could nearly see through. Go on, good boy, he’d said. Them mussels sweet like ladyfingers. But for all his trying, he couldn’t coax an appetite into me.

I waited for Harvey by the lake shore with the Devlin girl, Constance. She stood gargoyled by her daddy, watching her brother slap his flabby body about underneath the lake. I never knew how old she was; she were one of those that looked young and old at the same time. She had a thick brow like a cliff side and a big bottom lip, a little like mine.

She didn’t move an inch when a minute passed, two, three, and Harvey Devlin stayed down under them waves. But he weren’t gonna stay down there forever. I could tell you about when he came back up, and it weren’t Harvey Devlin no more. When the lake turned red and a burnt-brown, marbled thing waddled to shore.

It were wearing Harvey’s clothes, but its head were split down the middle, skin spindled up and whorled into plates. Then I saw the freckles, the bits of hair attached. On each side there was two stretched-out holes, lashes peeking out the wet and naked flesh, dripping with grime. And between the two empty eyes was some wrinkled thing, broken open, spewing red, threaded with white jelly. I’d snapped coyotes’ spines before and seen the same. They always scream and writhe, but Harvey Devlin, he made no sound—just the dull, wet smacks of bone and meat.

The lake-dwelling men screamed. The rest of him toddled to shore, the halved pieces of his skull curving a yard up into the sky like it were jawing at the Heavens, his brain tonguing about in his head, grey, gooey. There weren’t arms by his sides no more, just long, long nets of fingerling flesh, like onion roots. And he smelled. Smelled oily, smelled sweet. Like mussel.

I wanted to hear Carl Devlin shout, Loose! because then I’d know it were an animal, something I could kill. But when he never said the word, I understood it weren’t no beast—and when he didn’t reach for his rifle, I knew we wasn’t standing in the presence of a man neither.

He didn’t recoil from the Harvey-Devlin-thing until it wrapped first round his face, then his head. Desperate, piggish bawls escaped him as it pulled and pulled until I heard crack, pop-pop-pop, and Carl’s neck stretched a little longer than a man’s should. Harvey’s yawning maw of skull and flesh swayed; I could see two jawbones, studded with stained molars, quiver in his muscles.

I could tell you the crack that sounded, how the caved skin towers came apart, unraveled in a scarlet spray. What used to be Harvey Devlin dropped slack, and Carl dropped with it, thud. His head lolled a little funny when he hit the ground, spine askew, water seeping out his eyes. His lungs let out a wet sizzle and when I ran to him, I smelled something metal on his breath. I licked his skin and it tasted of that salt men leaked, the sick kind when they fight for their lives.

Constance Devlin had been the one to fire—stone-faced, brow thick as ever. She’d always been a good shot.

As Harvey Devlin twitched and died, a plump, brown mussel tumbled from his onion-root grasp. It rolled by his sprawled, bleeding brains, came to a stop beneath one of the wrinkled folds. It were like a newborn pup to some mangled mother, a pygmy mockery of his brown spiraled skull.

Before anyone could stop her, Constance Devlin simply took the mussel into the apron of her dress. And as she did I watched the men that had stayed lakeside, slack-jawed, slither away like foxes.

I could tell you about Old Solomon, too, little thing.

When I told the ancient barn cat what happened to Harvey Devlin, she were all too keen to tell me, “The men finally found something they can’t take,” and her face had raveled up so smug I thought it might fall off. The Devlins had named her Solomon on account that something about her under-parts had looked a little male. “They’d best exercise some restraint on that which ain’t theirs. There are things in places where men can’t breathe, Potbelly. I been around a while, you know. Once men get too curious, they dig up things they ain’t want to find. You best watch, son, you watch them. They swears to their gods they rule this world, and when the world shows itself, well, they ain’t got nothin’ to say no more.”

“That ain’t no way to talk, Solomon,” I said. “The Devlins have their hearts and home open to you. They’ve just lost their boy, and all you can do is spout off about their vices?”

She sneered. “Maybe they ought not to have so many. I owe them nothin,’ Potbelly, they’s just too poor to waste bullets shootin’ me.”

That were just like her, my Solomon. She were ornery as a goat and twice as difficult.

Carl Devlin’s neck were broken after what’d been done to him—I reckoned, at least, I ain’t ever found out for sure—and I ain’t seen the townsfolk for they feared Constance putting her brother down so coldly. The days passed with a sickly heat; Constance never called me in but I could tell the state of things by the moans of her father coming from behind the goat pens.“Stop! Stop! Stop!” the goats would squeal, and I’d bark my head off till they’d quiet down, but only for a little while. Then they’d start up again, “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Old Solomon were the only creature on the farm I could speak to. She’d told me some folk tale she’d learned abroad; men had taken thousands of years to keep animals as perfect captives. They make the goats dumb as rocks, so they can’t figure out how to escape. During the times they’d scream their heads off like that, I’d think she might be right.

I could tell you about them days Carl Devlin were ill. Constance weren’t the most generous girl to begin with, but she’d neglected feeding the rest of us. The goats became slow, sluggish—but at least they had the grass. I’d have starved if it weren’t for Old Solomon dropping mouse carcasses by the doghouse. Far too old for that sort of thing, she was. I’d say, “Bless you, Solomon,” and the barn cat would loaf her paws beneath her shaggy stomach and tell me it were all right. I dared quip, “You ain’t so cranky, ain’t you?” Then she’d tell me to shut my fat jaw, clotting me about the stumps of my ears. All the while we tried not to hear the pained weeping of the man in the house.

I could tell you about the screams. “Some sort of waterborne sickness, I reckon,” I’d said to Old Solomon. Ever since the day Harvey Devlin had changed, they’d carried in the wind, first as wails in the far sunset. I thought they may have been coyote yowls but there were just something unnatural about them, manmade, sustained, and I knew we wasn’t dealing with coyotes. Something in Mammon Lake had diseased the town, deep in their souls.

As the screams grew closer, so close that I could almost hear words on their tongues, Solomon said, “Can you hear, Potbelly? The lake cries for her children.”

She pawed towards me, the pouch of her belly dragging upon the hay. “They’s awakened a bad thing in those waters.” I were drinking when she said that, I remember. “You best run, while you still got a dog’s legs to run with.”

“Now you know I ain’t gonna do that, Solomon. We mutt folk, we’re loyal to the end.”

“Ain’t you fearful? Them screams are death cries, you know.”

“The coyotes cry, too, when I put them down,” I said. “I ain’t afraid, Solomon. I owe the Devlins my life. I ain’t gonna leave them if they stand to lose theirs.”

She scoffed at me. “You ought not to make yourself pay for man’s thievery. Them little clams weren’t theirs to take.”

“Since when’s a clam been so opinionated? Ain’t thievery to live off the land, you done it for years.”

“I take only what I need, not even that,” said Solomon. “A man devours ‘til he chokes, and in that sense, he ain’t so different from the coyotes he makes you butcher.”

“You always speak in riddles, old thing.” But the she-cat dismissed me; some subjects were too painful to speak plain of, especially with a dumb, fat little dog who ain’t know what’s good for him. Once I finished my drink, I made sure to fling the water out my jowls at her. She hissed, but she’d never claw me. Them’s was precious moments, times when my heart were mischievous—because every night, the screams pitched higher, drew closer. I could scarcely tell the difference between the neighbors’ cries and the squeals of their hogs. Sleep was a hard thing to come by those days, their voices gathering together into one off-kilter noise. Every few hours, it gurgled and died, but it always started up, a different voice, a different animal. At least, I thought, Carl Devlin’s plaints had quieted. But one moment them screams was off in the distance and next, the Devlins’ goat shed erupted with them.

“It ain’t right! It ain’t right!”

It were difficult, running in midnight like that, but I did. And it were only when I arrived at the shed, I realized why I hadn’t heard Carl Devlin crying no more. I could tell you, I could tell you, the sickness…by God, little thing. It were like watching some strange, sideways cornstalk grow.

Carl Devlin had burst through the walls, arms blooming out his sides. But they wasn’t like Harvey’s were; it were like each of his ridged, blackened limbs had grown ribs of their own, flesh hard and glossy like resin, melted into spirals. And between his two clamshell arms, his broken neck unfurled, a long, tubed clam-foot, the broken bones slithering inside. I could see them, floating through the pink fluid, swimming beneath the milky-thin skin. But it weren’t Carl Devlin screaming—he were preoccupied with chewing.

Prostrated stiff on her side, legs outstretched, were one of the Devlins’ fainting goats. Inside her, wet rips giggled and gulped into the see-through cheeks of the lake-thing; the blood-flushed head pursed its lips, trying to force more tissue onto its tongue. The goat’s legs twitched but she didn’t move an inch and I saw it in her eyes, the urge to run but the wretched prison of her fainting body holding her captive.

The goat did not cry. Her mouth gaped, a bubble of blood popping between her teeth,

“It ain’t right,” she bleated. “It ain’t right.”

Carl Devlin sighed, glassy eyes rolling up and down in his expressionless face, blank and dumb like an animal’s. His jaws wriggled beneath his brain, his eyes rolling around and around and around.

For the first time in years, I whined like a puppy. I can’t recall what quite happened between my tiny cry, and Carl Devlin squelching under my teeth.

I could tell you how the meat in his neck oozed and danced out of my grip, how his spine bones clunked into the roof of my mouth. How I wrenched my head back and forth, pretending we were playing tug. I always went easy on young Harvey but Carl always told me, get it, get it, get it and all the while he smelled, he tasted sweet and oily and fishy. The only thing I could think was, I can’t lose none of them goats. I can’t, I can’t, it’d break Carl’s heart.

When I’d finished, when the head quit its grunting and moaning, the thing that weren’t Carl Devlin no more lay dead. And, soon, so did the goat.

“It ain’t right,” she coughed, and as she did, a piece of her intestine tumbled into the hay.

I could tell you how light bathed the three of us; I thought maybe I’d killed Carl Devlin and now some man’s god had come with recompense. But it weren’t God.

Glassy-eyed and stupid, Constance Devlin stood, slacked upright, in the doorway. The thickset girl stared down at what used to be her father, not a weep, not a word. But deep in her speckled white thighs, a hundred mussels, caramel-brown and sweet-smelling, wriggled greedily. As she ambled past they squirmed, her skin widening to make way for their digging. Then one, webbed with blood, dropped to the floor, crack, from up between her legs.

But she didn’t cry out. She bent down, picked it up, and placed it inside her apron.

It were Solomon’s idea to flee the farm.

“You was right, Solomon, you’s always right. The men, they’s drug up their deaths in that lake.” But when I begged her to come with me, she laughed.

“I ain’t ever said we should leave.” She eyed me real sly-like. “I’s old, I’s old as the rocks, it feels sometimes. I’d just weigh you down. You go on without me.”

I were so mad when she said that, I stomped my paws and howled, “You ain’t even got love for the Devlins, Solomon, why do you insist on stayin’? The lake takes them from me, now you’d abandon me too?”

“I’m tired, Potbelly,” said the old cat. “Ain’t no life for soft barn creatures like us, not without men; they’s made us prisoners of their sovereignty, sovereignty they pillaged.”

I shook my head. “I’ll keep you safe, old girl, I swear it on my soul.” But I could see it in her blurry eyes, in the memory of the half-eaten goat in the shed, she had no faith in me.

“There’s nothin’ men won’t take,” she said, “and I’m tired of bein’ taken from!”

And then Old Solomon told me about the only time she’d ever had kittens. Half-tom cats like her ain’t supposed to kit—but she had. She told me she still remembered what colors they were; two little striped, orange, mewing things, and three others: one tortoiseshell, one calico, and one of them bright white, just like she herself had been, before her years had soaked her ashen and heavy.

But the Devlins hadn’t accounted for her to have kittens. Solomon still remembered the day Carl pulled them from her belly, ignoring their cries, Solomon’s claws, her hateful snarls. He’d tried auctioning them off to the other townsfolk of Mammon, but none of them had use for soft, delicate creatures with closed eyes and deaf ears. Then one night, while Carl were agonizing over what he ought to do, Constance Devlin gathered the five kittens up in a basket and drowned them in the lake.

Solomon told me what Constance had said, the only thing she’d ever heard the girl say: They wasn’t goin’ for much anyway.

“I’ve no faith no more,” Solomon said. Her growling voice were scraped and sore. “They’s taken from you, too. Your ears, your tail, your freedom. But you ain’t realized it yet. I’ve got no love for men, Potbelly. No more. But you, you still got the heart. You still believe there’s good in them, and all it takes is belief. There’s hope outside the farm for you. There ain’t for me, cause I don’t believe in it. I believe in nothin’.”

I begged her, I begged with all my body, everything in me that knew to fight—but she wouldn’t budge. She eyed me careful, like she were expecting me to drag her by the scruff. But I saw the suffering deep in her cloudy gaze, the weariness caked muddy into her legs, the yellowing of her dull fangs, and I couldn’t. And I told her so, that I loved her like I were one of her kittens myself—but I couldn’t make her go.

“You know I loves you to bits, old girl,” I said. “But I ain’t ever been able to make you do nothin,’ though the Heavens know I wish I could.”

“Oh, Potbelly,” Solomon said, “you’s always been good. You’s the only thing I ever loved on this farm. When they took my kits from me, I thought I’d never love again. But when I met you…” She let out a hissing snicker, “I found I still could, though I tried my damndest not to. I can’t help it, lovin’ the good things in this world, even if the world ain’t love y’all none. Oh, Potbelly. It breaks me to leave you, lone and hurtin.’ But I need you to live. I need you to run. It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask you, you hear me? I couldn’t live, watchin’ you waste that goodness. Not like I have.”

She touched her nose to mine, and I bowed to meet her. “I’m ready, Potbelly. It’s time I meet the lake. I know she’ll love me well. We’s both robbed of our children, and maybe down there, she’ll let me sleep with their bones.”

It were hard for me to tell her goodbye. Even now between these ribs, in my war-torn blood, beating like drums, her last words will always hurt worse than anything:

“Be quick, now, my little love. Find the good men, but know you’s too good for any of ‘em.”

And then I never saw Old Solomon again.

I could tell you things, things about when I fled, the things I heard, the things I saw. Men, goats, pigs. The screams of damned souls, the cries of children. The wailing of mothers—how words, wails, the squeals of beasts, exploded—bled—all raw and horrid, the same spittled babble, over and over.

And the lake. The still waters, the crunching of leaves under my misshapen paws—how the night tripped and grabbed at me.

And the things I’d seen…the things I’d seen.

I shook. I howled. I pled, pled like all the damned before me.

But I still ran.

I could tell you how, in spite of it all, the daylight still came. The daylight comes, little thing, as this fat little body grows old and brittle. As I lay here now, as I tell this all to you…as my years fly by.

But years fly gently when you send them off, warm and soft—far from Mammon Lake.

Oh, an old farm dog could tell you things. But I’m tired, too, far too tired. Them’s is dusky tales, and these old bones were made for the sun.

Photo of Mei Backof

BIO: Mei Backof is one of Santa Clara University's two Canterbury Fellowship-awarded scholars of 2025, currently developing a horror short story and essay collection entitled "Bitter-Milk Drunk." Her previous works have been published in magazines like manywor(l)ds, Sardine Can Collective, and an upcoming print edition of the engine(idling.