The Fiction of Owen Thomas

The Lion Trees

A Novel

 

Matilda: Excerpt

Bitches and sirens. Don’t they just always get the attention?

Damnable storm. Everyone recognizes her now. Katrina’s mother.

That’s some real star power for you.

And there’s really no doubting where she’s headed. She’ll be there soon enough and not the least bit tired for the journey. Two more days at most. Everyone has been waiting for so long – sixty years! Imagine that. And soon she’ll be there, at last, with her arms flung wide and her capes in the wind, gliding in through the front door as if she walked on water. She’ll set down her wet bags and sing of her arrival. And when they hear her voice, all will weep at the sound.

She is coming to kill them, of course. All of them if she can. She will bludgeon and drown and choke them with mud until they are all dead or gone or so stricken by her diluvial terror that they are left hollowed out and floating like empty gourds. She will submerge the entire body of the place, snapping the arteries of oil like twigs and popping the eyes of commerce and gouging her wet thumb into the brass and reedy windpipes of Louisiana. She will make her daughter, little Katrina, seem merciful by comparison. They have all been waiting for her.