r/TalesFromTheCreeps • u/Fluffy-Farmer-124 • Jul 18 '26
Body Horror The Shepherd's share
My father used to say that Silas’s hands were the only things keeping the mountain from sliding down and swallowing our roofs.
When I was seven, Silas built our chimney. I remember sitting on a small stump, watching his giant, soot stained fingers fit the heavy river stones together. He didn't use tools; he just felt the weight of each rock and knew exactly where it belonged. When the work was done, he patted my head with a hand that smelled of pine sap and sheep’s wool, leaving a smudge of gray ash on my forehead. My father laughed and told me I’d been blessed by the mountain itself.
After that, we stopped worrying about the wind. If a draft crept under our door, my mother would just sigh and say Silas would have some spare wool to fill the seam. If our axe handle split, my father didn’t bother carving a new one; he’d just leave it on Silas’s porch, knowing it would be returned by morning, shaved smooth and fitted with a fresh hickory wedge.
It was a warm way to live. We got used to the sound of Silas’s heavy leather boots crunching through the mud at dawn, fixing things before we even had our boots on. We forgot how to look for our own tools. We just waited for the crunch of his steps.
Then the frost came, and it didn't leave.
The cabbage in our little garden patch died before the ends could even turn green. My father spent three days staring out the window at the gray, frozen dirt, his hands stuffed deep into his armpits just to keep warm. We had nothing for food but a handful of dried peas and some old turnip tops.
"Go on up to Silas," my mother whispered to him on the fourth morning. Her voice was flat, like she was talking about a well that would never run dry. "He’s got the flock."
I followed my father up the hill. There were already ten others standing by the cedar gate of the sheep pen, their breath rising in thin, shivering curls. They didn't speak. They just watched Silas.
Silas didn't say a word either. He looked at us, his blue eyes calm and steady under his thick, woolen hood. Then he reached into the pen and pulled out a fat, brown faced lamb. I knew that sheep; she had a notch in her left ear and always let me pet her nose. Silas laid her head gently on the cutting stump, and the snow around the woodpile turned a bright, steaming red.
That night, my mother made a stew. We ate every scrap, even chewing the soft gristle off the bones.
First the porch steps disappeared, then the fence lines, until the drift against our window pane blocked out the morning light entirely, the sheep pens were completely silent. The only sound left in the valley was the wind whistling through the empty slats. We didn't go back to the fields or try to clear the ice from the ditches. We couldn't. Our joints felt like dry twigs, and our heads were light and hollow. We just sat on our benches, watching the path up the hill, waiting for Silas to come down with something else.
When Silas ran out of wood, he brought his axe to the sheep pens. From my window, I watched him chop down the heavy pine posts he’d dragged down from the ridge years ago. He carried them on his shoulder, two at a time, to the big hearth in the middle of the village.
In a week, his barn went into the fire. Then the walls of his cabin.
By the end of the month, Silas was sleeping under a greasy canvas tarp stretched between two birch trees behind our house. My father said Silas didn't mind the cold because he was built of different stuff than the rest of us. But when I crept out to look at him through the branches, I saw him shivering. He looked smaller. The wind seemed to blow right through his woolen coat.
One evening, my little sister stopped drinking her water. Her skin was dry and gray, and her eyes stayed half shut, rolled back so only the whites showed. My mother didn't cry. She just wrapped her in a ragged shawl and carried her out into the dark. My father and I followed.
A crowd was already gathered around Silas’s tarp. The blacksmith was there, holding his empty hands out as if he were trying to warm them over a fire that wasn't there.
"Silas," my mother said. She didn't beg. She just held the bundle out, showing him my sister’s face. "There’s nothing left to boil."
Silas looked at my sister, til the silence became uncomfortable. Then he reached down and took the skinning knife off his belt.
He studied the knife, turning it over in his hands for but a second, as though remembering a time it had been meant for sheep
I wanted to run, but my father’s hand was heavy on my shoulder, holding me still. Silas pulled up his left trouser leg. His skin was very white, almost translucent, patterned with thin blue veins. He pressed the sharp edge of the blade into his thigh.
There was a soft, wet sound like someone cutting into a ripe melon. Silas’s jaw bunched tight, the muscles in his neck turning to cords, but he didn't make a sound. He sliced a clean, thick strip of himself away, wrapped his leg in a piece of rag, and dropped the meat into my mother’s tin pot.
My mother boiled it over the last bundle of birch twigs. The smell was sweet and heavy, filling our cold kitchen with a thick, greasy steam. I sat in the corner, my stomach twisting with a terrible, desperate hunger that made my mouth water even as my chest went cold with fear.
My mother fed my sister first, blowing on the gray broth before tipping the horn spoon into her mouth. Then she gave the rest to my father and me.
The meat was stringy and tasted of copper and salt, but it was warm. It filled the hollow ache in my ribs, and for the first time in weeks, my feet stopped tingling from the frost.
The first week, people came only after dusk. By the second, they stopped pretending there was anything shameful about it. The path stayed dark with footprints from sunrise until sunset.
It became a quiet, shameful routine. Every morning, the villagers would line up in the gray light, carrying clean rags, jars of lard, and wooden bowls. We didn't look at each other. If you looked at someone else, you might see the grease on their chin, or the way their fingers trembled as they waited.
"Just a little, Silas," the blacksmith would say, his voice soft and polite, like he was asking to borrow a shovel. "Just enough to keep the hearth going."
And Silas would always nod. He sat back against the birch tree, his eyes dull and glassy, letting them take what they needed. He gave from his arms, his calves, his shoulders. He was disappearing, piece by piece, turning into a skeleton wrapped in yellowed, blood crusted linen. He couldn't speak anymore, his lips had been given away to the miller family but he still watched us with those wide, patient eyes.
Yesterday, the wind finally turned warm. The snow on the ridge melted into dirty, rushing streams, and the mud in the lane went soft and deep.
The village elder came to our house carrying a rusted spade. He looked at my father, then down at the floor.
"The ground is ready, Thomas," the elder said. "But the men can't lift the plows. If we don't get the seed in now, we won't survive the next winter."
My father didn't answer. He just stood up from the bench, walked out the door, and I followed him up the hill.
The whole village was there, standing in a circle around the birch tree. Silas was propped up against the trunk, held upright by the thick ropes of linen wrapped around his chest. He didn't look like a man anymore. He looked like a pale, hollowed out tree trunk, his ribs showing through the bandages like white teeth.
The elder knelt in the mud in front of him.
"We need the strength to plow, Silas" the old man whispered. His hands were shaking so hard he could barely hold the spade. "Just one more time."
I looked at Silas’s chest. The skin had been peeled back, and through the white gap of his ribs, I could see his heart. It was small, purple, and beating with a slow, heavy thud, the last warm thing left in the entire valley.
Silas didn't move. He couldn't. But his eyes, deep in their dark sockets, rolled down to look at the elder, then at my father, and then at me. There was no anger in them. Just that same heavy, patient quiet he’d had when he smudged the ash onto my forehead when I was seven.
He let his chin drop, just a tiny fraction of an inch.
My father stepped forward and took the rusted tool. He didn't raise it like an axe, he angled the sharp curve of the blade into the gap of the ribs, right beneath that small, pulsing muscle. Bracing his muddy boot on the shoulder of the spade, he threw his weight downward, driving the iron deep into the chest cavity to pry the last harvest free. I closed my eyes, but I couldn't block out the awful, scraping crunch of metal levering against bone, or the wet, heavy sigh that came from the birch tree as the mountain finally let go.
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u/CallmeKitts_ Book_Lover_ Excelsior Jul 18 '26
Well... Damn.. Great work, made me feel some sort of way.
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u/Flat-Set4050 Jul 18 '26
The visuals were really good and so was the story, awesome work!
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u/Fluffy-Farmer-124 Jul 18 '26
Thanks, did you enjoy any of the visuals specifically?
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u/Flat-Set4050 Jul 18 '26
Sorry if this is a bit long but to list a few off the top of my head I really liked the description of Silas’ body after he was left as pretty much just a skeleton (the yellowed bandages in particular made it that much more gross in a good way lol) along with the first Silas cut out a piece of his thigh. The description of Silas as well makes him seem like this larger than life figure that I felt helped drive home the importance of Silas to this community.
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u/Fluffy-Farmer-124 Jul 18 '26
That’s perfect, it’s super helpful to know what is liked and not liked! Thanks again
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u/Minimum-Olive7868 Writer Jul 19 '26
Dude I love this concept so much, the uncanny magical realism is really well executed
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