Shadows of Bitterwood
Content Warning (click to expand)
animal injury and killing, blood, child abuse, dead bodies, death of a loved one, guns, homicide, gore
by D. Thomas Minton
The town of Bitterwood sits on the edge of the salt pans, like a beaten corpse.
On a desolate hill a half-hour walk to the west, a priest closes his Bible and forearms the sweat streaming down his face. He’s a good man but a poor speaker; the dioceses don’t send men of promise to Bitterwood.
“Thank you, padre,” I whisper. We are alone except for my father’s body swathed in oiled burlap at the bottom of a shallow grave.
The priest offers no words of comfort. Perhaps he knows nothing can save my father’s soul. “You shouldn’t have come back,” he says softly, and after all these years, he may speak the truth. Head down, he weaves his way through the tombstones, mindful of the shadows they cast.
I lean on the shovel. The sun is barely above the hills, but already the heat is oppressive. The only shade of any size is with my father, and there I know, to no surprise, he is not alone.
• • •
Bitterwood is three days off the nearest stage route, across barrens so desolate not even buzzards inhabit them. The only things that grow taller than knee-high are gaunt trees with leathery leaves that hang limply from thorny branches like chips of fossilized smoke. We call them bitterwoods, and as a namesake, they are appropriate.
Their wood is good for nothing, and when cut, the trunks bleed a yellow ichor that blisters the skin. Yet, it’s not the wood or the thorns that men fear, but the malice that lurks in the shade beneath those branches. My father said the shadows were holes torn in the wall between Earth and Hell, through which the stalkers slipped into our world. Being creatures of smoke and darkness, they could not survive here for long unless they stayed far from the light and could steal the lungs of an animal so they could breathe. In those days, the stalkers kept to the desolate lands, but every homestead in Bitterwood burned sage or sprinkled holy water to keep the evil away.
My father, a stern immigrant from the old country whom I called Sir, had fifty head of cattle that grazed the land between Dust Creek and the salt pans. My mother died bringing me forth and was likely the better for it.
I never asked Sir why he stayed in Bitterwood, but I suspect his old-world pride required him to prove a man could claw a life from this patch of forsakenness. Then, maybe the land wasn’t so bad when he got here, and the corruption that came to infest it arrived in his luggage.
• • •
When I was nine, a pair of brothers came to Bitterwood on a donkey all skin and bone. A rough-looking pair, I could only tell them apart because one had a silver tooth. Rumor was they were wanted for rustling cattle up north of Chilagoe, but Bitterwood spawned stories, true or not, like a cactus grew spines, so I didn’t know what to believe. After one of our head went missing, Sir and his man, Ben Scrivens, went up their place but found it empty. The brothers had moved on, Sir said, and who was I to question back then.
Many years later, a man in worn dungarees and a woman with grey in her hair rolled in from the east on a wagon covered with sun-bleached canvas. They had three teenage children and, as rumor told, a dozen head of sheep. I’d never seen a sheep before, but Dean Scrivens, Ben’s middle boy, said they were the death of cattle because of the way they ate a pasture to the pan, making it unfit for anything else.
Some days after, Ben Scrivens came by to say he’d seen three of our head wander into the salt pan. Done, he turned to what I thought his real reason for visiting. Sir’s lip curled at mention of the sheep, and Scrivens spat on the ground, which drank the moisture greedily.
“I’ll shoot any of them devils I see,” Scrivens said.
Sir’s jaw had set firmly into a grim expression.
Scrivens hung there, sucking at his teeth.
I pressed my jaw forward, mimicking Sir’s look. I wanted to nod at the same time Sir did to show Ben Scrivens that Sir and me were of a same mind.
“Anyone see these sheep?” Sir asked.
Scrivens wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, the fabric coming away black with his grime. “I haven’t,” he said, sounding like a little boy caught in a fib. “But the man came into the store this morning and, well, he don’t look the type to run cattle.”
Sir considered this. “I’ll have words with him.” He ordered me to fetch the horses, and I brought them.
Excited, I swung into my saddle and turned to follow Sir and Ben Scrivens.
“What are you doing?” Sir asked. “The salt pan isn’t this way.”
His refusal stung, more so because of the way it amused Ben Scrivens. The man’s grin made clear the men would be riding off to the meeting, and the boy would be rounding up the strays.
No one in Bitterwood argued with Sir, least of all me. “Yes, Sir,” I said. Someday I would wield that type of respect, but not that day.
• • •
About once a month, Sir sent me into Bitterwood to check the mail and collect supplies. Sometimes I dropped off fresh meat to level a bill, or real coin to settle the taxes. Sir believed in paying his taxes, and I took pride that he trusted me with that important task.
As I came into the mercantile, Dean Scrivens was leaning on the counter talking with Mr. Mendes, the owner.
“Ol’ Hank ran into them new folks, the Giffords, out near Needle Rocks,” Mr. Mendes said, his droopy mustache quivering. “Says they invited him to chow.”
Hank Bojois was a salt man who wandered the pans with a burro name Miguel. He came into Bitterwood every few weeks to re-up his tobacco.
“Said he’d not do that again,” continued Mr. Mendes, “and Hank wouldn’t turn away a free bite from Old Scratch himself.”
“True ‘nough.” Dean nodded knowingly.
“Why so?” I asked.
Mr. Mendes shrugged. Plainly he knew more, but he busied himself wiping the counter with his grungy cloth.
“My dad went up the other day with Mr. Malkowicz—” Dean acknowledged me with a nod “—said those folks were a strange lot.”
Mr. Mendes shot Dean a quizzical look.
Sir hadn’t said anything to me, and I was jealous that Dean’s dad had told him about the meeting. Dean wasn’t any more a man than me, yet I was the one in the dark. My ears grew hot, but I was spared further indignity when the bell above the door jangled.
Mr. Mendes cleared his throat as if warning us to say no more as a woman in a head scarf entered with three teenagers. She wore a simple dress, dusted so from her ride into town that its blue pattern looked sun-faded. The three teens wore identical loose-fitting shirts, dungarees, and leather shoes. They had delicate features, with feminine slants to the lines of their jaws and the curves of their eyebrows. Based on his height, I guessed the tallest was near my age.
“Señora Gifford,” Mr. Mendes said with a nod.
She eyed Dean who blocked the counter, a glimmer of disapproval in her mud-brown eyes.
After a long few seconds, Dean stepped aside while offering a drawled, “Ma’am.”
She watched him until he was gone, then stepped up to the counter.
“I’ll be with you in a moment, Señora,” Mr. Mendes said before looking at me.
I recalled my purpose for being there, but Mr. Mendes hadn’t started to help me yet, so I nodded politely to the woman. “Ladies first.”
She had a pale face, not the color you’d expect on someone who had crossed a hundred miles of sunbaked land. She must have never come out from the cover of her wagon.
Finding her smile cold, I moved away and feigned interest in a jar of prickly pears.
“I need several things, and you seem the only place in town,” Mrs. Gifford said. Her words were as clipped and short as her smile. I would learn years later that it was the way folks talked in the big cities back east, but there in Mr. Mendes’s store, her words fell strangely on my ears, like she spoke some dialect that followed rules intended to render her near unintelligible.
She rattled off a list of items then, rote from memory it seemed, and after a few, Mr. Mendes pleaded for her to slow down.
I lost track of their conversation when the tallest of the teens came up next to me and examined the same jar of prickly pears. Up close, his face was smooth and shiny in the same odd way of a wind-washed stone. His hair was the color of cattle bones.
I realized I was staring and mumbled a sound meant to be an apology, but it came out like a soft clearing of my throat.
“I’m Elis,” he said. His accent made it hard to tell what he truly said, but the “e” had a hard sound to it like the middle of “meat.”
“You from east ways?” I don’t know why I whispered, but it seemed the right thing to do.
“From that way, yes,” Elis whispered back. Whether he took his cue from me or also didn’t want to be overheard, I didn’t know.
“I’m Gavin Malkowicz. My dad runs fifty head out past Dust Creek.”
“We don’t have cows.”
“So I heard.”
Elis shrugged noncommittally, almost like he knew confirming the rumors would drive a wedge between us. Saying nothing said a lot, and if Dean Scrivens was right about sheep, it’d be best for these folks to move on from Bitterwood.
“You settling in, permanent like?” I hoped to learn something I could share with Sir or even parade in front of Dean.
Before he could answer, the woman tugged his sleeve. “Stay close, Elis.” She wrapped her arm around his shoulders, like a tether to keep him from wandering away again. She shot me a dark look like I was something contemptible, but she didn’t know me from Adam, so I assumed she gave that look to everyone.
Elis mouthed something in my direction. I couldn’t say for certain, but I think he said, “Nice to meet you, Gavin.”
• • •
The next day, I ran into Dean Scrivens while checking the herd.
“I’m heading toward Needle Rocks,” he said, “to find where those sheep herders keep their devils.”
By that hour, I’d accounted for only half the herd, but I’d lose face if I didn’t join Dean’s mission. Needle Rocks were only an hour away, so I’d have time to locate the rest of the herd and still finish my afternoon chores.
Not many folks went out that direction because the land was more yellow rock and sand than anything else. What little rain fell soaked through it faster than any grass could drink. The only things out there were bitterwoods, and fortunately, they grew sparse enough we could stay out their shadows.
We circled through the dusty land for several hours, finding nothing. To be honest, with all our wandering, I didn’t clearly know where we were. This was unfamiliar land to me.
“You sure they’re out this way?” I asked as we stood atop a ridge of crumbling rock. My shirt clung to my chest, but even soaked in sweat it didn’t cool me.
Dean rose up in his stirrups scanning the broken land that stretched to the north and west.
I swung down from my horse and took shelter in its shade. As I tipped my head back to drink from my canteen, I caught a gleam from a gully to my left.
“What is it?” Dean asked, as I picked my way down into the arroyo.
“Dunno.” At the bottom, I got my bearings. With the angle of the sun, most of the shade had burned away, but it was still too dark for my comfort. Even so, I wasn’t about to come up because Dean was eyeing me from the top.
“I saw—”
I scuttled through the ankle-deep sand to a roundish rock with a bit of metal in it, like a piece of silver set just so to catch the light.
“What is it?” Dean called down to me.
It took me a moment to realize the rock was actually a human skull, and the bit of metal a silver tooth, and that the hole square in the middle of its forehead was the size of a rifle bullet.
I stumbled back into the loose sand, my heart thumping.
Dean started to laugh, but I doubted he could see the truth from his vantage.
I heard it then, that faint congested rattle, and on the edge of my vision, I saw the movement of the stalker’s long, spider-like limbs deep in the darkest reaches of the arroyo. Beneath the creature’s hollowed out torso, the glistening lobes of its stolen lungs dangled flaccidly.
I dared not make eye contact. I had never heard of a stalking killing anyone — their preferred prey being innocent animals — but given what I had seen they could do to a cow, I had no desire to test that assumption. I edged back until I could turn and claw my way up to the horses.
Dean had stopped laughing. Perhaps he had heard the stalker.
“You remember them brothers from a few years back?” I asked, struggling to keep the quiver from my voice. “Seems someone did them harm, and we’d be best to leave the dead in peace.”
• • •
Dark clouds occasionally rode in on the hot winds from the west. Usually, they passed over Bitterwood gifting nothing except disappointment. Even when in a giving mood, the dry air usually sucked up the droplets before they ever reached the ground.
It was rare indeed when a summer morning was broken by five minutes of rain. Yet those five minutes were enough to send water scampering overland in muddy sheets, funneling into the arroyos where the torrents greedily chewed away the land. It was only after such a rain that water would pool in a depression up atop Black Rock, creating a waterhole that spawned mosquitoes and attracted the boys of Bitterwood.
By the time I arrived at the trail up to the waterhole, Dean and another boy, Logan Holdman, were already there, laying out the challenges that formed the centerpiece of our gatherings.
Logan drove a finger into Dean’s shoulder. “You ain’t got the sand to go in over your head.”
“Ain’t no spot deep enough for that now,” Dean said, and likely he was right. When we was little, the center of the pond seemed deep, but I doubt the water would even be above any of our eyes now. Having parried Logan’s challenge, Dean greeted me as I dismounted.
I started up the trail, Logan falling in behind. About halfway up, he pushed past me to take the lead. Dean tried to get by too, but I blocked him. As we neared the top, I heard voices ahead, and cresting the ridge of rock, I saw Elis and his two siblings splashing each other in the shallows of the waterhole.
“What are they doing here?” Dean asked.
Logan grunted and stomped down to the water’s edge. He glared at the three interlopers.
“Git out of here,” Dean yelled. “This is our place.”
Elis blocked his siblings from leaving the water. “The pond is big enough for everyone.”
I placed a hand on Logan’s arm. “Let ’em be.”
Logan pulled his elbow away. “Dean is right. They’re disrespecting our place.”
“The three of us can take ’em.” Dean smacked his fist into his hand.
“They’re just playing,” I said. “Ignore ’em.”
“But they’re freakish looking,” Dean said loud enough to draw Elis’s attention. “You scared, sheep boy? You should be.”
“Let’s go home,” one of the Gifford boys said. Elis agreed, and they sloshed their way back to the bank. They had been swimming in their clothes, which now clung to their skinny torsos.
As they passed us to get to the trail, Dean lunged at Elis and the two tumbled to the ground. Dean threw punches, but tangled as they were, his blows were ineffective.
I grabbed Dean’s shirt and pulled him away, ripping his collar in the process. Dean jumped to his feet, his nostrils flaring. Sir had taught me to handle myself, and I popped a quick strike before Dean could bring his fist forward, splitting his lip. Dean dropped to his knees, as much from the surprise as my punch.
Logan pushed between us. “They ain’t worth this,” he said, giving each of us a stern look.
Dean swatted Logan’s hand away. I could tell he wanted to say something to me, but thought better of it. “I’m leaving. Water’s ruined anyways.” He stopped atop the ridge. “You coming, Logan?”
Logan looked me in the eye. Still angry, I didn’t care if he left. I think he read that in my expression because he shook his head and followed Dean down the trail to the horses.
“Thank you,” Elis said, coming over.
I turned away. If Elis had left when Dean had told him, none of this would have happened. I had nothing against Elis, but Dean and I had history, good history. Sir might have run Bitterwood, but Dean’s dad was his man. I had always envisioned it would be the same in the future, but with me and Dean in the starring roles. I didn’t need anyone driving a wedge into that.
“Sorry if we made trouble for you,” Elis said, slapping the dirt off his dungarees.
I exhaled in frustration. Dean had no right to act as he did, but for me to stand by and allow it, would make me just as wrong. Elis was not at fault, so I knew I shouldn’t place my anger on him. “Dean gets too hot for his own good sometimes. It’ll be fine tomorrow.”
After an awkward moment, Elis nodded toward the trail. “We’re going to go.”
“No. Wait—”
Elis and his siblings paused, giving me one last opportunity. I don’t know why, but I liked Elis. Unlike Dean and Logan, I felt no need to prove I was the fastest or strongest or toughest. It was nice just to be. “The water is good for only a day or two,” I said. “Seems a shame to waste it.”
• • •
After we had got all wrinkled in the water, we lounged on the bank, and Elis told me he and his brothers had been taken in by the Giffords when he was ten.
His brothers basked silently in the sun, seemingly not listening to our conversation.
When I asked about his real ma, Elis got quiet, and I could tell he didn’t want to talk about that, so I didn’t press him.
“The Giffords are good, god-fearing people,” Elis said. “They’re just looking to live in peace and worship as they wish.”
Elis explained that Mr. Gifford decided it would be best if they went west. They sold everything and took a train to Independence where Mr. Gifford bought a wagon and fifteen sheep before they headed off the next morning with the sun at their backs.
“Why Bitterwood?” I asked.
Elis couldn’t say for certain. “I think mostly because no one comes to Bitterwood, so Mr. Gifford thinks that maybe we’ll find some peace here.”
• • •
A week later, I found a steer out past Dust Creek tangled up in a wire fence. The day before, I had overheard Ben Scrivens telling Sir he had cut a bunch of fence out that way that the Giffords had strung to keep their sheep from wandering. The barbs had cut deep into the steer’s haunches, and the wire had wrapped so tightly around its neck it gurgled grotesquely when it breathed. As I came upon it, the panicked animal thrashed on the ground because its front legs had been cinched up to its belly.
I couldn’t approach it for fear of getting kicked in the head, so I stayed back while I tried to figure out what Sir would do. I could have gone for Sir, but to what purpose? Given its wounds, the steer was dead, even if it hadn’t accepted it yet. Sir would have said to me, disappointment clear in his tone, “Why didn’t you put it out of its misery?”
He’d be right, too, like he always was, and I knew what needed doing. More than once, I had seen Sir put away an injured or troublesome animal with a single, clean bullet through the middle of its head.
As I drew my pistol, the bile rose up in my throat. I had shot at rocks and sticks, but never at a living thing before. I never realized how hard it was to take a life, even one that had already been taken. Even though I was only easing its journey, I couldn’t steady my hand.
It took three shots to end the animal’s suffering.
Afterwards, all I could think about as I sat crying in the dust was what kind of evil was needed to steady a man’s hand so he could put a single bullet through another man’s skull.
• • •
When I told Sir about the steer, he grew quiet. Sir was a quiet-angry kind of man; he didn’t scream and turn all red in the face. I learned later men like Sir were more dangerous than the other type because unless you knew the man, you’d never be able to tell how close you were to something bad happening.
“Get my horse, boy,” he said. His tone was so tight I could have plucked a dark note from it, but I did as I was told and brought his horse around.
As he swung up into the saddle, I looked searchingly at him. I wanted him to invite me along. I wanted him to say, “Mount up; we ride,” but he never spoke those words. Instead, he spat disdainfully on the ground.
“Can I come with you?” I asked.
I don’t think he heard me because he didn’t respond. He pulled the reins and started to ride. A few paces along, however, he stopped and turned back toward me.
My spirit suddenly lifted.
“You did good,” he said.
His words swelled my pride. I had proven to him that I was ready to ride at his side. My time was here.
His next words, however, crushed my spirit.
“Finish your chores. I’ll be back soon.” He nickered at his horse and rode off, heading in the direction of Ben Scrivens’s place.
• • •
Three hours later, Sir handed me the reins to his horse.
“What happened?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, only unholstered his rifle and started toward the house.
“Sir, what happened?” I don’t know what youthful rebellion made me ask my question again.
Sir stopped, his shoulders hanging low. In the shadow cast from the late afternoon sun, his rifle looked like a comically long extension of his right arm. If I had been of a different mind, it might have looked like a spider’s leg, but that moment, it seemed an effortless extension of who Sir was.
“I dealt with it,” he said and continued on to the house.
I looked west, but with the sun in my face, my eyes started to water. I had a pit in my stomach that I dismissed because I could not accept Sir would do anything to break the peace. Yet, for the first time in my life, I was afraid.
I heard a faint rattle, sounding much like the last pitiful breaths of that steer I’d shot that afternoon. The nearness of the noise made me jump, and from the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a stalker lurking in the shadow cast from Sir’s horse. When I looked, however, I saw nothing there. It must have been my imagination because the stalkers had never come this close to the house.
• • •
After a restless night, I rode out early the next morning, ostensibly to check the herd, but I headed west instead. I didn’t know exactly where Elis lived, but as the morning brightened, I saw a line of black smoke in the distance, like a claw mark on the dusty sky.
As I approached, I found three dead sheep already bloated in the morning heat.
I urged my horse forward.
The smoke rose from the smoldering remains of a wagon. My heart climbed into my throat. I prayed a fool’s prayer this wasn’t Elis’s home, and my hopes vanished entirely when I found Elis’s siblings lying face down in the dirt, bullet holes in their backs. Nearer the smoldering wagon, Mrs. Gifford lay on her side. Other than the blood on her face, she looked peaceful, like she would awaken any second.
“Elis?” I’m not sure why I called his name; perhaps some desperate hope that he had survived.
I found Mr. Gifford’s body laid over a stack of adobe bricks. He stared straight up into the sky, his mouth opened in a circle of shock, and an equally large hole in the middle of his forehead where a rifle bullet had passed clean through.
My stomach threatened to revolt, but fortunately, I’d had no breakfast that morning.
As I approached the waist-high walls of their small brick house, still under construction, the buzz of flies filled my ears.
“Elis?”
Inside, pressed into a shadowy corner of what would have been the Gifford’s communal room, I found Elis. He had not been killed by a bullet, but had been split down the mid-line, and the flesh and muscles of his torso peeled back. His ribs had been neatly cracked and his stomach and intestines, his liver and heart all exposed and still glistening in the morning heat.
His lungs were gone.
• • •
I sit on the edge of my father’s grave and dangle my boots into it, tantalizingly close to the shadow that fills it.
To this day, I cannot say with absolute certainty if Sir or Ben Scrivens pulled the trigger that destroyed the Giffords. I guess it doesn’t matter which did the deed, because Sir was there, and he had the power to stop it, but did not.
I turn my head to the side and watch the darkness below from the corner of my eye. I strain to hear any sound coming from the grave.
I regret that Elis and his family never got justice because no one in Bitterwood had the courage to stand up to Sir and his man, most especially me. I realize now that age and cowardice are no excuse, and while I did not pull the trigger, I am complicit through my silence. That day all those years ago, I did not go home. I rode north out of Bitterwood because I did not want to look Sir in the eyes and see a killer. In the years since, however, I’ve have come to know the real truth: I did not want to see myself in Sir’s eyes.
A rasping hiss rises from the grave.
“Where are you, you son-of-a—”
Spindly arms unfold from the darkness near my father’s head, and a hollow, smoky torso rises up. It has no lungs.
I look at it, now, straight on, daring it to make a move. I should feel dread from its cold presence, but I am strangely calm.
I slip into the grave and settle into the cool, dark earth at my father’s feet. I don’t know what I expect, but I want redemption for what I failed to do for the Giffords.
I pounded my chest, hoping to goad it into action. “Don’t you want these?”
The stalker’s legs reach toward me, but withdraw. Its rasping grows more urgent. It needs my lungs, but is unwilling to take them.
I have always known an evil infests Bitterwood, and Sir had believed it a product of the land and the shadows. Yet, the world is neither good nor evil — it simply is — and any darkness unleashed upon it comes from the hands of men, or the inactions of others.
Perhaps this creature, borne from the malice of my father and men like him, thrives because men like me do nothing to stop them. Perhaps this stalker does me no harm because I am worth more to it and its brethren than the weight of my lungs.
A sickness wrenches my gut, worse than that morning I found Elis flayed in the shadows of his home. Preferring to forget that day, I have never thought deeply on it until now, but that stalker saw more value in his lungs than mine.
But what happens if I work to lessen the evil men do? I could never eliminate it all — an impossible task — but perhaps I can start small, here. Perhaps I can lift some of the darkness from Bitterwood, and give more weight to my lungs.
Climbing up from the shadows, I take the shovel and pile the dirt into the grave, burying together, once and for all, two creatures of darkness.
About the author and the piece (click to expand)
D. Thomas Minton tells us this story garnered 26 rejections before coming to us. He is the author of the Calypto Cycle, a series of espionage thrillers set in an alternative 1920s eastern Europe. The fifth book in the series, Tiger Unbound, was published in 2025. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and Apex magazines. He can be found online at dthomasminton.com.
©2026 by D. Thomas Minton. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.