Sins for a Shell
He gave me his sins. I gave him my shell.
Genre: Horror • Body Horror • Southern Gothic
Deep in the Atchafalaya Basin, where the black water don’t reflect the sky no more and every cypress knee looks like a finger pointing up from hell, they got a sacrament older than baptism.
I went out there last spring after my brother disappeared. Everybody said he owed the wrong men money and probably slept with the gators now. But I knew better. He’d been talking about “making things right” for weeks — whispering to the mud like it could forgive him.
I found his pirogue first.
Empty.
Except for the molted crawfish shells piled in the bottom like red armor he’d outgrown. Thousands of them. Still wet. Still twitching.
Then I heard him.
Not his voice — something wearing it. Coming from under the duckweed, bubbling up slow.
“Cher… you come to confess too?”
He rose out the water wearing my brother’s face, but the skin was wrong. Too thin. Translucent. You could see the veins underneath pulsing with tiny black claws. His cheeks split open along the seams like boiled crawfish tails, revealing rows of delicate swimmerets fanning the air, tasting my fear.
The thing that used to be him smiled with mandibles.
“He gave me his sins… and I gave him my shell. Fair trade in the basin.”
I tried to paddle away but the water thickened. Every paddle stroke pulled up more shells — some still had fingers inside. The air smelled like cayenne, mud, and something sweet-rotten, like meat left too long in the boil.
That night I woke up in my own bed back in Morgan City with mud between my toes and red chitin growing under my fingernails. They click when I type this. Soft. Hungry.
Now when the spring floods come and the crawfish boil pots start steaming across the parish, I feel them calling. The Confessor. He’s building a parish down there — a whole congregation of hollowed-out men wearing living red armor, pinching away their old lives one sin at a time.
They say if you leave a plate of your sins by the water’s edge (a lie you told, a woman you ruined, a man you buried shallow), something will crawl up wearing your face and thank you proper.
If you live anywhere near the Basin… don’t set your traps tomorrow.
And whatever you do, don’t answer when the mud calls your name in that clicking, boiling voice.
He’s still hungry for confession.
And the shells are getting tighter.
