The Book of X

by Sarah Rose Etter

  IN THE CLOTHING STORE, BRIGHT BANners proclaim the sales, the promotions wild, excited. I want to look like the city women: lethal, pointed.

  Beneath the fluorescent lights, the same haze from the grocery store returns.

  “You need help?” the saleslady asks.

  “No, thank you, though.”

  “When are you due?”

  “Due what?”

  “Your baby, when are you having your baby?” “I’m not pregnant.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  I stand in the racks of clothing, deflated, the empty bodies of women without heads. I move the hangers to the left and the right, I search for a nice color to hide within.

  In the fitting room, I slide the new colors over my head. I try on a sharp, tight suit. My shape bulges under it, the knot bigger than ever, the fabric taut enough to choke. The next suit and the suit after do the same, arrows pointing to the worst parts of me.

  I put my old clothes back on. I leave everything in the dressing room. I walk home slow, hands empty.

  I TAKE THE TRAIN HOME FOR THE HOLIday. The whole ride is a blur of landscape and the creep of my old self back into my body.

  MY FATHER COLLECTS ME FROM THE station.

  I climb into the truck and sit next to him, my favorite feeling. His hair is shot through with silver now. His face has begun its collapse.

  “Is that my old dad?” I joke.

  “Well if it isn’t my favorite daughter!”

  “Your only daughter!”

  We laugh, the cold winter sun streaming through the windshield. Suddenly, my heart opens a small mouth and whispers: He’s going to die one day.

  The sentence is an arrow through the lungs.

  “What’s wrong with you over there?” my father asks, bringing his elbow to my ribs, jostling me. “Are you having an asthma attack?”

  I picture myself standing over his coffin, his face in repose, eyes closed, makeup covering his dead color, the scent of the funeral home in my lungs, the cheap white satin surrounding him, my beautiful dead father, my shattered heart lowered into the ground, covered in dirt.

  ◆In most cultures of the world, the beginning of family history is set in creation myths

  ◆In his book Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Ariès argues that childhood was not understood as a separate stage of life until the 15th century — and that childhood is a recent idea created by nuclear families

  ◆Many sociologists believe the nuclear family fostered the development of industrialization

  MY MOTHER LOOKS AT ME OVER THE kitchen table, exhaling smoke.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you,” she says.

  Her arm stretches across the table to clutch mine. Her hand is heavy with rings, so many dazzling rings, then the dark pearls that are her eyes. Her skin sags at the cheeks and jowls, paperthin beneath the eyes, blue veins showing through the skin.

  “I’ve missed you,” I say. I have rehearsed my lines.

  “We should see each other more often.”

  “We should,” I agree. “How are you feeling?”

  “Well, you know how it is with the knot. But I’m fine.”

  She stretches her lips over her teeth. The pain is something she hides from me, I can feel it: I imagine her at night, twisted up on her own bed, writhing as I writhe.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve seen my mother, too,” she says.

  By mother, she means the cross with the name etched into it over the grass which holds her mother’s body.

  She will die too, and then what? My own grief will rise up and riot, I will walk out into the street and scream with a terror that rips my ribs from my body and lifts them up to the sky.

  IN THE NIGHT, THERE IS A KNOCK ON MY door.

  “Come in,” I whisper.

  The door opens slowly. My father steps in and makes his way to my bed.

  “Want to go on an adventure? Like old times?” he asks.

  I can smell sharpness on his breath again, but I nod.

  “Nothing crazy,” I say.

  “Deal,” he says. “That’s what I was thinking too.”

  Out in the fields, we walk under the cold moon light. The colors of the world are inverse: Black grass, black sky, white stars, blue light on our bodies. I know the path we are taking. My muscles know the way.

  “So, how’s the big city treating you? You too good for life back here on The Acres now?”

  “You know it’s not that. Just hard to get all the way back here.”

  “What’s the job like?”

  “A job.”

  “I knew you’d get one like that.”

  “You didn’t know shit!”

  My father lets out a low howl of laughter under the moon.

  “I never knew shit, that’s true.”

  “How’s business?”

  “Not exactly booming,” he says.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Well, you know, freight costs are up, demand is down.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “I’d say pretty bad. Some of the harvests have been poor too. The meat coming out of the quarry is just weaker than it’s been.”

  We fall into a silence until we arrive at the gates.

  MY FATHER PULLS THE KEY FROM THE thin cord around his neck and unlocks the Meat Quarry. He pulls two flashlights from the pile and hands one to me. The meat scent is thinner than I remember it.

  “We’ve got some new veins here,” he says. “Had to find some new paths when the big one dried up.”

  We wander through the old caverns to the new. The old caverns have meat with less wetness to it, a slight matte to the flesh. Deeper in, the walls get wet again, that new-meat smell thicker, intoxicating.

  THE DEEP RED SMELL BRINGS IT BACK: MY body pressed into the walls, into the ground, the taste of his salty mouth on mine, the feeling of him inside of me, my head shaking against the wetness.

  My breath leaves my body, I cannot fill my lungs, I stretch a hand out to rest it against the quarry wall, that red moisture beneath my palms again, tears streaming down my face.

  “Let’s go see this new cavern your brother discovered. Might be some real prime meat there. Come on, get a move on there.”

  My father shines his light forward and keeps walking. He doesn’t notice the dampness of my face, the heave of my back wrenching against the sorrow.

  THE NEXT EVENING, THE HOUSE IS PRIStine, candles lit across table, my mother in the kitchen, cooking, her knot covered in a red apron. She is her best self. She hugs me close, our knots touching beneath the fabrics.

  “There you are,” my brother says as he walks in. “What’s been going on? Haven’t seen you in ages.”

  I press my head into his shoulder.

  “How’s quarry life treating you?”

  “Good, good, you know — meat and blood!”

  “I made your favorite!” my mother chirps. “The red potatoes you like!”

  At the table, everything looks cut from a magazine: Red tablecloth, food heaped on plates, full glasses of wine.

  “Here’s to this family!” my father calls, the sweet sour back on his breath, a glass of liquor in his hands.

  “To family!” my mother calls back. We clink our glasses, fill our plates, begin to eat. All of the food is beautiful but cold.

  “I never know when to take it out of the oven,” my mother says.

  They’re all going to die one day, my heart calls again.

  I PICTURE IT: THREE TOMBSTONES, THREE times my head over the casket, three perfectly still faces in repose, three times the hollow sound of soil hitting casket.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother asks.

  I can’t speak, my chest is paralyzed, my lungs won’t make air.

  “I know you hate coming home,” she says. “I know you can’t stand it.”

  My mouth is stuck open, pained, the terrifying future stuck in my head, chiseled into the gray matter of my brain.

  “It isn�
��t that,” I say finally.

  “Just admit that you hate us and you don’t want to be here,” she says, slamming down her fork.

  My throat is so full of love and sorrow that no more words come out. I can’t breathe and I know nothing, looking into the heart of the future, the relentless oncoming of death.

  “MY BACK IS FUCKED,” MY FATHER SAYS that night after dinner. “They’ve got me whacked out on these new pills.”

  “Stop digging in the quarry,” I say.

  “Whose gonna pay for my home when I need it?”

  He sits at the table, face contorted, eating vanilla-bean-flecked ice cream.

  For a moment, he is the emperor, milk and sugar dissolving against the heat of his mouth.

  My mother reigns quietly in the corner, eating nothing, her thin wrinkled hands on the table, two small dead birds.

  I VISIT SOPHIA BEFORE I GO BACK TO THE city. She is in a new house. There is her man and her children everywhere. I eat dinner quietly, let the scene absorb me.

  “Nice to finally meet you,” Sophia’s man says.

  “You too, I’ve heard so much about you.”

  We make painful small talk through dinner: Work, men, the city, the kids, Sophia’s new hair.

  “So how are you?” she asks after dinner. “How’s your exciting life in the city?”

  “Oh, it’s wild,” I say. “I’m out every night. Things are just so busy. Work is great, but the nightlife is something else entirely.”

  On the train ride home, I sob against the window through which the landscape flashes, back into the city.

  I MOVE MY BODY TO THE OFFICE UNDER the black fog of deaths that haven’t happened yet. The calendar says Monday.

  “What’s off with you?” the boss asks.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Your eyes are all glassy. You’re radiating a bad vibe.”

  “I’m fine. Just a bit tired.”

  “Well, don’t bring that in here,” he says. “Sleep is for the home!”

  Outside, the city glints in the morning sun. The knot is a gnarled black pit beneath my blouse, a ticking bomb.

  TODAY, IT IS RAINING. I WEAR A THIN dress, no coat, a fool.

  The city continues to burst with tragedies:

  Three pigeons peck at a pile of vomit.

  A woman urinates on the sidewalk.

  A man is lifted onto a stretcher, his bony feet protruding from the bottom of the thin sheet that covers his body.

  On one corner, a man holds a sign that says: I have been to war and back!

  The rain pelts my skin through the thin cloth. I put my wet head down.

  VISION

  I take Jarred out into the throat fields because I need something to strangle.

  “It’ll be five dollars per,” a man in overalls calls to us and I pay.

  “It’s been a long week at work,” I explain.

  “I don’t understand,” Jarred says.

  Discomfort blares off his skin in the sun. This is his first time, and I want it to be tender.

  In the field around us, bare necks reach toward the sun, short stalks of flesh, the raw edges of the throats blooming the color of old blood at the center.

  How did he see me before this? Poised with the right hair. Now, I am disheveled, wearing filthy sweats, bags under eyes.

  Lately, the fury has been keeping me up. My anger boils under my skin at work, beneath the fluorescent lights of the office. All I have ever wanted is a soft place. At night, I dream of rooms filled with feathers or cotton which will keep us both safe.

  “You don’t feel the same anymore, do you?” I ask out in the throat fields.

  I can feel his ebbs and flows instantly. I know when he is turning from me in the slightest way, as if the face of a flower toward a second sun, or a planet drifting from its stationary orbit.

  “Remember the good days?” I ask. “You loved me once.”

  He looks carved as stone: No words, just that straight face.

  “Say something,” I say. The necks keep their stance.

  The silence is bigger than suns, it is the silence of distant galaxies. The universe begins to crumble. The rage roars truck-like through my blood.

  I throw myself to my knees in the field. I grab a good neck, a thick neck. I look up at him with my mania. The rage multiplies and I wrap fingers around the flesh.

  “SAY SOMETHING,” I scream.

  I clench hard, good around the throat. I squeeze until my fingers want to break. The skin caves in beneath, which feels good, a nasty satisfaction. I strangle harder, until I go dizzy from lack of oxygen, until my rage deflates.

  I pant on the ground before him, my weakening fingers loosening around the skin. He stands in the field, still silent. I stare up at his throat which is long and thick, glinting in the light like a golden coin.

  This is how love begins to end.

  THE GROCERY STORE FLUORESCENTS around me. The packaging of each food is brighter than the last: light green bags wound around bread, bright blue plastic shrouding cookies, vibrant red plastic trapping the body of a cake.

  I fill my cart slowly: Meat, eggs, spinach. In the dairy section, the lights get more dazzling, disorienting me.

  I’m grasping the handle of a gallon of milk when it happens: The knot seizes, tightens, and pain tears through my body. It radiates out through my limbs, a hell fire in the veins, an eruption that levels me, my mind going blank from the ache.

  I COME TO ON THE GROUND. I PART MY eyes, and everything is cool and wet. My knot still hurts, a leftover shiver from the explosion.

  “You OK?” asks a man.

  I hear him before I see him, before he slides his head into my line of sight. The lights of the grocery store make a saint of his face.

  “OK?” I ask.

  “Well, you dropped like a shitload of meat all over,” he says. “And now you got milk everywhere.”

  I lift my throbbing head off of the ground and I can feel it — the milk is in my hair, on the back of my neck, on my hands and wrists, a drenching.

  “Here, let me help.”

  He grasps my hand and hauls me up. My body is trembling, wet as if I have just been birthed, milky calf.

  “That’s it, there you are, just fine,” he says. “Do you want me to call a doctor?”

  Here comes the sugar water, here comes the sugar water.

  “No,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  A grocery store employee walks by and his eyes widen.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he says, pulling a walkie-talkie from his green vest. “Clean up in the dairy aisle, I repeat, clean up in the dairy aisle.”

  I WALK HOME SLOWLY, WITH MY THREE groceries. I can’t carry more than that. My knot still aches. Home, I unlock the door, crawl into bed, dried milk on my skin, clothes, in my hair, flaking down onto my sheets like snow.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I PICK UP THE DAY’S newspaper from the stand on the way to work. The cover story:

  82 DEAD IN BOMB STRIKE

  At 7:32PM local time today, our Forces conducted a strike against a foreign country determined to do our country harm. As part of an ongoing effort to contain these attacks against our freedoms, our country dropped a GSU-78 bomb from an aircraft.

  We took every precaution to avoid civilian casualties with this strike. There are 82 confirmed dead at the time of press.

  I can see them: the 82 dead bodies, their limbs against the ground, their insides splitting open. Their bodies are diagramed in my head: Liver, spleen, intestines, skull fragment, brain, heart.

  There is a diagram of the bomb in the paper, and each part of the bomb’s body is labelled: Tale plate, base plate, end plate, explosive cavity, suspension lug.

  The words explosive cavity echo in my head.

  The whole walk to work, a chorus of the phrase explosive cavity repeats in my head.

  “YOU SEE THE NEWS?” ASKS THE BOSS.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “We bombed the shit out of those fuckers, we sure did!” h
e crows.

  “Yes... yes, I guess we did.”

  “You look sick.”

  “Ah, just not feeling well today. Still working hard though!”

  “Well, let’s get back to it!”

  At my desk, I stare down into my coffee mug. There is a hard crack in my chest, near my heart, near the breastbone.

  IN THE DIM LIGHT OF THE BAR, I SIP THE sharp liquid like my father.

  “Long day today?” asks the bartender.

  “Very long, how about you?”

  “Just getting started! Crazy about this bomb, huh?”

  “I hate the bomb. It’s terrible what we’ve done to those people.”

  “Well, get them before they get us, right?”

  A silence begins between us and it doesn’t end.

  ◆The word bomb comes from the Latin bombus, which comes from the Greek βόμβος, meaning “booming,” “buzzing”

  ◆Explosive bombs were used in China in 1221, and bamboobased bombs were used as early as the 11th century

  ◆The Ming Dynasty built fragmentation bombs using iron pellets and pieces of broken porcelain, which served as shrapnel upon explosion

  ◆The Grand Slam is an earthquake bomb that is the most powerful non-atomic bomb used in combat; when it hits, it penetrates deep underground before detonating in order to destroy the foundation of its target

  AFTER THE SILENCE, I MEET A MAN WITH blond hair, blue eyes, steel cheeks. He feels silver, cool, metal to the touch. I let his fingers wrap around my leg. I let my hand curl around the back of his neck as if he is mine.

  Everything in the world seems to speed up once you learn how it works. Once I caress his neck, there is a quick cut to the apartment.

  WE STAND IN THE DIM LIGHT OF MY kitchen.

  “Want to hear a joke?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Knock knock,” he says.

  Before I can respond, a laugh escapes my throat and then our mouths are together. He presses his body against mine, but I hold the knot away from him, an expert now, keep his hands to my shoulders and upper back.

  “Want to go to your room?” he asks.

  “Sure, but we’re taking it slow, OK?”

  “Your rules.”

  “I’m not ready yet,” I say.

  “That’s OK,” he says.