Cataclysm Baby

by Matt Bell

  Even after this handicapping, some people remained more charming than others, and if there was an attribute each of my sons possessed equally, it was charm.

  All these excuses and more were given by the women in town after every wife and daughter and matron and maiden from fourteen to forty-five swelled with my sons’ oft-spilled spunk, with the fruits of their inseparable loins. Later it grew difficult to prove whose child each mother carried, amid whole seasons of confused houses packed with breaking bellies, those quick-sequenced summer and fall and winter months filled with spread legs, with the emptying of wombs, with new mothers seeking out my sons for shotgunned weddings and promises of child support.

  Hidden away in my house, my sons now celebrate their success: This is how you start a dynasty, one says over family dinner, a meal eaten behind blackout curtains, barricaded doors.

  A kingdom, says the next, then corrects himself. A franchise.

  In a world that’s dying, says the third, isn’t this all sort of beautiful?

  I ask you: What possible solution to these childbirths overpopulating this town with more redheaded babies, with fiery scalps awaiting the state-razor, whole streets lined with my sons’ progeny, with their strong genes wiping out the faces of their children’s mothers in deference to their own perfect jawlines?

  How many babies are born before we realize that all their children are boys? That our town’s women are the past, thanks to my one-note issue, to their deadly sperm making deathly pregnancies, taking each of their partners the way of their own mother: blood-wet, breath-gasped, split-wombed, at best to linger, never to recover from the makings of their children?

  Now these babies left behind. Now only me and my three sons, only us four shut-ins against a town full of adulterated widowers, of shamed cuckolds and seething fathers, all parading our yard, my many grandsons in tow.

  Now the first babies being left on our doorstep. Now the rest, following soon after.

  Now my walking out onto the front porch to see the rows and rows of abandoned twins and triplets, the exponential crop of my line.

  What loud reverberations their hunger-cries make! What diaper-complaints, what pain, what suffering, and amid it always my boys, unfeeling for what they have done, and so what else to do but discipline again these three failed fathers, these three no-use sons of mine?

  What next but to make them take up the scythe and the shovel, if they will not take up their right roles instead?

  What point in anything else? What good fathering could boys as bad as they possibly do?

  So at last their lesson in how to reap. And how to sow. And how, when there is nothing better, to plow the world back under.

  Hali, Halle, Hamako

  The day came when we could no longer hide the glistening sight of our daughter’s flippers, nor the secret of her skin, its oils and fur.

  Like the other parents afflicted before us, we took her to the lonely end of the island, to the cliffs hung high above the breaking surf. There my wife kissed our daughter’s wet nose, after which I bound tight her swaddling, stilling her wide limbs to her sleek middle, and then together we let our baby tumble from our hands, through the tall air, into the swallowing sea.

  Afterward, what endeavors we undertook to forget, even as our guilty bodies tried again for some more right-birthed baby, even as our bodies proved unable to produce another—even as we entered this famished sea, this season of nets cast out and collected empty, until throughout our village every stomach was as hollowed as our crib.

  And now these legs, walking me back to the cliff, my guilt-path worn through the jungle.

  Now these eyes, watching the ocean crash its anger-fist upon the shore, a parade of knuckles on top of knuckles on top of knuckles.

  Now this hurt-drowned heart, when I see how other times the ocean is flat like so much glass, like the unwalked beach below, its sand stormed upon, lightning-fused and mirror-smooth; when sometimes I catch my own face staring back from the water beyond.

  Those waveless days, I see my face or a face like my face, but not the faces of the fish that once swam in those depths.

  Our fish are gone, and our daughter too, and together her mother and I pray for some rewinding of waves, some reversal of what awful ripples we have made, so that our daughter might one day find her way to the flatter side of the island, to the yellow beaches, to the path leading to our small hut, our home meant once to be her home.

  And if it happens? If our pup returns? Then what?

  Then how: With anger? With forgiveness? With love?

  Or with what thing we deserve instead, a new mood from our new daughter, dredged deep from the dark, rising slow and sure, purposed only to take us back down.

  Isaac, Isaiah, Ishmael

  Even at birth they were already damaged, their brittle bones opened and crushed, powdered by their mother’s powerful organs, her pressing canal: All those thin ribs snapped and splintered upon the stainless steel of the operating room. All those skulls crooked and cracked, all those twisted greenstick limbs. We lifted each child out from the mother’s body and into surgeries of its own, did our best to splint and screw our prides together.

  So few survived, and for what next chance? On what legs would they stand, with no milk to grow them strong except from the body that had already failed to make them so?

  If only there was some other mother, some second receptacle for the babies we want so badly to make. But no, there is only me and my brothers, only this last-caught woman between us.

  To quell my brothers’ anger, to beg their patience, I say, This woman may not be capable of producing what heir we need, but perhaps she may yet birth the one who might, if only one of her daughters lives to have a set of hipbones strong enough to better bear our advances.

  I say, The end isn’t short, but long. And so always we must not rush, must be in no hurry.

  And so we fill the mother with powdered milk, with canned peaches, with vitamin-paste squeezed from nearly empty tubes.

  And so we fill her with meat.

  Every new wish is followed by another waiting, followed by another failure: Push, we say, our voices speaking in unison, our wants aligned after a lifetime of bitterest division, of brotherly strife. Together, we make what we can make, and we save what we can save. Push, we say, and then comes this next baby born just as broken, its first cries already choked with the chalk of its bones. Its newborn everything else shattering into dust. This daughter-like reminder that not all birthed into this world shall see it reborn—and then again our determination, our willingness to try once more.

  And then, Lie still, I say, and then, Hold her, brothers, hold her, and then, I will plant again in her this seed, until at last we grow the world we desire.

  Justina, Justine, Justise

  For the first crime my daughters took only my thumb. They refused to apologize for their aggression, even after I confronted them, after I tossed their bedroom and confiscated the hatchet hidden in their toy box, beneath their miniature gavel. When lined up and accused beside her sisters, all the oldest would say was that my trial had been fair, their court complete even without my presence: One daughter for a judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense.

  My middle daughter, she spit onto what was left of our thread-worn carpet, said my defense had been particularly difficult, considering my obvious guilt.

  She said, Perhaps you should tell our mother you cut your thumb at work, so that she will not have to know why we took it.

  She said, Your records are sealed until you unseal them, and then she made the locking motion over her lips that I taught her when she was just my baby, when she first needed to know what secrets were.

  What milky-stern eyes the youngest had too, set in her pale face, floating above the high collar of her blackest dress: Blinded as both her sisters, still her blank eyes accused, threatened, made me sorry for what I was.

  This youngest daughter, she walked me back to my room, her hand folded small in m
y uninjured one as she explained that she and the others hoped I had learned my lesson, because they did not want to hear my sorry case again.

  Then the key turning in the lock, jailing me for my wife to rescue, to admonish for leaving the girls alone, because who knew what trouble they might make when no one was watching.

  How I tried to be sneakier: To send messages only at work. To go out after they were already in bed. To change my clothes away from home, so that they might not smell the other upon me.

  And then waking with my hand gone, divorced from my wrist, a tourniquet tightened around my stump and my mouth cottoned with morphine. And then wondering where my beautiful daughters could have gotten their tools, their skillful medicines.

  And then not knowing what to tell my wife or my mistress, each curious about my wounds, and also still being unable to choose, to pick one woman over the other.

  How now the gavel sounds in my sleep, how I hear my oldest pounding its loud weight against the surface of her child-sized desk, bringing into line the pointless arguing of the middle daughter, of the youngest—Because in my defense, what could the middle daughter say? What judicious lies could she tell that the others might believe? When all she wanted was for me to see the wrong of my ways, to repent and rehabilitate so that her mother and I might remain married forever?

  In the last days of my affair, I lift my middle daughter into my arms, feel how much weight she’s lost, how her hair has wisped beneath its ribbons.

  She meets my apologies with a slap, squirms free. She says, Don’t think I’m still daddy’s little girl.

  She says, I only defended you because no one else would.

  She says, In justice, we are divided, but in punishment, we are one.

  The lullaby she sings as she walks away, I am the one who taught it to her. I am the one who sat beside her crib and held her hand when she could not sleep. I am the one who rocked her and fed her when her mother could not, exhausted as she was by her difficult pregnancies and the changing of the air.

  I want this good behavior to matter, but I know it does not.

  Some weeks later, I awake restrained to my now half-empty bed, nothing visible in the darkness except the silhouettes of my blind daughters in their black dresses, their white blindfolds wrapped tight round empty eyes.

  And then it comes, and then they come with it: the children I deserve, if never the children I wanted; my three little furies, my three furious daughters.

  Kidd, Kier, Kimball

  Another new rain falls, dumped from the complicated sky, its acid-heavy droplets pelting our shoulders as we run from awning to awning, from collapsing home porch to crumbling chapel steps. Along our way, we see every kind of bird upon the ground, all heavy with forgotten flying, and around them their mud-left eggs, as thin-walled as my wife’s uterus, that tender space slung inside her unsteady body.

  Within it, within us both, sound always these trapped prayers, necessary to be loosed.

  Inside the church, that last dry place, we give them voice from our lungs, beg them from our knees, clasp them between hands wrapped in rosaries gathered from this dead town, this plague-slapped village. Above our heads, stained glass strains against the wind, refracts the last minutes of dusk-light wrong and weird upon our faces, reduces our speech to mumbles. Exhausted of words, we move together to light a candle for each baby lost, each fetus formed but not right-birthed.

  By now, this takes us all night long. This takes every minute of every night.

  At dawn, we extinguish the flames so the candles will be there to relight tomorrow, and then again we pray: Oh lord, just once. Just once, deliver us a child not wrecked from the beginning. Grant us a son not lousy with fur, not ruined with scales or feathers. Give us a daughter made for the old world instead of this new one, this waste of weather and wild.

  And what we would do.And how we would do anything.

  Our only answers are the church’s silent histories, those sequenced promises written in terrible stone, decorating each circling step from the vestibule to the altar, from the sacristy to the last unburned pews. Each station a horrid hope too unbearable to believe, this world made only the end of mystery, only the opposite of miracles.

  Inside my wife, perhaps there is only the same, only these doubling doubts, these many questions that fill my own still-beating heart: Oh lord, for who else might be promised the inheritance of the earth? For who else is meant the receiving of the kingdom? If not our impossible, short-lived children, then what new race still to come, undreamt in our present darkness? Who are these next babes, about to be poured down upon the earth, come at last to wash us from off its tear-soaked face?

  Lakin, Lamia, Lakshmi

  Remember the difficulty of your labor, and how at first the doctors mistook our daughter for a breech birth, but then came no foot, no other hard limb or promontory leading the way?

  What was stuck instead: Only this plump fluff of flesh, these greased rolls of fat. Only flush skin in handfuls, leaving nothing for the doctors to do but tug the mess free—And what a baby they found within, what gigantic girth of daughter, her face hung with meat, her fingers barely able to poke free from the folds of her wrists.

  Remember how afterward you were too weak to hold her weight, how for the first months of her life the only way to feed her was to bring your breast to her buried mouth, those lips moving within the pancake of her face? How at bath time you would stretch her skin tight so I might wash within her creases, so that together we could clear the lint-slop between, scrub free the mold grown in every hanging crevice?

  Remember the surgeons advising operations to remove that excess, to suck the fat from around her eyes so she might be able to see? From around her ears, so she might be able to hear?

  How you hated the doctors then: for trying to decide in what ways our daughter could be beautiful, how she should see the world, and how the world should see her.

  No, you said. She will eat what she wants to eat, until she fills out that great skin, until she stretches it taut, until jagged lines of purpled flesh mark new territories upon the body of her person.

  My daughter could fill a room, you said, and still I would think her perfect.

  Remember saying these words?

  Tell me you remember. Turn around from the stove, from the meat-stink you’re making, and tell me.

  Remember how she grew, how she continued to grow? How her head sagged so she needed a brace to support it, and yet there was no device that could fit the trunk of her neck? How she toddled, now a worm the size of a bulldog, buried in rolls of flesh that restricted her movement, that reduced her to a slither, to lunging and dragging across the carpet?

  Blind and deaf, mumbling behind the smother of her face, she cried for help, but all we heard was a muffle, a moan, and still you refused, named her your pretty darling, your shining star.

  Remember how you buried your face in her belly, laughing and tickling her with your lips? How you said she was so delicious you wanted to eat her? Or how the salt-shame of her tears collected in the shelves of her face, left their etchings for us to find with the washcloth?

  When the doctors finally cut our skin-gorged daughter free, when they returned her wrapped in bandages, mutilated of face, but escaped from the flapping weight of her birth, how bad was it for her then, because we’d pretended for so long?

  How much worse when the bandages came off, and we saw what skinny creature your honest love had hid?

  How hungry she was then, how little food there was left in the stores, the depleted and shuttered supermarkets, and how dry your breasts were, empty as our larder—

  And then what? How to feed our daughter, who you loved, whose forgiveness you wished to earn?

  Remember how once, long before this gristle-spat daughter now munching and chewing in her highchair, remember how then you said my legs were my best attribute, that you fell in love starting from my feet and working your way up?

  Remember how thick the muscle of my thig
hs, how fine the curve of my calves?

  Say you remember, then look again upon our daughter’s re-fleshed face: As awful as it was to make a monster of her before, how much worse to have made her so once again?

  Remember how once I claimed I would stop this—But how you believed me wrong, because who am I, without those legs?

  Who am I, without those hands, offered in the absence of better gifts?

  Who I am: I am still her father. I am still your husband, your partner, a half wedded to match your half, and even if you have made me less of a man to make her more of a daughter, still I mean to retake the whole of what is mine.

  Come close, my one-time love. Come closer and find out our ravening daughter is not the only one with teeth, nor the only one who hungers.

  Closer now. Closer.

  Closer: Taste what’s happened to me, to you, to our daughter, this fat wedge shoved between us until we splintered. Open your mouth as we have opened ours, and taste how soon I will tear you both free, how I will wrench our daughter from you, from where you are together wrapped tight, trapped, floating mad within the weight of all she once was.

  Meshach, Meshach, Meshach

  We knew our firstborn might not last, his weak constitution revealed even before he could walk, signaled by his crinkled little fingers, his wet coughs full of sputum and phlegm. Still my wife nursed him, still I wiped the sweat off his sallow face and his caved chest. At night, we let him sleep between our bodies, even though his raucous breathing often woke us, even though there was no need to keep warm his small shape, not in the furnace of our bedchamber, our tiny hole of a home.

  Each morning, we awoke from our dreams covered in the night’s soot, the expectorate that blew upward from the vents in the floor, the ash and worse that could not escape through the clogged height of the chimney above.