Cataclysm Baby

by Matt Bell

  And then me hugging her goodbye. And then her mother doing the same, refusing to let go.

  And then my pulling mother from daughter so that our child might climb the ladder to the platform where she will await her rising.

  How great our sorrow is during the first few months, when she is still close enough that we can climb the ladder ourselves to hold her floating hands, to bring her food and drink so that she might not consume the supplies meant for the trip ahead. Already she longs to be farther away, to be up in the air with the other sons and daughters drifting in the wind, her cousins ballooned with this adolescent gas that fills their bodies and never filled ours.

  Together, my wife and I wait until our daughter is ten or twelve feet above the platform, her belly bloating until she floats out of reach, then out of yelling distance, then too far away to see with the naked eye.

  Only then do we host this second party, the one where everyone brings binoculars and spyglasses instead of presents and a dish to pass.

  The Untethering, it is more a party for us than for our daughter, but it doesn’t feel like a celebration, not with everyone dressed all in black.

  Midway through the dancing, I remind my wife that she’s the one who must release our daughter.

  I say, If our daughter was a son, then I would do it, because it is what has to be done, what has always been done since the time of the first rising.

  I say, We don’t know where she will float to, but if you do not let her go, then she will starve to death upon her tether. Together, we will have to watch her deflate, then float back to the earth, our own lifeless feather.

  Our hushed guests wait while my wife looks through her spyglass at our daughter, that fat far-off speck caught in an updraft, spinning uncomfortable at the end of her line. They watch through their binoculars, struggling to read my daughter’s lips, the last message of our only child, only half-mouthed when my wife, already turning away, finally pulls the release lever.

  How quick the rest of the cord shoots up and out through the guide-loops, speeding into the air behind my daughter, and how fast our baby girl disappears, off for whatever world awaits her up there in the atmosphere, among all the other children this town has released.

  And who can imagine what far-off countries they might settle, what new families they might next inhabit?

  All we know is how sad our landlocked bodies are now, comforted only by each other’s flightless, balloonless limbs. Her mother and I, we weep, black-clad, while around us our neighbors sing the Untethering song and cut our Untethering cake: Chocolate, my wife’s favorite, the one she hasn’t had since the day our allergic daughter was born, when we traded its pleasure for some other flavor, some taste thought even sweeter.

  Rohan, Rohit, Roho

  Sod furrows behind the plow, behind our slow son tacked to its traces, his shoulders and thighs bulging as he scratches the blade across the earth, sundering scars to be scabbed over by his mother’s following hand. All day she walks behind the hulk of him, doing the work I used to do. With her slender fingers she pushes the seeds carefully into the dank dirt, into soil exposed only briefly to this uncertain sun, this angry air, this quavering question posed as perhaps unreasonable hope: Because even though what grows from the world’s womb might be no better than what grew from my wife’s, what other choice do we have but to try again?

  There are some who say it’s the earth that’s gone wrong, and some that say the seed, and it is this my wife and I debate after she pushes my wheelchair up to the dining table, after she sets the brakes my fumbling fingers are too weak to work. While we fight, our son takes more than his share of our food, offers less than his fair part to the conversation. Everything about him is retarded except his appetite, the cost of his too-big body, his still-nameless face, left so because what right name was there? What title for a child best loved as a beast of burden, best desired for the plow he can drag, for the twisted tree trunks he pulls from the ground to make more farm?

  What do you call an animal that eats more than it helps grow, until crop after crop yields less, until soon there won’t be enough feed for the three of you?

  What do you even say to a son like that? What you say is, Come here, boy. In the middle of the night, you say this. You say, Carry me, and then he carries you.

  With your crippled body in his arms, he chases your pointing finger out of the bedroom, out of the house, out into the field still flipped fresh by the plowing.

  Right here, you say. Do it right here.You say, Hug me the way you hugged me last.

  You say, This time, away from the house, there’ll be no mother to stop us.

  And then you give thanks for a boy too stupid to know his own strength, too broken to understand the patricide carried latent within his sausage-thick fingers, his ox-stunk palms that close over your skull, that crack those flat bones loose from their jagged moorings.

  And what then? What’s this?

  Already a world where nothing grows right, and now a world where nothing dies?

  More, you beg, more! Son, tear me from the earth like a trunk! Husk me like the corn! Scatter me into seed again, plant me in the earth, let grow what grows! Feed your mother my share, or else plant her too—

  And then your bored son dropping you unfinished to the dirt, then you watching as he bounds away, his big idiot-happy body receding, leaving you broken in the fields, screaming hoarsely for morning, for the sharp edge of the approaching plow.

  Svara, Sveta, Sylvana

  See now our subterranean daughters, our dark-eyed beauties so impossible to keep in their wicker cribs, to keep inside our rude-made gravedigger’s hut, perched at the rent edge of this barren plot.

  See them squirm free of their cribs, their new and segmented bodies falling to the packed-dirt floor, down and out of this home I built for them and their mother.

  See me with shovel and mattock, tearing up the flooring, uncovering tunnels, chambers, new and deeper rooms.

  See them tangled in each other’s sleeping bodies, keeping each other warm in the dampness of the earth, their spade-thumbs sucked and suckled in the absence of us, their parents.

  See what watch I keep, what eyes I fix on their cribs, but see also how it is never enough, how all day there are piles of the plagued to heap into graves, and then all night there is their sick mother, bedridden, her vulgar pains leaving her no chance of sleep.

  See me feed their mother through her stomach tube. See me soak her sore skin. See her tears at the rub of the sponge, the touch of the soap.

  See our daughters taking advantage of my absence to again escape the confines of their cribs.

  See me waking to their three tiny gowns beside three tiny holes, three petite piles of spent dirt, then to their wailing mother in the next room.

  See me digging up the floor to find their burrows empty.

  See me on my knees, reaching into the dirt, feeling their new passages, exit vectors from the confines of our home, our yard: Three tunnels for three baby girls, each in a direction of its own.

  See my wife, their mother, my fading light. See me cutting her screaming hair while she cries for her children to return.

  See also what I do not do: See me not covering the burrows, not filling in the caved pit of our kitchen floor, the room where I fed our daughters porridge after prying free the grubs and beetles they held stubborn in their hands and mouths.

  See the day my wife loses her last voice, the day she sends me from the room with weak flurries of spotted hands, because if she cannot have her daughters she does not want me instead.

  See how I crawl down into the dirt, into the sunken ruins of our home. See me whisper into the center of the earth, see me beg them to come back, to visit their mother once more before she is gone.

  See the day they emerge together, clothed only in grave-dirt.

  See how they’ve grown, how their toddling days have ended, how some new age is upon them.

  See next their fists clenched around ginger a
nd burdock, around echinacea, around liquorice and marshmallow.

  See me gather them up onto my chest. See me carry all three at once in my arms. See me take them into our bedchamber, their hands stuffed with the medicine they traveled so far to find.

  See until you cannot see anymore.

  Listen: Their first words in turn, three broken intonations of cure and mother and save her, save her. What stories they tell then, of places they have gone, of the things they have seen! What hard hurt of my heart follows, what ungrantable wish shaping this trembling flesh, this poor gravedigger again made quaking father!

  Listen: The sound of herbs hitting the floor is a whisper, then a word. Roots collapse, tubers tumble, and what sentence can follow? What good noise can I make for my daughters then, clinging reluctant to my body, this earth they no longer love?

  Travis, Travon, Tremaine

  When we are sure the hospital is empty, only then do we leave the youngest to hold the mother’s hand, to stroke the clammy baldness of her head while the rest of us search and scavenge, bulge backpacks to bursting with clean gauze, ample medicines, new needles for her drips and fresh inserts for her catheters, everything else we will need for her care.

  For ourselves, we take just what last food remains in the commissary, what few blankets we cannot go without.

  We take as little as possible, because their mother is already so much to carry.

  At the top of the spiral stairs we collapse her gurney, fold its wheels beneath its chassis, and then we lift, each as much as he can: Myself at the bottom, walking the heavy end backward into the decline, and then my small sons at the head of the bed, doing the best their little bodies can do.

  At each landing, I bark orders, beg my boys to lift, lift higher, over the railing and around the corner, and then again we descend, again we dive through the deep toward the new dark below.

  For twenty floors, we do this. We do this for two hundred vertical feet, and then we are in the lobby, then across the paper-strewn reception, then through the handprint-smeared glass doors and out onto the street.

  What destruction greets us, surrounds us, hangs above us: The high-rises swaying in their foundations. The towers towering. The diseased dead crashed everywhere, up and over and around all the abandoned cars and trucks, the overturned carts and stalls.

  And then the sky spitting black rain, and then my boys each opening their umbrellas, crowding in close to keep their sick mother dry.

  I drag their mother. I drag their mother’s gurney. I drag the gurney flat like a sledge, with their mother atop it, with the boys and their umbrellas huddled close because the rain never stops.

  At every rest, we do what the doctors once did, what they taught us to do before they fled: My boys know the names of their mother’s medicines, have learned every sequenced step involved in her care. Beneath their umbrellas they change her dressings, inject appropriate doses into her ports, pour cans of gray formula into her feeding tube until her belly bloats, until her waste-bag is ready for the emptying.

  One after the other, they pump her legs to keep the muscles straight, flex her arms to do the same, because still they believe she might one day need them, because on our long walk I tell the boys that when I am gone she might once again carry them, as we have carried her so far.

  We make weeks of slow progress across the city, until one morning I wake up fevered, the sound of my new cough enough to set my youngest to bawling, to clutching at my pant leg. By the next morning, my muscles have already begun to tighten, as the boy’s mother complained hers did, back when no doctor knew what these signs portended.

  I look around at my three boys, my exhausted sons arrayed, each smaller than the next, each spaced too far apart to fill another’s shoes, let alone mine, and then I do the only thing I can: I take my oldest son aside, and I tell him that I will go on alone, that alone I will enter the rumble and ramble to prepare the way for their passage.

  Through my hacking cough, I tell him that I love him, and that I love his brothers, and that he is the one who must watch over the others from now on.

  Don’t go, he says. We need you yet.

  No, I say. He has his mother, still alive, still sleeping. He has his brothers.

  He has enough, I tell him. What he has, it will have to be enough.

  And then he is the man of the family, and then I tell him so: Two separate events, happening so close together that I can barely separate them afterward, when I am crawling alone through streets of panic-crushed cars, disease-fat corpses, caught up in the tight spaces the mother-laden gurney would never have fit, no matter how hard I tugged.

  And then the sins of the spirit, punished upon the flesh; until I cannot move, until my muscles clutch into paralysis.

  How much later is it when I hear their voices following, coming behind me through the dark, shouting my name, my title, reminders of my renounced fatherhood?

  And then their little hands lifting me onto the empty gurney.

  And then their ignoring me when I ask or try to ask, Where is your mother?

  In silence the younger two move my joints, bend my elbows and shoulders and knees to busy me while the oldest wipes clean a used needle on his stained trousers, then seeks its entrance to my veins. As they prepare me for transit, all I see are their determined faces, foreheads bent with their decision to trade one near-dead parent for the other—and also the mistake they have made, leaving behind the only person they were ever tasked with caring for, all so that they might preserve what’s left of me, this shell of an undeserving father, who tried so hard to abandon them first.

  Ulmer, Ulric, Ursa

  I wait until the winter moon peeks from behind its shadow and then I call to the harrow-hunt this pack, these sons and cousins and half-brothers and grandsons, all these evolutions of my own beast-headed form, an overlapping of altered progenies, some mimicking my own shape and some their mothers’, so that we are become a family united by blood but not body, our forms as far-ranging as our hunting grounds, as the sprawl of forest we’ve claimed for ourselves, where despite our differing shapes we live together by the same rules:

  That each kill we make is shared among the pack.

  That each wound incurred in the hunt is licked clean by a brother.

  That after we hunt we eat. And after we eat we howl. And after we howl we run.

  The moon waxes wider each night, and soon there is little time to pause, no matter how empty our bellies or how tired our legs. In single-file, we cross forest floor and snow-clenched clearing, each pack mate putting his paws in the unshared footprints of a father or brother, until together we reach the high rock, the place of decision agreed upon a year ago, when last the forest tribes met.

  What spectacle there is to see upon our arrival, what new variety of form only a year past our last meeting: What bear-bodies, what cougar-hearts, what boar-teeth, and among them all the other wolf-head packs, flush with brothers despite the endless snow, the failing prey.

  When all are assembled and greeted—when we have each sniffed and nuzzled and marked each other as friends, as temporary extended family—then each father-alpha relates his tale in turn, some with words, some with beast-noise, some with both at once. We speak loudly and with great length, give speeches that consume many nights, that take the whole fullness of the moon to complete.

  We speak these many words as if we have to, as if the limitations of syllables could somehow mask the truer language of our shifted bodies.

  The failure of our great hunt, the one each tribe is engaged in for the good of all others, it has already been communicated by our lowered heads, our tucked tails, and so even before our speeches all our boys know what we fathers know too: It has been years since any of us have seen a human woman, and the beast-heads make no daughters.

  The wives we share our dens with welcome us gladly because they too are short of number, their own males scarce even before the dwindling of the world, but they cannot give us human children, cannot keep
our lines from drifting toward wildness.

  They cannot, and if we complain they cry bitterly, for they do not see why our children should look only like us, why they should not also take after their mothers.

  They say this, but it is not their race that is disappeared, and so our sorrow is not theirs to share. They do not mind their children who are only wolves, only cougars, only bears and boars, because what else should they desire but more of themselves, new packs made stronger by our mingled blood and seed?

  When the meeting is over—when the moon enters the waning that awaits it on the other side of our words—only then do we give up one language for another, to come together as one people, one troubled nation of tribes. As one mouth we combine our voices, a cacophony rising as if to crack the earth, as if to shake the heavens, as if to loose the turning moon from her mount and bring it crashing down upon us, the only mass heavy enough to bury our giant grief.

  There is this big noise, and then afterward there is my prone form, whole of body but spirit-quaked, hope-bloodied.

  All around me, my wolf-children gather, licking my face and chest, pulling loose what matters they find fouled upon my fur, while beside them my beast-headed boys stroke my coat with clawed fingers, make what few words their dumb tongues can make.

  All these children, these many pups, and yet gathered to me are no true sons, no sons I wanted, in their place rise only these altered generations, these boys who will not grow up to be their father, not without the mothers I wanted them to have.

  And if I refuse to stand? If, like the other alphas, I demand to be left here at the meeting place, the high rock of the woods? If I tell my sons and grandsons that I have failed, that I am no longer worthy to lead their pack, what then follows my quitting them, their family?