by Mary Rickert
I pull on the rope and it holds tight. I put the noose around my neck and I don’t like how it feels, but then I step off the ladder and kick it with my feet and I can feel the breath getting sucked right out of me, and there is this horrible noise like a bomb, and the next thing I know, I am free. Then I feel the weight of the world on me, and by the time I climb out of the wreckage, I know I have failed. The rope is around my neck, the barn collapsed, and all the mothers are staring at me, until the one with the gun says, “Well, all right; we can use this wood to board up the windows and doors.”
THE MOTHERS
We do not know how Tamara’s husband snuck away. For a while he was quite a regular on the local news. He insisted we were not a cult. (We are not a cult.) He also denied allegations that we were some sort of militia group, though he did say he had no idea how many weapons we had. (We only have one gun.) We thought he was our friend until he started calling us monsters. “Tamara, honey,” he said, looking right out of the TV screen at us, “I’m sorry I left you. I thought I’d get back in time. Please be careful. I’m here, waiting for you. You’re not in trouble. I told the sheriff and the FBI and Homeland Security about your situation. They understand that you are being held against your will…” And on and on. We did not know that Raj, who had been so silent around all of us, could talk so much.
The mothers do not completely trust Tamara, and suspect she offered to be chronicler only to get our secrets. After all, she has nothing to lose. Her baby is already dead. We feel bad that we are reduced to such cold calculation, but our life now depends on calculating. We also do not trust Elli Ratcher. We’ve been medicating her with various mood modifiers and enhancers that we pooled from our own supply. Though we started with a rather amazing amount of medication, the stash is dwindling at a suspicious rate. Several of us suspect Maddy Melvern of pilfering it for recreational purposes.
We cannot say we blame her. We pace about the house like restless animals in a cage. We are restless animals in a cage. We have played all the Ratcher games: checkers, Monopoly, Life, Candy Land.
We miss our babies terribly. We miss them with every breath; we miss them in our blood. For a long time we missed them with our leaking breasts. But we know we did the right thing. We think we did. We must have. We hope.
We were watching the morning news the first time we saw Raj, his dark eyes wide, his black hair like a rooster’s, ranting about flying babies and murdering mothers. We hoped nobody would take him seriously, though it was unlikely that he would be completely ignored. “We need to fortify, and protect ourselves,” Emily said.
That’s when the barn came crashing down. We found Elli Ratcher climbing out of the rubble in her nightgown, a rope tied around her neck. She tried to run into the cornfield, but we brought her back to the house. We think that was the right thing to do. What was she going to do out there? Where was she going to run? This is her home, after all. Of course she objected, but that’s how teenagers are. We try to take good care of Elli—and Maddy, of course—but they resist us. Perhaps we are overprotective, after what happened with our own children.
The hardest thing any of us ever had to do was release our babies.
We were not even finished nailing all the wood over the windows and doors when the first cars arrived. Pete Ratcher apparently had only one hammer; so there was that to contend with. We resorted to using books and shoes and other tools. We have to admit that not all of us pursued this task with equal vigor. Many of us weren’t completely certain that Emily Carr hadn’t also gone nuts. But we had bonded over the Ratcher deaths, as well as the revelation that all our babies had wings.
We had not yet figured out we were a family. It was only later, after Jan and Sylvia got in a fight over Scrabble and began throwing letter tiles at each other, when we had the discussion that eventually resulted in the remarkable revelation: Jeffrey had fucked us all.
The first car was full of high school kids. They drove by with their windows down, screaming nonsense. We continued to hammer wood over the windows and doors. The car stopped and the kids inside were silent. Then it made a squealing U-turn back towards town.
The next car was Mrs. Vecker’s Ford Explorer, with its skylight and fancy hubcaps. It pulled over by the side of the road. Roddy Tyler stepped out, shading his eyes with his hand and squinting at the house. He walked over to the barn wreckage (in his duct-taped shoes) and started poking through the rubble. We are not sure what he was looking for, but he jerked back as though bitten by a black widow. He looked at the house again and then ran to the Ford, jumped in, and made a squealing U-turn, driving too fast.
We continued nailing. Perhaps with a bit more resolve.
TAMARA
There is a certain scent in the Ratcher farmhouse now that its windows are boarded and the doors nailed shut. It is the scent of sweat and skin; and the sickly odor of bodies wasting away on a diet of jelly and pickles; and the pungent scent of pickles on breath made sour by slow starvation and the toothpaste long since eaten. Sometimes a vague perfume wafts in through the cracks and bullet holes. Elli Ratcher has been discovered many times standing with her little freckled nose right in one of those holes, hogging that sweet air.
On just such an evening, Sylvia sat barefoot at the table, weeping. This was not the life she had imagined for herself: trapped in a farmhouse listening to Rod Stewart’s scratchy voice over loudspeakers, eating grape and strawberry jelly while Homeland Security and FBI agents, reporters, and curious onlookers camped outside with bulletproof vests and guns and cameras. Once, before they shut the power off, she’d even seen on one of the news channels that someone was selling food from one of those trucks on the road in front of the house—hot dogs and nachos. She really didn’t want to think about it.
Lara Bravemeen watched Sylvia, as she had many times before, and finally did the thing she had always wanted to do. She walked over to the weeping beauty, placed a hand on her shoulder, and, when Sylvia looked at her, leaned down and kissed her on the mouth—which, yes, was sour and pickled, raw with hunger, but also flavored with the vague taste of roses. Sylvia stopped crying, and Lara, desperate to paint, took a jar of jelly and began smearing it across the wall, though she knew she risked her life to do so—that’s how serious the penalty was for wasting food.
Shreve Mahar told her to stop, but Lara just laughed. Shreve thought of her fiancé, who died before the world changed; and she thought of her little boy—released, as they all were, when the mothers realized what was coming; and she thought about Jeffrey. “Maybe we should just tell them that the babies are gone,” she said.
That’s when Jan Morris walked into the kitchen, with the petite body she had always wanted and the satisfaction that she had been right all along; it really did take starvation to achieve. “We’re not telling them anything,” she said. “What the fuck is she doing? Hey, is that our jelly?”
“It’s like a poem,” Sylvia said, “with color.”
“Poems have words.” Jan smirked.
“Not necessarily,” said Shreve.
“Well, you better tell her to stop it or you-know-who is going to shoot her.”
Sylvia and Shreve considered their options—tackling Lara to the ground or letting her continue her jelly painting, a death sentence for sure—and each of them, separately and without consultation, decided not to interrupt.
THE MOTHERS
What was it about him? The mothers still cannot agree. Was it his blue eyes? The shape of his hands? The way he moved? Or was it something closer to what Elli said, something holy? Was it something evil? We simply do not know.
TAMARA
Once, Tamara answered the house phone and spoke to a reporter.
“My name is Fort Todd. I wonder if you care to comment on some information I’ve uncovered about someone you might be interested in. He’s a wanted man, you know.”
“Who? My husband?”
“No, no, not him. Oxenhash. Jeffrey.”
“I don’t know who you
’re talking about,” Tamara said.
“I’ve uncovered a great deal of information about these winged creatures.”
“What winged creatures?”
“People mistake them for angels, but they aren’t. Apparently this is one of the ages.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“They’re coming into fruition. There have always been some, but we live in a time where there are going to be thousands.”
“What do they want?”
“I thought if we could talk—”
Tamara hung up, which she sometimes regrets. She often thinks of turning herself in. What does she have to lose? Her baby is dead, and her husband has abandoned her, saying things like, “Just walk out, honey; nobody will hurt you.” How can he, despite all that has happened, remain so naïve? So she stays with the other mothers who share the secret the authorities have not yet figured out: the babies are gone.
Tamara stays with the mothers out of choice. She’s given up her freedom, though not for them. It’s for the children.
THE MOTHERS
On this, all the mothers agree. As long as the authorities think the babies are in here with us, well, the babies are safe. We hope.
(If you see one, his small wings mashed against his back, perhaps sleeping in your vegetable garden, or flying past your window, please consider raising him. We worry what will happen if they go wild. You don’t need to be afraid. They are good babies, for the most part.)
TAMARA
Emily paces throughout the house with the gun slung between her breasts. Perhaps Shreve was right all along, Emily thinks, though their friendship has been strained lately. Maybe it is all an illusion. Certainly the men and women pointing guns at the house are under the impression that there are babies inside. Emily is convinced that that’s the only reason why any of them are alive. “There ain’t gonna be another Waco here, that’s for sure,” the sheriff said, when he was interviewed on Channel Six.
One night there was a special report about the standoff at Waco, Texas. The mothers sat and watched, for once not arguing about whose head was in the way, or who didn’t put the lid back on the peanut butter jar, or who left the toilet paper roll almost empty and didn’t bother to change it. (Thinking about this now, Tamara smiles at the quaint memory of toilet paper. Wouldn’t that be nice, she thinks.)
When it got to the part where they showed the charred bodies—the tiny little bones of children’s hands and feet, the blackened remains—the mothers wept and blew their noses. Some swore. Others prayed. It was up to Emily to point out what it meant. “They are not going to make that mistake again. As long as they think we still have the babies, we are safe. And so are our babies.”
Before that night, Maddy didn’t know a thing about Waco, Texas, and she’s still not sure how it’s connected to the mothers. But the mothers are convinced that they must stay locked behind boarded-up windows and doors; that this is the best thing they can do for the babies. Maddy isn’t even convinced that the babies all got away, but she hopes they did. She walks through the house, trying to stay behind Emily, since she has the gun, keeping out of the way of Elli Ratcher, who sort of haunts the place—though she’s not dead, of course.
Lately, Maddy has gotten so hungry she’s begun eating the house. She pulls off little slivers of wood and chews them until they turn into pulp. She has to be careful to peel the slivers off just right. She’s cut her tongue and lips several times. Maddy thinks she never would have guessed she’d start eating a house, but she never would have guessed she’d give birth to a baby with wings, either. When Maddy thinks about JoJo, she stops peeling a sliver of gray wood from the upstairs hallway and stares at the yellow flowers in the wallpaper, trying to remember his face. “Please,” she whispers.
“It won’t do any good to pray,” Elli says.
Maddy jumps. Of all the people to find her talking to herself, why’d it have to be Elli Ratcher?
“I ain’t praying,” she says.
“That’s good. ’Cause it won’t help.”
Elli stands there, staring at Maddy until she finally says, “What are you looking at?”
“Did you know I had two babies?”
Maddy shrugs.
Elli nods. “My dad killed one of them. And the other is in my closet.”
“Well, it’s been great to have you visiting us on Planet Earth for a while, but I got some stuff I gotta do.”
“You better be careful. If Emily finds out you’re eating the house, she’s going to kill you.”
“I ain’t eating the house,” Maddy says. “Besides, you’re the one who should be careful. The mothers know you keep stealing the notebook.”
“What notebook?”
Maddy rolls her eyes.
If Emily knew how afraid everyone was of her, she would be insulted. Even Shreve is nervous around Emily now. She didn’t know, she honestly didn’t know: if Emily found them in the kitchen, would she shoot all of them, or just Lara and Jan, who were the ones wasting the jelly? “Maybe you should put that away,” Shreve said, but they ignored her. It’s like I’m not even real, she thought. It’s like I’m the illusion. Shreve wondered if this was what was meant by being enlightened. She looked at her surroundings: the dark little kitchen with the boarded-up windows and door, the bullet holes, Sylvia sitting in the straight-backed chair, Lara painting with jelly, and Jan Morris licking the wall in her wake, pausing once to say, “This is true art.”
Maybe I have never been here, Shreve thought. Maybe my entire life was an illusion: the death of my fiancé, the birth of my winged child, the couple who died in the barn, the babies, everything. Maybe everything is nothing at all, including me. Maybe I never existed. She felt like she was being swallowed, but not by something dark and frightening, not by a beast, but more like something with wings, something innocent she’d always been a part of but only now recognized. She wanted to tell the others what she was feeling, but she worried that speaking would break the spell. Instead, she closed her eyes, until Cathy Vecker came into the room and said, “Have you all gone crazy? What do you think Emily’s going to do when she finds out?”
When Emily walked past the kitchen, she quickly looked the other way. She hoped the mothers would get their act together and clean up the mess. The last thing she wanted was to have to confront the issue. If she did, they might wonder why she didn’t shoot anyone, and that might cause them to become suspicious that there were no more bullets. She heard Cathy say, “We have to clean this up before Emily finds out. Do you want to die?” That got their attention. They all started talking at once about how, since the day Elli threw their babies out the window, they didn’t really care if they lived or not.
ELLI
We are such stuff as dreams are made on. That’s what I whispered to each one, as though I was a fairy godmother, as I pushed them out the window, the mothers standing behind me, crying.
“You do it,” they said. “Please. We can’t.”
“Why don’t you ask Tamara? She’s got a dead baby, too.”
“She’s writing about all this and interviewing everyone. She doesn’t have time to actually do anything; she’s too busy chronicling us.”
“But I hate all of you.”
“That’s why it has to be you,” they said, using their crazy mother-logic on me. “You won’t let your emotions get in the way.”
They were wrong. All those babies with Timmy’s dimples, and Timmy’s little round body, and Timmy’s eyes looking at me. I saw him in every one of them, and I felt the strangest emotion of all: a combination of love, hate, envy, joy, and sorrow. The more I dropped Timmies out the window, watching them sprout wings and dart across the starry sky, the more I felt my own wings—small, fluttering, just a tremor at first—sprouting from my back. I kept waiting for the mothers to notice, but they were too busy holding their babies tight, kissing them all over, crying on them. More than once, the baby was soaked and slippery by the time he was handed to me. Ev
en though I wore my mother’s old winter gloves, there were several babies I did not toss, but dropped. They did not get to hear my blessing, though I whispered it into the air.
The mothers handed me their babies, sighing, weeping, blowing kisses; or the mothers had their babies ripped from their arms as they screamed or threw themselves to the floor or—in one case—down the stairs.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on. I whispered it into tiny pink ears shaped like peony blossoms. I whispered it into wailing wide-open mouths (with sharp white teeth, already formed), and I whispered it into the night. It was amazing how they seemed to understand; even those who were crying, even those who plummeted towards the earth before unfolding their wings and darting over the cornfield, following their brothers.
I breathed the dark air scented with apple, grass, and dirt, and I felt the air on my arms and face, and I was happy and sad and angry and loving and hateful, and I thought, as I tossed Timmies out the window, We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
Emily, with the gun hanging from the scarf my dad bought mom last Christmas, handed her baby to me and said, “Maybe later we can bake cookies.”
Sylvia handed her baby to me and said, “I hope he goes somewhere wonderful, like Alaska, don’t you?”
Lara was one of the mothers who would not release her son. She stood there, crying and holding him, as the mothers reminded her how they had all agreed this was the best thing; the babies’ best chance of survival. So far, this seemed to be true. No shots were heard. Even though Rod Stewart continued his singing, somehow the officials out there slept, or at least were not watching the sky at the back of the house. This was our chance. It was everything that had already been said and agreed on. But they still had to rip the baby from Lara’s arms. She ran from the room, crying, and I thought, Well, now you know how I feel.
