Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “Marisol,” I told her one day. “Did you see what they looked like? Did you see their deformities? They glow a bright yellow, Mari. They each have one too many limbs and their eyes are nothing more than a hundred more eyes looking out at us. Those bodies wanted to be born again through you, cherie. Only three were able to make it and within those three, there are more.” I paused, held her hands and looked into her eyes. “Like cancer cells, Mari. The scientists will place one of them on Ayizan-Freda’s soil and they will replicate. They only needed a host and that was you.”

  She was quiet for a bit. Then she smiled and said, “It was always my dream to reach the end of the rainbow—where the sun and sea meet—my name.”

  She became Ayida-Wedo, the serpent rainbow wife of Dambalah and Haiti’s primordial mother. Long ago, we’d stop making offerings to her thinking that she’d abandoned us. Indeed, she’d been born again.

  “She was a good host,” I heard the scientist say about my wife. “You think she can do it again? The others won’t be the same without her.”

  “The closer to human form they are, the better. We don’t want this to get out of control. But they can’t stay here forever. We’re not trying to make this the Garden of Eden. This is Haiti, for chrissake. Not here.”

  Weeks passed, and Marisol had gone into a rage after she’d been away from the triplets for days—the scientist urged her to go back to work on the farm because she was not capable of raising these seedlings. Of course not, I thought. They were not human. I dared not say this again to Marisol. She was Haiti’s first mother in twelve years, the envy of all the other women around. She needed something to show for this—the rearing, and coddling, and doting.

  I drummed softly at night while the others slept under the protective gaze of a full moon. With my own quiet prayers and song, I summoned Papa Legba and Ogu. If the foreigners with their science had removed what was embedded in our souls, then I am nothing more than a gaunt casing of skin and bones much like the fallen ones. I would try nonetheless—with Legba’s permission and Ogu’s will.

  Marco helped us escape during the night while cursing us for being foolish. Outside the gates of Ayizan Valley, Gédé was king—death, lust, intoxication, and the perpetual darkness of lost hope. After walking the few miles to the edge of the Valley where the land became increasingly barren, we discovered that the gates were barely guarded.

  “I don’t understand how you can be so stupid, Innocent,” Marco said. “Don’t you know you are Ayizan-Freda’s favored one? She wanted you to live and now you’re running toward death’s door.”

  I was Papa Legba’s favored one, too. He opened the gates for us. How else could we have been able to walk out of the Greenhouse with Mango in Marisol’s arms? It was the nurse who’d been sleepily guarding the seedlings who allowed Marisol to walk outside with her “baby.” We hid its naked yellow, slimy body beneath torn fabric from uniforms. Any sight of what was thought to be a baby outside the gates of Ayizan Valley would’ve ended our lives.

  “We’ll come back later for Golden and Hope, right, Inno?” Marisol asked, looking up at me with weary eyes. She hadn’t slept well, always worrying about her “babies.”

  I nodded. I lied.

  For a week, we traveled along abandoned roads trading stolen fruits and vegetables in exchange for gas, a ride, a hiding place. I caught Marisol trying to breastfeed the seedling. She’d been longing to complete the cycle of mothering. She cried when it wouldn’t latch, cursing herself for not being a good mother. But I showed her how Mango only wanted to feed on dirt. She cried even more, pounding her fists on my bony chest, cursing the loa and the scientists.

  “I am a mother, Inno. A mother!” she cried. “They came from my very womb. They are my flesh and blood, Inno!”

  Fragile, my wife was. I consoled her, daring not to say anything that would break her.

  A few times shielded by the night, I’d put Mango down on the ground and he would roll his little deformed and discolored body, sticking his warped hands and face in it, taking from it what he needed. And moments later, something would sprout from that very spot he fed from. A flower at first, then within an hour, berries would form. We’d never stay in one place long enough to see what would become of the blossoms.

  Until we reached the village of my birth. Few of my mother’s relatives remained, mostly the elders and women caring for young children, doing their very best to survive. An old great-aunt, Tant Gertrude, who survived the diseases, learned to find the healing properties in the leaves and bushes around and always prayed over old Rosary beads, greeted us. She sniffed new life. She’d been a lay midwife and instinctively stared at Marisol’s milk-swollen breasts.

  I made sure to tell Tant Gertrude the whole story, how the loas appeared to us at every point, before revealing Mango. She held her Rosary beads out at him and at us. We didn’t deny her claim to this Jesus, she called it.

  When we placed the seedling on the parched soil, he writhed his little body around in the dirt. At long last, we were able to set our eyes on the harvest that sprouted before us: yams, plantains, cassava, spinach, herbs. The spontaneous garden had attracted the neighbors living in the looted and abandoned homes.

  An old man wearing a tattered hat pointed his cane toward me. “Azaka,” he said in a dry raspy voice. “I knew you’d be back.”

  I remembered this Azaka, the farmer loa, guardian of the harvest. The old man came over to me and placed the tattered hat on my head. When I picked up Mango from the ground, cooing and satiated, I noticed his little belly bulging out as if he’d had more than his fill. I looked over at Marisol who watched us with loving eyes. Mango was squirming in my arms and something shifted within his full belly. I sighed long and deep. I never claimed fatherhood like Marisol insisted on motherhood. I was the farmer to this son of mine—not the father.

  More seedlings. There’d be enough, I thought. There will always be enough.

  The Hungry Earth

  Carmen Maria Machado

  The last carnival in human history was in Miami. It became the last carnival because Gilberto refused to switch to the devices. “To download popcorn,” he wheezed. “Foolish. Those ugly terminals. No ambient smells.”

  The bird-men who had come for the hard sell offered him Scenters for half-price. They would pump the air full of fat butter-smells and fried-dough-smells, they promised. He refused again.

  “How do you even shove food through those tubes, anyway?” Gilberto was unclear on the mechanics of computers, even on a good day. The bird-men shifted from foot to foot, and one of them muttered something about electricity.

  Gilberto ignored them. He’d been a small boy when Castro had taken power, and did not respond well to threats, no matter how much they were packaged as helpful suggestion. Behind him, the thin-gold filament of a funhouse bulb went bright as a dying star and then blew. The daylight dimmed incrementally around us, and the fabric of the emerging sky was matte and black. The moons of the bird-men’s faces waned into half-shadow. I did not like the way the darkness pooled in the creases between their stippled skin and the wicked curve of their beaks.

  “The day when a carnival uses those stupid things—bosh,” Gilberto said. “Strip the ghost from my bones. I embrace the future as heartily as the next man, but this? Strip the ghost from my bones.” He chuckled a little, probably imagining carnival patrons plugged into the machines like rows of toasters.

  Perhaps if he had seen the silver knives of the bird-men, he would not have said this twice, or even once. They moved quickly and obliged him, and though many of us saw the knobs of his body fall to the packed dirt, there was nothing else to do or say. A carnie’s life was defined by fear of extinction. We buried him and we ran.

  Many years after that last Ferris wheel came down, when the terminals were everywhere and the fields were permanently fallow, I sat in a restaurant in Little Havana. This was in the final wave, and the nauseating fog of hunger defined my days. With trembling fingers, I hooked th
e jack into my neck. Somewhere in a distant server, a fixed amount of credit left my account and entered another.

  Around me, other people were hooked in and silent. The only sound in the room was the thin, barely perceptible hum of many machines running at once. The terminals filled me with the nutrients that I technically needed. I was a cavernous and empty well, and they tipped a thimbleful of water into my depths.

  The splices did not intend for this to happen, not in this way. They say this as a matter of propaganda, though I think I believe them. After we created them, and after they freed themselves, they could have killed us outright, but they did not. They just wanted us passive.

  How could we blame them?

  In the beginning, the bird-men were the foot-soldiers, the enforcers. The cow-men were wiser than we had previously supposed—what we had attributed to stupidity was actually a kind of deliberate thoughtfulness that most humans did not possess—so they made up the majority of the splice governing body. The pig-men became radicals and in the early days blew up the terminals with dynamite before they realized we were being phased out anyway and did not need to be slaughtered directly.

  Of course they laid waste to our farms and our meat-packing plants. Of course they tore up and torched the acres of genetically modified crops. Whole states burned. My three sisters fled Miami for the rolling earth of Iowa, but Iowa was a field of fire, after.

  Slow starvation was a kind of transcendent experience. So I was certain, there at the terminal in Little Havana, that I saw Gilberto, moving through the sea of people like they were a field of wheat, though I had never seen a field of wheat, and I had not seen Gilberto since my teenage days as break-boy and ticket-taker and sweeper-of-trash. The Gilberto vision came to me.

  “How have you survived, Mario?” he asked me.

  “I do not know,” I said.

  He pressed his thumb into the center of my forehead. “Wake up, Mario. Wake.”

  I closed my eyes and opened them, and I was again in this room of humans, completely alone. A woman fell off her chair. The jack popped out of her neck and the room was awash in her moans.

  I slumped back in my seat, my arms resting in my lap, the base of my skull cradled in a soft brace. I could twitch my fingers a little, and I found myself tapping out the rhythms I overheard on the leg of my pants: the cycles of rain that struck the roof and floor-to-ceiling windowpanes, the syncopated sound of human breath, even the uneven sounds from the woman who had fallen and could not stand. No one lifted from the chairs.

  I remembered a howling storm that tore over the carnival in the weeks before the bird-men came. The rain drummed against the main tent, and we all sat and watched the structure around us inhale and exhale like it was alive, as if we were resting in the lungs of a giant beast. When I touched the leathery canvas and pulled my hand away, beads of water slid down my fingers. The whole place smelled like wet animals and hay, and human sweat. Celia, one of the acrobats, held me tightly against the bony arc of her ribcage, her heart banging around like a terrified bird, gently shushing me even though it was really her own fears she was trying to soothe away. Thunder slit open the seams of the air. Lightning threw our faces into relief unevenly, like we were watching a badly joined filmstrip. The horses panicked and gouged nautilus-shaped curls of wood out of their stalls with their flailing hooves.

  There, in the restaurant, Celia dead, Gilberto dead, the horses freed by the bird-men, a gust of wind blew an outdoor chair into the long glass window that faced the street. It went thickly veined with cracks, and then shattered. No one moved. Behind my fluttering lids, I saw the bird-men, again, the first time they came, how I wanted nothing more than to touch them, and how the tallest of them flinched away from my dry fingers. Then, darkness. Then, Gilberto’s hoarse laugh. Then silver knives. The carnival tents burning. A sheet-wrapped body thudding against the packed dirt of a shallow hole. Darkness again. I might have had a fever. I might have been there for two days, for fifty. The fallen woman’s moans of hunger went silent. Maybe it was only a few hours. I do not know. A deer—a full deer, not a splice—picked its way through the glass pieces, the room of people, curiously touching her black nose to us and to the terminals. Head dip, tap. A thin, gentle face so close I could see the high cheekbones, the liquid curve of her eyes. Stretched neck, tap. No fear. Tap. Tap.

  Of course we all died, eventually. People’s credit ran dry, and anyway, the human body is not meant to have nutrients downloaded into it. Or uploaded. The mechanics of the machines were never clear to me, or anyone. As the last crop of humans failed, the splices said to us via the terminal screens, “We are sorry. This is part of the natural cycle. It was always supposed to happen this way. A normal flux. Evolution.” The message would scroll and then blink out, and then scroll again, over and over. I stopped reading it, after a while.

  For those of us with enough credit—credit that was both useless and now saved us, though to what end?—we remained in the place we had last sat down, alive and aware, but motionless. In this way, we saw the cow-men and pig-men and bird-men, loosed of their need to pretend be like us, return to nature. They shed their clothes and took to the outside world. As grass pressed up between blocks of pavement and trees split apart the streets and buildings, the splices lived there. They rollicked and pulled plants up with their teeth. They made sounds that may have been laughter. They reminded me, in the dim hallways of my memory, of the carnival freaks, the bearded woman who had trimmed my hair and slipped me butterscotch that I would click against my teeth, the melted man who had shown me how to throw a knife and pin a butterfly. The splices’ backwards knees allowed them to lollop thunderously across the earth like horses, but sometimes I saw them reading.

  Those of us who were still alive did not fight what was coming. The footfall of our hearts did not quicken when green tendrils curled around us, grew into us, took what they needed. Where the soycorn and hydroponic lettucemelons had once grown, where we had built our cities, nature reclaimed her skin. She reached vines and microorganisms into the buildings and the houses and the land that had once sustained us. She reached into us.

  Centuries hungry, she choked us down.

  The Half-Wall

  Rabih Alameddine

  On a glorious, gilded Levantine morning, the day after the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, we heard the flapping of Auntie Lulu’s strapless sandals climbing up the two flights of stairs to our landing. Glee and smile wrinkles overwhelmed my mother’s face. She looked invigorated, as if she’d been dunked in an Italian fountain of joy.

  Sitting next to my mother, our upstairs neighbor, Auntie Fadia, seemed surprised at first, then yelled at the half-wall, which was added to protect us from flying bullets that hadn’t been around for quite a while, “Well done, my love. Well done. I’m proud of you.” The half-walls, part of the post-civil-war renovation, were supposed to serve their defensive purpose while maintaining the building’s older Beiruti character and keeping the common stairwell relatively open-aired. Like most things Lebanese, they arrived after the time when they were most needed had passed.

  Auntie Fadia remained seated, fully coiffed as she was every morning and wearing a striped bright green muumuu. All the way from Hawaii, she’d insisted, even though she’d bought it from a basement shop that specialized in cheap clothing imported from Sri Lanka. She peeled a mandarin, using her long nails to pick at the strings of pith clinging to the fruit. My mother laid the newspaper down on the brass tray and poured a thick cup of Turkish coffee for her friend making the trek up the stairs. To my mother, pouring the morning coffee was a sacred ritual—irrigating the garden, she called it. She placed the kettle atop the newspaper, fearing the ruffling breeze, and a porcelain saucer atop the kettle itself. She unhooked the clasp holding her toffee-colored hair (her latest annual color change) and raked unruly locks back into shape. In the domed conical cage behind her head, the trilling canary that had lost its voice hid behind a wilted lettuce leaf.

  A
untie Lulu’s cup waited on the brass tray. The stool she’d sat on since before I was born was right where it had always been. The three women had been having syrupy coffee together every morning for as long as I can remember, in thunder, lightning, or in rain. Auntie Lulu had sat on her stool a lot less frequently since her son Walid disappeared five years ago, and she hadn’t used it at all in the last year.

  Many of my earliest memories involve this landing, the women, and their coffee and cigarettes: twirling before them to model my first white dress; Walid and I sitting on the steps above, watching them gossip while we whispered our own tidbits about them; Auntie Fadia leaning her head back and unleashing her frightening trademark laugh, a crackling falsetto exhalation that made her elongated throat swell and undulate like a baker’s bellows. My father would put his head out the door, the knot of his tie showing, but not the tail. He’d good-morning the women, joke with them, and shout down to Mr. Itani, Auntie Lulu’s husband, to make sure he was ready for their walk to the American University, where they both taught. My mother taught there as well, but she drove her car and never rushed her coffee. She poked fun at her men because most days they walked in a dawdling mosey, and she picked them up along the way. “They want exercise,” she’d say, “but not perspiration.”

  Auntie Lulu arrived on the landing. “What a pleasant surprise,” she said when she saw me on the stairs. She smiled, which seemed like a herculean effort, as though her facial muscles had atrophied from lack of exercise. “Sit, sit, my daughter. No need for formalities.” I couldn’t imagine, and doubted she could, either, not standing up to greet her. I held on to her skeletal arms, and my nostrils inhaled a whiff of tobacco and deodorant. Her kiss felt like a Mediterranean fig impressing its texture upon my cheeks.

  Auntie Lulu wore a blue scarf that didn’t cover much of her hair and didn’t match the burgundy blouse. She had but three scarves, all bought in halfhearted solidarity after her son’s disappearance. She’d never worn them before. As obsessive as Walid became about our religion, he never once suggested modesty or propriety to any of the women in his life. It probably didn’t enter his mind. His beliefs were an internal struggle against his failings. Or maybe he was just worried that any suggestion to cover up might prompt Auntie Fadia to take him over her knee as she’d done a few times when he was a child.