The oldest boys, too, leaned in, funnels to their ears, for the same reasons. They had never been spanked by The Foreman, even when they were younger and smaller. They had no fear of The Foreman, so with the sound of each slap, even though they knew it wasn’t true, they were able to imagine it was Mano who was spanking The Foreman. “Split him in half, Mano,” one boy said to himself.
The boys with funnels weren’t the only ones imagining the spoon in other hands. This particular spanking felt different to Mano. He wasn’t scared of The Foreman anymore, and he didn’t anticipate each sting, or the shame, as he had on other bad days. Instead, he let a tiny rage grow. Inside his own pain, he imagined it being The Foreman’s pain. He imagined splitting The Foreman’s body in two with a thousand blows of the heavy spoon to his spine. Mano was half the size of The Foreman, but in his head at that moment, he was twice as big as him. And the thought made Mano laugh out loud.
The Foreman looked up after the second spank. “Enough laughing!” Then he looked to the line of girls. “Enough crying!” There was shuffling, and then only the echo of the third spank.
Usually there were only five spanks, but after the 12th, Mano’s bones were sore, and his face was hot with the sting from behind him growing up his back. Still, the smile from his laugh stayed frozen there.
“How many more?” asked Mano brazenly. It was bad form to interrupt the spanking, and Mano knew it.
“Silence!” The Foreman’s 13th spank was very hard.
Mano’s real rage was growing very deep somewhere in his chest, but not on the outside, where his smile remained.
“How many more? I’d like to count along.”
The 14th-20th spanks were the hardest that The Foreman could spank. The pain was so great, Mano’s body felt hot through all of its cells. He could feel that his body was made of pain. And it felt to him like the body of a man. But in his throat, he felt cells made of love. He first thought to tell Pepe about his new cells. And he thought to tell his mother, too. And just knowing that he had the two of them to tell about this made these cells made of love multiply.
The Foreman was out of breath, and he leaned momentarily on the enormous wooden spoon like it was his cane. In that moment of silence, Mano tilted his head all the way back and yelled into the factory’s ceiling. “I’m a man!” The line of girls laughed. Mano knew it was true now that he heard his own voice shout it.
The Foreman stood upright and lifted the spoon as a threat to everyone who continued laughing. Then it was his turn to laugh. “A man?” He leaned all the way over to laugh more. “You’re just a little girl. Look at you.”
Mano looked directly at The Foreman and repeated himself, just for The Foreman this time. “I’m a man now.” He stood up straight, despite the lightning in his legs. His shoulders were small. His legs were bright with pinkness and belonged more to a child than a man or a woman. The Foreman stood in front of him to examine his red and girlish face. He tugged slightly on Mano’s long black hair, while Mano stared at him. “You’re just a little girl, aren’t you?”
Mano thought to spit in his face. He felt a new strength in his bones and behind his eyes. He thought about the kind of strength that his father must have felt, hunting things that didn’t exist. “No,” Mano answered.
The Foreman kneeled down and looked at Mano’s entire body. He felt his waist through his work shirt, and then stared at his underwear. “Drop your panties. Show us.”
Without hesitation, Mano lifted his hands from where they were folded on the top of his head, and pulled his briefs all the way down to his ankles. He was a man now. He knew it. Now everyone else knew it, too. He stood back up and looked at all the girls in their eyes. With his new glasses, he could see all their perfectly round pupils shrink into tiny black dots.
Mano felt unfurled, free.
The Foreman felt furious. He felt fooled. He spanked Mano more wildly than ever before.
The girls were squeezing each other’s hands, poking each other in the ribs, as if to remind each other not to forget any of this, to record everything with their eyes so they could discuss it forever. They stared at Mano’s bare genitals as the spanks were being wildly delivered. For the girls, they were the only genitals that most of them had ever really known in person. Mano’s dick flapped there in the cold wet factory air like a shining flag of non-surrender.
The Foreman was beyond winded, and took a knee to catch his breath.
Enid Pine had seen enough. Even though Mano was a year older, she had always felt protective of him. She defended him when the other girls made fun of him, and until now she was the only girl who had ever suspected that Mano wasn’t one of them, wasn’t a girl. At grave risk of being punished herself, she walked over to Mano and picked up his glasses. She checked to see if they were broken, which they were not. She put the glasses back onto Mano’s face.
“Thanks,” he said with a smirk, as if what had just happened to him was routine. Because of the pain, Mano wasn’t capable of bending all the way over to pull up his own briefs, or trousers. “Would you...”
“Yeah.”
She bent down on her knee in front of him and pulled up his trousers around his calves, which were wet with blood and sweat, and around his thighs, which were even wetter. She tied his shoes, too.
The girls could not contain their excitement. Their line was becoming more of a circle. After Enid tied Mano’s shoes, she returned to the circle, and the circle quickly swallowed her back up again, and spit Mano out.
5.
Enid Pine’s cigarette hung from her pre-teen lips like a tiny dead mouse’s tail from a cat’s mouth.
“I knew he was a boy,” she whispered across the table.
“Shush. You did not,” Mary Minutes whispered back.
“I did.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?” Mimi Minutes asked. Mimi was on Mary’s right, very closely, as always. They were sisters who were conjoined until they were six years old. Now separated, Mimi was half of Mary’s size, and had a half arm with no hand on the end that she tucked into her sleeve. She was shaped like a tea kettle. And she rolled a cigarette with one hand better than all the other girls at the table could roll with two.
“Do you think he’s cute?” asked Enid.
“No!” Mimi yell-whispered a little too loudly.
The Foreman hushed Mimi’s whispered outburst. His body was stiff and stuck on one knee. He couldn’t move. His eyes were half open. He seemed small and desperate to all of the girls.
Mimi looked for Mano, but he was nowhere. She wanted to look at him again to determine whether or not he was, in fact, cute, especially now that he was a boy. “Do you?” She asked.
“Well, I don’t know. I mean, maybe. No?” Now that Enid knew that Mano was a boy, she was in love. She always thought that he was different than all the other girls, but still she liked him. And now she knew that this difference came from his being a boy. And she liked that. She scanned the entire factory, but couldn’t find him.
“Enid! Go get Mrs. Good.” The Foreman gestured with just his finger to Enid. He spoke quietly, and between breaths. “Tell her my back is out again.”
Enid was giddy at the chance to play an official role in the morning’s events, and she skipped up the stairs and knocked on the door to the mysterious back room. Usually, no factory worker was ever allowed entry. What happened in that room was the subject of hours of conversation each day while the girls rolled cigarettes. But no one knew the actual answer to that question except for The Foreman, Mrs. Good, and Ms. Good.
June Good (née Fair) was the opposite of her husband, The Foreman: extravagant and generous. Her loud laugh could be heard from the back room over the steaming sounds of the factory. It was June who was featured in the magazine advertisements wearing a fur coat and pearls saying It’s High Time for a Pie Time. The fur coat and pearls were not her style as much as her costume. She had become Pie Time’s mascot more or less, the image of a refined woman with a taste
for sophistication. In most of the magazine advertisements, she’s smoking and drinking while descending a marble staircase. No one else in Pie Time was truly refined, so the beer and cigarettes were actually for the unrefined. But the unrefined wanted the finer things. And one of those finer things, according to the magazine ads, was a bottle of Pie Time and a Pie Time cigarette, which she held in the same hand.
Most often when she was laughing, she was laughing at her husband. His rigid personality had become ridiculous to her. The only other person who could get away with poking fun at the way he dressed, and the childish ways that he managed his anger and jealousy, was his sister, Vera Good. And everyone knew that June was actually in love with Vera, and her marriage to The Foreman had nothing to do with love.
Together, June and Vera were known as The Goods. Like June, Vera had lost all affection for her brother, if she ever had any to begin with. Although she and her brother were twin siblings, they looked nothing alike. Where The Foreman had short black hair and a bushy mustache, Vera had long red hair that she most often wore in braids. Where The Foreman was squat, Vera had long legs. The one thing that they did share was that they both loved June Good with the entirety of their hearts, but only one of them got to feel what it was like to be loved by her in return.
Enid knocked on the back door, where the wood framed the frosted glass. She waited for a few seconds and knocked again, more loudly.
“Knock harder!” The Foreman yelled, easing his body into a prone position on the floor.
Enid knocked harder, but not as hard as she could. She could see two figures in the room, moving around in the light. They weren’t coming closer to the door, despite her knocking. “I...they’re...”
“Knock as hard as you can, Enid! On the glass part.”
Enid was afraid of breaking the frosted glass. She knocked hard on it, but with some attempt at delicacy.
“Break the glass, Enid.” The Foreman sounded as if he was about to cry. The girls all looked at each other. They all wanted to watch Enid break the glass, and they all wanted to see him cry.
Enid wrapped her fist with her handkerchief and punched the glass. It didn’t break. The dark figures kept moving. She could hear The Goods moaning.
“I don’t think...”
“Break it!” The Foreman was crying now. The girls were all snickering into their hands, except Mary, who dropped her hands to finally let her laugh go free. It flew from her body like a bird from a cage into the room above The Foreman.
Enid punched one more time and the glass exploded around her. Shards spilled over her shoulders, and down the front of her shirt. The laughter of the girls turned into a burst of cheers. The moans of The Goods grew louder and louder, both of them naked, their legs wrapped around each other, rolling on top of a long wooden table in the back room. Enid motioned for the rest of the girls to hurry up the stairs. They crowded around the broken window and looked in. They marveled just as much about the size of the room—its shape and colors and its furniture—as they did about what the Goods were doing in it. All those years working next to a room, imagining what’s inside, and then finally seeing it.
“What are you looking at? What do you see?” The Foreman’s voice had changed. It was lined with hysteria. But no one could hear him.
Outside, the bells of Lady Blood rang.
6.
“Now I’m the only one who hasn’t seen your dick yet?” Pepe cracked open a cold Pie Time on the back steps of the butcher shop.
Mano laughed for the first time since he had limped out of the factory. It felt good to tell Pepe the whole story. He wasn’t ready to worry just yet about how he would now make the sliver of money he needed to keep the water in his mother’s bathtub hot, and her beer cold. He cracked open his own Pie Time, and chugged half of it until his eyes watered. “Yup. You’re the only one now.”
“Maybe we’ll have to fix that.”
Both boys looked back into the open back door of the butcher shop.
The Butcher yelled from inside. “You got five more minutes, Pepe. These sheep won’t butcher themselves.”
“Yes, sir,” Pepe yelled back. “Five minutes is enough time, right?”
“You could see it twice,” Mano said.
Pepe laughed. “I wish.” Pepe was a year older than Mano, and nearly twice his size. He was bigger than most men, taller and stronger, though he still didn’t know exactly how to move in his own body. He often tripped and knocked things over. He was constantly slipping in the sheep blood on the floor, and slicing his fingertips with the sharpened knives. And unlike any other boy his age, he already shaved. He had the same stubble as his father, The Butcher, as if he had been shaving every day for a decade. He liked to touch his own face and feel it there. That morning, his father gave him his very own razor, and told him to keep it sharp. He nicked himself around his chin and lips. Mano couldn’t imagine what it must feel like to shave his own face, but what he really wanted to know is what it would feel like to shave Pepe’s.
Mano could see the little nicks. “I bet I can shave your face better than you,” he said.
“What are you talking about? You don’t even have pubes yet.”
“Will you let me?” Mano asked.
“I just shaved. I don’t need one yet.” Pepe felt his stubble and nicks with his cold beer hand. “Do you know how to do it?”
Mano just remembered that The Barber was dead, which meant that his barbershop would be empty. “I’m The Barber now,” he said without thinking about it.
“What about The Barber? You can’t be The Barber if The Barber is The Barber. ”
“The Barber’s dead. Died this morning.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Big hole in his chest. I saw Inez Roar and Baby Zuzu crying on their front lawn. It was a real mess.”
“A big hole?”
“Yeah, she said Mothers has been talking about God’s Finger. Maybe it was that.”
“I guess so. My mom’s been talking about God’s Finger a lot lately, too. She stopped drinking because of it anyway. Made my dad stop, too. I don’t know.” Pepe kept rubbing his stubble, like he was solving a mystery. “Same thing happened to The Postman last week. A big hole in his chest. It went all the way through. Beulah’s running his routes now.”
“The deaf woman?”
“Yeah. I guess a little black poodle came out of his hole.”
“Where did it come from?” Mano adjusted his new glasses on his face.
“No one knows.” Pepe attempted his best Father Mothers II impression. “God’s Finger giveth and taketh. It tooketh his life, but gaveth the world a poodle.”
“Where did it go?”
“The poodle?” Pepe just shrugged.
The Butcher called his son back to work. “Time’s up, boys.”
“Yes, sir,” Pepe responded. “Hey, think about it. Someday, you can be The Barber, and I’ll be The Butcher.”
The lightning pain in Mano’s back and legs drained away for a few seconds at the thought. “We’ll be right next to each other every day.”
“We can take smoke breaks together whenever we want.”
“For as long as we want.”
7.
Lady Blood was fuller than on any other Sunday in its twenty year history, so it was a particularly unfortunate morning for Father Mothers II to be late. Most new faces sat in pairs in the back pews, some sat alone. Some people stood on the side leaning against the wall next to a painting of Jesus Christ that the original Father Mothers painted a few years before his death. In it, Jesus looked like he was double-dribbling a basketball, but he was supposedly turning water into wine. Two of the new faces stood peeking through the doors in the narthex, half-committed to the idea of attending a mass. After more silence than a full room could bear, some chatter began.
The Baker asked his daughter, Mary Minutes, if she had fed the cat before they left. She hadn’t, because she thought it was Mimi’s turn. The Baker had forgotten that Mimi had
a turn altogether. But Mimi hadn’t fed it either. June Good leaned across The Foreman to whisper something to Vera Good, to which The Foreman cleared his throat in disapproval. The Foreman only sat between the two women each Sunday to keep up appearances. Lois Horn sat in the back talking to her two young sons, Ernesto Horn and Ernest Horn. She tied Ernesto’s shoes with one hand, and Ernesto helped Ernest tuck in his shirt. Mimi wrote a note about Mano with her one hand while Mary held it in place for her, and then Mary wadded it up and threw it at Enid Pine, but it missed and fell to the floor. Nana Pine, Enid’s mother, looked back at the twins disapprovingly. Inez Roar uncovered Baby Zuzu’s face from under a blanket just to look at her, to be sure that she was still there. It was the first Sunday that Inez attended church without her husband, The Barber.
“Do you have any spare clocks in your workshop?” The Butcher whispered to his wife, Mitzi Let, who liked to fix broken clocks. “I may need another one for the shop.”
“I do. I have one with a cow on it.”
“Perfect.” They held hands. Pepe usually sat between them, but that morning he claimed he was too sick to even stand up straight, so he stayed home.
Beulah Minx sat in the far back pew by herself for the first time without her husband, The Postman. It made little difference to her that Mothers II had yet to arrive. She lived in a world of silence, and it felt even more silent without The Postman’s hand on her leg.
It wasn’t at all like Mothers II to be late. He regularly preached about the virtues of punctuality. Sometimes he liked to walk in from the back of the church, where everyone else entered, as a way to amplify the pomp, and then he’d make a point about how we all enter and exit the same doors, or something to that effect. But they had waited long enough that everyone’s heads were turning and looking at all the possible entrances that Mothers II could make.
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