Mammother

by Zachary Schomburg

  “Today, we celebrate resurrection! We celebrate life!” With his elbows tight at his side inside his cage, Father Felipe awkwardly strummed his guitar on “resurrection,” and then again on “life.”

  “Yes to not dying!” added the new Postman, who raised his XO Cola though the black iron bars of his cage, and into the air.

  “But to more than that! To fighting death! To the fight against dying, just like Pie Time is doing today!” exclaimed Father Felipe.

  “And Jesus, too!” shouted Mimi.

  “To that, too!”

  Everyone raised their XO Colas through their cages.

  Then Father Felipe yelled, “Now bring on the pretty babies!”

  Of the dozen babies entered in the pretty baby contest, only one wasn’t crying. Only one wasn’t inside of her own XO Baby Life Cage. The rest of the babies were propped upright by their own caged mother or father in a special chair designed to prop up babies who were in baby life cages, so they could sit up like little adults. The wind was cold on the babies’ faces, and shiny snot trickled down their philtrums onto their top lips. The mothers and fathers covered their babies’ faces with blankets right up until the moment Father Felipe passed by to judge them. As he judged the prettiness of each baby’s face, the mother or father dropped the blanket, and their babies cried in the wind, red-faced and wet with snot.

  The uncaged Baby Zuzu was the only baby who did not have her face kept warm with a blanket by her mother or father. She was the only baby not crying. She was the only baby not in a cage. She was laughing into the sharp teeth of the wind.

  Inez was in a folding chair in the front row with her head down, not watching Baby Zuzu’s prettiness be judged by Father Felipe. Inez was only there because she thought there could be the chance she would see Mano there, too. Every few moments, Inez lifted her head and looked around, hoping to catch sight of him. She kept her eye on the weight guessing tent in particular. Mano’s glasses were in her purse.

  Father Felipe had completed his judging, and he was prepared to announce the winner. “The prettiest baby in Pie Time is...” he looked down at his notepad to be sure he was pronouncing the name correctly. “...Zuzu Roar!”

  There were a few polite claps, but the crowd of caged mothers and fathers were audibly disappointed. “My baby is prettier indoors,” whined one of them.

  Father Felipe then announced Baby Zuzu’s prize. “And what does she win?! Nothing other than her very own XO Baby Life Cage!” There were more claps following this announcement. Even though many caged mothers and fathers wanted to see their own baby as the winner of the pretty baby contest, they had a difficult time not supporting such an appropriate prize for the one and only uncaged baby.

  Father Felipe placed Baby Zuzu in her new baby life cage, and held her high above his head for the crowd to see. The crowd ooohed.

  For the very first time in her life, Baby Zuzu cried.

  When the caged Baby Zuzu was handed back to Inez, she didn’t quite know how to calm her. Baby Zuzu was a new kind of baby, and it felt to Inez like she was holding a cage instead of her daughter. “Thank you, Father,” she said over the strange new piercing sound of her baby’s wail.

  With a caged Baby Zuzu in her arms, Inez walked around the perimeter of the festival in order to calm her down. She was also looking for Mano. Her eyes scanned for people not wearing cages, but she found no one other than herself. She was cold. She put her arms inside of Baby Zuzu’s new cage to warm her, and to warm her own arms.

  “It’s ok, it’s ok, Bebé.” Inez sang into Baby Zuzu’s cries. “It’s ok, it’s ok.”

  Baby Zuzu kept crying.

  “Do you not like it in there, Bebé? You’re safe in there. You’re safe now. You’re not going to die.”

  Inez sat on a big rock on the edge of the festival, bouncing Baby Zuzu, and talking to her from outside of her baby cage. After she calmed down, Inez told Baby Zuzu all about her father, The Barber, and all about Mano, too, who was now The Barber. Every time Inez said Mano’s name, she’d look up and around into the crowd of caged folk, and into the weight guessing tent.

  “He’s just a boy, Bebé. Just a stupid boy.”

  Baby Zuzu said her first word. “Boy.”

  “Yes! Boy! Good job. Boy. Boy.”

  “Boy.”

  “Yes, now say Mama. I’m your mama.”

  “Boy.”

  “Mama.”

  “Boy.”

  “Mama.”

  Baby Zuzu slowed down and tried to shape her mouth just right. “Mano.”

  The winners of the smile contest and the beauty contest were being announced on stage by Father Felipe. The best smile in the valley, according to the new priest, was that of Fran Rile, who was just growing into her new adult teeth—a detail that was no doubt a key in her victory. Fran’s mothers were ecstatic at this news. This family had figured out the most intimate way to make a triangle of bodies while still inside their cages, and in this triangle, they hugged for a long time.

  The beauty contest winner was none other than The Foreman, who was wearing one of June Good’s long and elegant sun dresses, despite the day’s lack of sun. He wore June’s high heels and her pantyhose. He had applied her lipstick just as she had done, and even managed to mimic her walk. He became her. It was so uncanny, this becoming of his late wife, that most people in the crowd shouted June Good’s name as The Foreman took the stage. There was so much applause, in fact, that Father Felipe had no choice but to announce The Foreman as the winner.

  “My sister isn’t the only one who can pretend to be June,” he said to The Businessman as they stood next to each other on the stage. The Foreman was posing, turning and blowing ridiculous kisses.

  “You make a better June than Vera,” said The Businessman out of the side of their mouth. They all laughed, though no one else knew what they were all laughing about.

  Like all the other grand prizes, the winner of the beauty contest was to be presented with an XO Life Cage but, of course, The Foreman was already wearing one custom designed for his lifestyle, and he even had a few spare cages as well. So, in the spirit of Easter generosity, The Foreman commandeered the microphone from Father Felipe and made an announcement.

  “I’d like to award this XO Life Cage I won to anyone here who doesn’t yet have one.” With one hand, he gestured to the cage which was propped on a little display stand, and he placed the other against his brow to imply a gesture of searching the crowd.

  Everyone’s heads twisted and turned to help him search. “Inez Roar needs a cage!” shouted The Tailor. He pointed to the back of the crowd where Inez was still sitting on the rock talking to Baby Zuzu.

  “Two cages in one day for the Roar pair! That is quite the haul. Inez Roar, come up here and claim your new life cage.” The crowd cheered.

  Inez sat on the rock and stared at a crowd that suddenly all turned around to look at her. She heard her name, but she wasn’t quite sure what she was supposed to do.

  “Go up there and claim your cage,” encouraged Lana Rile.

  Inez didn’t need Lana’s encouragement to move from her seat on the rock. She only needed a town’s worth of eyes on her. She had no choice, really, but to stand up and walk toward the stage. The stage was now a magnet, and she was pulled toward it. And in the center of that magnet was an even stronger magnet, with such an acute pull of gravity that she had no choice but to fall into it—an open life cage. Baby Zuzu started crying again, and her cries mixed with cheers and chants from the crowd. The crowd was chanting X-O-X-O-X-O. One leg at a time, Inez’s body fell into, then became, the cage. She and her baby were like a planet and its moon being sucked into a black hole.

  “May you two live very long and natural lives inside,” said Father Felipe. And then to the crowd, he announced, “Now let’s eat!”

  As the cage clasped around Inez and Baby Zuzu, and as the crowd turned toward the long table full of homemade dishes, there was an enormous rumbling. Everyone froze, terrified they
would be swallowed into the earth by an earthquake. But the sound wasn’t an earthquake.

  As most of Pie Time was celebrating the week of deathlessness at Father Felipe’s XO Pie Time Easter Sunday Contest Fest and Pot Luck, Mothers was across the street inside Lady Blood under the largest handmade cross anyone had ever seen. He was delivering his fieriest homily yet, on the subject of loyalty, alone to Lil’ Jorge, who was the one he needed the least to hear it.

  “Our loyalty has disappeared. And just where has our loyalty disappeared to?” Mothers began quietly and slowly into the empty room. Then he screamed his homily into the fire. “Into hell. Your loyalty is burning in hell, backsliders! It is pulling you down into hell with it. Do you feel its weight? Do you? Do you feel it hanging like a weight from your fangs? Your fanged faces are burning in the hot steam above the boiling. That’s your loyalty, there. That’s your loyalty. You’ve made enemies with your own loyalty. Look at it! Do you see it? Where has it gone? To hell. And that’s right where you’re going, too. To follow it. And may you follow it all the way down down down, the whole way knocking your own stupid heads inside your own goddamn cages!”

  And with that, came the explosion that everyone had heard. At first, Mothers, too, thought it was an earthquake, but an earthquake that was coming from above. Then, he thought perhaps it actually was the sound of the lord parting the clouds and reaching down from the heavens onto his new cross to push, with his righteous finger, all of the unloyal sinners deeper and harder down into hell. But, of course, none of that was true. The obscenely gigantic cross Mothers had built just a few days earlier on Ash Wednesday was far too heavy for the small concrete foundation that he had poured for it on the roof. It was far too tall and wide to withstand the slightest gusts of wind.

  The cross came crashing down through the old roof of Lady Blood, tearing apart every piece of the unsound structure in its path. Wood beams were snapping in half. The last nail Mothers had hammered, still poking out from the intersection of the two planks of the cross, was the first point on the cross to impale Lil’ Jorge in the center of his forehead, where four-day-old residue from his ashes still remained. The enormous weight of the rest of the cross flattened Lil’ Jorge’s body, along with everything else, completely.

  In the center of the dusty rubble, stood Mothers surrounded by what remained of Lady Blood, crying into the sky, suddenly open above him.

  “No, Lord! You’ve taken the wrong one. My son, my poor, poor son.” He sobbed while he wiped the dust from his face. “You’ve taken the only loyal one.”

  “Oh, dear Mothers, what has happened?!” Father Felipe was out of breath, and the first to arrive. He was good at running even with the added new weight of his life cage around his upper body. The others were just catching up behind him. “Are you ok?”

  Mothers pushed some of the rubble off of one of the pews. He sat there with his head down, silent.

  “Mothers, are you ok?” Father Felipe tried again. This time, he strummed his guitar in his cage on “ok.”

  Mothers lifted his head to look into the new priest’s eyes. “Rot in hell, Felipe.” He pushed those words through his clenched teeth.

  Fran Rile and some of the other children were poking around in the rubble beneath the gigantic fallen cross. Fran found the body of Lil’ Jorge at the bottom. Blood was still gushing from his forehead and down over his table-top haircut. It was making a purple mud when it mixed with the dust. Fran also found a death hole in Lil’ Jorge’s chest the same size and shape as all the others. “God’s Finger is back,” she said.

  Something small and colorful was inside of Lil’ Jorge’s hole. As Fran moved her hand above his hole, the small and colorful thing rose from the dead, resurrected right there into the palm of her hand. It felt warm.

  “I found an egg!” With her award-winning smile, Fran lifted it above her head to show everyone. “I found an egg! I found an egg!”

  “A painted egg!” shouted a few other children.

  And that’s how the tradition of hunting for Easter eggs began in Pie Time.

  32.

  The gigantic cross that crushed Lady Blood spared very little in its destruction. After the dust settled, and everyone went home for their Easter dinners, only Mothers and his confession booth were left standing where Lady Blood once stood.

  Mothers couldn’t stomach the thought of burying Lil’ Jorge at all, especially in XO Graves amongst the plots of backsliders, but he also couldn’t bear the thought of burning the corpse of his only son and sending it down The Cure to the sea, either. If anyone found out that he used such a passé way of disposing of his dead, then he’d lose all chance of regaining any of his deserters. So, Mothers buried Lil’ Jorge himself, beneath the floor of his confession booth—the one place on the entire planet that Mothers knew that Lil’ Jorge loved. Lil’ Jorge loved spending time in the booth behind the screen with him, helping him set up the camera to take photographs of the nude, and also helping him develop the film.

  Mothers also didn’t have the heart, the energy, or the skill to rebuild the church his grandfather had built. So, he made due with the only structure left standing on the lot: the confession booth. The booth operated the same as before, only now he decided it would be open 24 hours every day to compete with XO.

  Of course, Mothers did not allow life cages to be worn inside his booth, though his blindly vindictive reasoning was different than the blindly idealistic reasons why Mano didn’t allow life cages to be worn during The Death Lessons. Before entering Mothers’ confession booth, people were instructed to step out of their cages, and then to step out of their clothes. Then they were to tell Mothers of their sins. It became exactly the sort of thing some people in Pie Time really wanted—a place where they could feel free for a few moments, exposed and vulnerable, to move their arms and legs around in the dangerous air. His booth was a kind of station where they were lightened.

  Because Mothers felt betrayed by his god who took away the only person in this world who had been loyal to him, he stopped the tradition of having people confess their sins in the name of god. Instead, Mothers had them confess their sins upon the body of Lil’ Jorge, since they were, literally, confessing upon Lil’ Jorge’s dead body. “Upon the body of Lil’ Jorge, tell me your sins,” he would say. And they would do it. They would jump, spread their legs and flail their arms, and tell Mothers how they were bad, and then the flash bulb would go off and burn an image of their temporary moment of false freedom into the recorded history of Pie Time.

  One night while wrestling with sleep, face down on the floor in the main room of the confession booth directly above Lil’ Jorge’s body, a vision came to Mothers. In his vision, the booth looked like a submarine with four round holes on the two longest sides of the booth. Instead of submarine sailors looking out of the holes, the people of Pie Time were looking in. It was a major shift of perspective for Mothers. Once inside the booth, he thought, there is nothing to see when we look out. There is so much to see though once we look inward.

  The first thing the next morning, Mothers cut eight small round windows into the wooden walls of his confession booth, four on each side. And just like a submarine, he installed a wooden periscope with a convex lens at the very top, and a ladder at the back, so that the children could climb up on the roof and peer into the periscope to get a peek at what was happening inside, from above. Now anyone who wanted to watch the uncaged and naked confess would be able to. Above the front door, Mothers built Pie Time’s first neon sign. He installed it above the front door of the booth where a cross would have gone. In big electric neon letters the sign read, LADY BLOOD’S SUB.

  The sign did manage to attract a few new participants to the booth, however, it was certainly not inexpensive to maintain. There was the cost of electricity, of course, and also the maintenance for all that neon. Despite Mother’s falling out with the lord, he still felt it would have been very wrong to take money for confessions. People would not pay to confess, that was clear
.

  After the remodeling of the confession booth into the Lady Blood’s Sub, Mothers struggled for many days about how to pay for the expenses that he was incurring. He prayed into the floor above Lil’ Jorge’s body about his mixed feelings. After much deliberation, he decided it would be acceptable— responsible even—to make money from this venture. The electric bills must be paid and he must be paid for his time. It was only right. So, below each circular window, and right next to the base of the periscope on the roof, Mothers installed a mechanical coin slot. These were the first mechanical coin slots ever to be installed in Pie Time, just a few days before the mechanical coin-slotted XO Cola machines were set into operation outside XO Meats. At Lady Blood’s Sub, for a dime, a person could peep upon a live confession for one minute. For a quarter, a person could peep upon the entire live confession.

  With that, Mothers figured he had entered into a healthy competition with The Hole, and with all of XO. It could be argued that he was in business, but he was hardly in competition.

  33.

  No one wanted a haircut. Mano didn’t want to give anyone a haircut. He wanted only to feel his own clunky weight grow and settle into his own barber’s chair, and he wanted to swivel in it, back and forth, back and forth, like the slow metronome he held somewhere on his body, in and out of the little parallelogram of sun that sat in his lap and reflected off the more metallic objects there—the saw, the radio Pepe had given him, the clock of his mother’s that Mitzi had returned to him.

  Outside of his window, a crowd of people had gathered in the street, but they were just more shapes. He didn’t care why they were gathering, and he didn’t leave his barbershop to ask. Without his glasses, he had no idea which shape belonged to which person. He had no idea that the shape of the one crawling on the ground at everyone’s feet was Mitzi’s. And he didn’t care. Blurs in the stupid light.

  As Mano swiveled in his chair, he caught a glimpse of the black square on the wall in the back room. For the first time, he could see a body in it. He couldn’t see a face, but he could definitely see a body, and the body was getting bigger and bigger as he looked at it. The body was becoming bigger than the black square itself. The body was no longer even the shape of a person. It kept growing until it was bigger than the black square. It filled the entire back room and then it filled the barbershop. It grew and grew until it wasn’t even a shape at all, but a feeling. The feeling took up all the space in the barbershop around Mano’s body. And then the feeling became Mano’s body.