And then my wife and I at the nursery window, watching her leave. Watching her join the town’s other golden children, together flying a sky clouded shut. Keeping us safe, at least until the locusts run out. Until the flies are gone. Until the trees and grass and shrubs are empty of leaf and branch.
Until all the rest the creeping thing stops.
Until my grief-stung wife disappears, first into herself, a body spun inside a heartache, and then again outside our home, into the cloud of children blacking our sky.
The rest of us shut our hungry selves away, whisper through glass pane, through locked door: You can’t ever come home, we say, but no words can stop the knocking against our lit windows, our delicate houses.
The next time I see her, how big she’s gotten: My only daughter, all grown up.
And now her string of milky eggs across the window.
Now her own caterpillars, hungry for what world remains.
Edgar, Edric, Eduardo
My wife and I are too bloated to climb by the time the vines reach the floor of this spoiled forest, our bodies too quaking with fat to grasp even the lowest of their fruits. We call for our son, that skinny boy sunburned from his scavenging, and then we teach him to climb, to imitate the monkeys that screech from the branches. From our backs, we holler how best to shimmy the twenty-story vines of this new jungle, this eruption of trunk and thorn and branch and thistle rising from where our concrete once strangled the earth: All that old life gone now, replaced by towering trees, by mud made anew, by daily wallows and failed waddles, by the deforestation diet of my hungry wife and my own hearty appetite.
To our son: Climb, we cry. Climb, and bring us back what there is to find.
For some while it works. He returns with bony arms full of guavas, peaches, papaya, descends the vines with breeches torn and stained, his pockets stuffed with bananas, other fruits dropped whole into my gulping gullet, into the strained esophagus of his mother.
Our baby boy, our darling son, born into this lonely forest, made for this world to which we cannot adapt: Without him we would be lost, would surely starve and waste away.
For a month he brings such quantities of fruit, until our cheeks bulge with the feasts of his foraging, and after each feeding we bid him stay close, bid him to sit beside us while we question him about the treetops. We ask, Have you seen anyone else above, in the sway and the swing? Are there others still left? Other boys and girls feeding other parents trapped below?
Our boy shakes his head in feigned loneliness, but each passing day reveals the length of his lie: First a bracelet of flowering vines, knitted by another, then a pox of hickies, a necklace of bruises. Suck-marks, my wife sneers, driving our son back into the high trees, where he leaps easy from vine to branch to trunk. Her disapproval follows him, pushes him higher and higher, until there is nothing to see, until the forest is silent around us.
Then our breakfast arriving slow, our lunch late.
Then our dinners not coming at all.
Then our guts aching, desperate for what grows above.
We gather our quivering bodies, release our screamed demands into the canopy, but still no son appears. Still no meal follows. To keep us company there is only the squawk of the monkeys descending lower by the day, growing braver on the vines in the absence of our once overprotective son. There is only their toothy muzzles, stained with the fruits of the hunt, and then, from far above, the airy laughter of our child, of all our children who have ascended into the bowers, into the verdant newness suspended above this fallen earth, this last of all the muck and mud we’ve known.
Fawn, Fiona, Fjola
They take our daughter and in return they grant us eight hours of light a day, plus nutrient-enriched air pumped thick and cool through the vents in the concrete ceilings, the non-slip floors. The mother and I alternate days washing ourselves in the extra fifteen minutes of water we’re rationed, but despite their promises this cleanliness does not lead us to renewed conversation, to revigored copulation. Before the makings of our daughter I did not know this woman, and now that the daughter is gone we rarely speak, barely look in each other’s direction even when the thrumming lights permit.
Instead, our eyes swivel toward the silver screens set into the walls, into every tight-cornered wall. Working silently, the mother and I move all our furniture: In the living room, we discard tables and ottomans, push the couch so near we have to climb over the arms to sit cross-legged before the flicker, and then we continue on, driving room to room the destruction of inessential surfaces, unnecessary seating, until in the bedroom we shift our mattress into the cleared space below the largest screen, beneath the silver stretch of video as long as our once-used bed.
On our knees, we press our faces to the screen, put our ears to speakers making only soothing static, the swooping sound of television dreams: This is where they promised we’d see our daughter again, where they said she’d return beautiful and whole, not womb-thrashed and gene-short, not malnourished and depressed.
Not like her parents, they promised.
The mother and I waste our brightest hours peering into the static, but no matter how many channels we check we find no daughter, and also no other programming, as there was the last cycle of abundant light, of quick electricity.
Each day that passes, we breathe deeper of the processed air, let its engineered taste force us into health, into some state like happiness.
Each day, we wash in our daily bucket of water, perfume ourselves before showing off our broadening faces, our fresh flesh plump with improved circumstance.
For one minute we tell each other our trade was worth it, because only then can we bring ourselves to gaze again the daughterless static, to stare until our eyes ache, until we cannot resist calling the talent scouts who took from us our only child.
Into the phone, we say, Where is her better life you promised? Where is her bright and shining future? What channel you guaranteed, what better reality captured beneath lights and microphones, and where is it to be found?
They do not answer our questions.
All they say is, Keep watching.
All they say is, Trust us—And what other choice do we have?
How healthy the mother appears, how fat my face reflected in her worried eyes, until the day the power whirrs off, the lights go dark, the fans stop blowing.
The television’s dwindling dim casts us into silence, leaving only our still-stinking breath to fill the air once stubborn with its sound. With hands held between us for the first time since the daughter-making, the mother and I kneel upon the bed, press our bodies to the screen. Wracked with rediscovered heat and hunger, we beg for a glimpse, any single sound from the throat of our mistake-given daughter, but the screen offers only glassy potential, only what might still be, if we watch, if we believe.
How far gone are we then, when the mother begins to beg, when she first pleads aloud?
I have forgotten our daughter’s face, she says, her own deflating cheeks pressed against the screen, streaming the stale dark, washing the dust from its silence.
She says, Please. Please describe her, remind me, tell me what I cannot see so that I might recognize her when she comes: Her new hair, her new face, her new body.
I tell the mother again what the scout promised, what he told us our daughter would have because of our sacrifice, because of our willingness to go without.
I tell her how our daughter resides now on the surface, under the sun we have not seen in years, except on this still-dark screen.