And so we fill the mother with powdered milk, with canned peaches, with vitamin-paste squeezed from nearly empty tubes.
And so we fill her with meat.
Every new wish is followed by another waiting, followed by another failure: Push, we say, our voices speaking in unison, our wants aligned after a lifetime of bitterest division, of brotherly strife. Together, we make what we can make, and we save what we can save. Push, we say, and then comes this next baby born just as broken, its first cries already choked with the chalk of its bones. Its newborn everything else shattering into dust. This daughter-like reminder that not all birthed into this world shall see it reborn—and then again our determination, our willingness to try once more.
And then, Lie still, I say, and then, Hold her, brothers, hold her, and then, I will plant again in her this seed, until at last we grow the world we desire.
Justina, Justine, Justise
For the first crime my daughters took only my thumb. They refused to apologize for their aggression, even after I confronted them, after I tossed their bedroom and confiscated the hatchet hidden in their toy box, beneath their miniature gavel. When lined up and accused beside her sisters, all the oldest would say was that my trial had been fair, their court complete even without my presence: One daughter for a judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense.
My middle daughter, she spit onto what was left of our thread-worn carpet, said my defense had been particularly difficult, considering my obvious guilt.
She said, Perhaps you should tell our mother you cut your thumb at work, so that she will not have to know why we took it.
She said, Your records are sealed until you unseal them, and then she made the locking motion over her lips that I taught her when she was just my baby, when she first needed to know what secrets were.
What milky-stern eyes the youngest had too, set in her pale face, floating above the high collar of her blackest dress: Blinded as both her sisters, still her blank eyes accused, threatened, made me sorry for what I was.
This youngest daughter, she walked me back to my room, her hand folded small in my uninjured one as she explained that she and the others hoped I had learned my lesson, because they did not want to hear my sorry case again.
Then the key turning in the lock, jailing me for my wife to rescue, to admonish for leaving the girls alone, because who knew what trouble they might make when no one was watching.
How I tried to be sneakier: To send messages only at work. To go out after they were already in bed. To change my clothes away from home, so that they might not smell the other upon me.
And then waking with my hand gone, divorced from my wrist, a tourniquet tightened around my stump and my mouth cottoned with morphine. And then wondering where my beautiful daughters could have gotten their tools, their skillful medicines.
And then not knowing what to tell my wife or my mistress, each curious about my wounds, and also still being unable to choose, to pick one woman over the other.
How now the gavel sounds in my sleep, how I hear my oldest pounding its loud weight against the surface of her child-sized desk, bringing into line the pointless arguing of the middle daughter, of the youngest—Because in my defense, what could the middle daughter say? What judicious lies could she tell that the others might believe? When all she wanted was for me to see the wrong of my ways, to repent and rehabilitate so that her mother and I might remain married forever?
In the last days of my affair, I lift my middle daughter into my arms, feel how much weight she’s lost, how her hair has wisped beneath its ribbons.
She meets my apologies with a slap, squirms free. She says, Don’t think I’m still daddy’s little girl.
She says, I only defended you because no one else would.
She says, In justice, we are divided, but in punishment, we are one.
The lullaby she sings as she walks away, I am the one who taught it to her. I am the one who sat beside her crib and held her hand when she could not sleep. I am the one who rocked her and fed her when her mother could not, exhausted as she was by her difficult pregnancies and the changing of the air.
I want this good behavior to matter, but I know it does not.
Some weeks later, I awake restrained to my now half-empty bed, nothing visible in the darkness except the silhouettes of my blind daughters in their black dresses, their white blindfolds wrapped tight round empty eyes.
And then it comes, and then they come with it: the children I deserve, if never the children I wanted; my three little furies, my three furious daughters.
Kidd, Kier, Kimball
Another new rain falls, dumped from the complicated sky, its acid-heavy droplets pelting our shoulders as we run from awning to awning, from collapsing home porch to crumbling chapel steps. Along our way, we see every kind of bird upon the ground, all heavy with forgotten flying, and around them their mud-left eggs, as thin-walled as my wife’s uterus, that tender space slung inside her unsteady body.
Within it, within us both, sound always these trapped prayers, necessary to be loosed.
Inside the church, that last dry place, we give them voice from our lungs, beg them from our knees, clasp them between hands wrapped in rosaries gathered from this dead town, this plague-slapped village. Above our heads, stained glass strains against the wind, refracts the last minutes of dusk-light wrong and weird upon our faces, reduces our speech to mumbles. Exhausted of words, we move together to light a candle for each baby lost, each fetus formed but not right-birthed.
By now, this takes us all night long. This takes every minute of every night.
At dawn, we extinguish the flames so the candles will be there to relight tomorrow, and then again we pray: Oh lord, just once. Just once, deliver us a child not wrecked from the beginning. Grant us a son not lousy with fur, not ruined with scales or feathers. Give us a daughter made for the old world instead of this new one, this waste of weather and wild.
And what we would do.And how we would do anything.
Our only answers are the church’s silent histories, those sequenced promises written in terrible stone, decorating each circling step from the vestibule to the altar, from the sacristy to the last unburned pews. Each station a horrid hope too unbearable to believe, this world made only the end of mystery, only the opposite of miracles.
Inside my wife, perhaps there is only the same, only these doubling doubts, these many questions that fill my own still-beating heart: Oh lord, for who else might be promised the inheritance of the earth? For who else is meant the receiving of the kingdom? If not our impossible, short-lived children, then what new race still to come, undreamt in our present darkness? Who are these next babes, about to be poured down upon the earth, come at last to wash us from off its tear-soaked face?
Lakin, Lamia, Lakshmi
Remember the difficulty of your labor, and how at first the doctors mistook our daughter for a breech birth, but then came no foot, no other hard limb or promontory leading the way?
What was stuck instead: Only this plump fluff of flesh, these greased rolls of fat. Only flush skin in handfuls, leaving nothing for the doctors to do but tug the mess free—And what a baby they found within, what gigantic girth of daughter, her face hung with meat, her fingers barely able to poke free from the folds of her wrists.
Remember how afterward you were too weak to hold her weight, how for the first months of her life the only way to feed her was to bring your breast to her buried mouth, those lips moving within the pancake of her face? How at bath time you would stretch her skin tight so I might wash within her creases, so that together we could clear the lint-slop between, scrub free the mold grown in every hanging crevice?