Remember the surgeons advising operations to remove that excess, to suck the fat from around her eyes so she might be able to see? From around her ears, so she might be able to hear?
How you hated the doctors then: for trying to decide in what ways our daughter could be beautiful, how she should see the world, and how the world should see her.
No, you said. She will eat what she wants to eat, until she fills out that great skin, until she stretches it taut, until jagged lines of purpled flesh mark new territories upon the body of her person.
My daughter could fill a room, you said, and still I would think her perfect.
Remember saying these words?
Tell me you remember. Turn around from the stove, from the meat-stink you’re making, and tell me.
Remember how she grew, how she continued to grow? How her head sagged so she needed a brace to support it, and yet there was no device that could fit the trunk of her neck? How she toddled, now a worm the size of a bulldog, buried in rolls of flesh that restricted her movement, that reduced her to a slither, to lunging and dragging across the carpet?
Blind and deaf, mumbling behind the smother of her face, she cried for help, but all we heard was a muffle, a moan, and still you refused, named her your pretty darling, your shining star.
Remember how you buried your face in her belly, laughing and tickling her with your lips? How you said she was so delicious you wanted to eat her? Or how the salt-shame of her tears collected in the shelves of her face, left their etchings for us to find with the washcloth?
When the doctors finally cut our skin-gorged daughter free, when they returned her wrapped in bandages, mutilated of face, but escaped from the flapping weight of her birth, how bad was it for her then, because we’d pretended for so long?
How much worse when the bandages came off, and we saw what skinny creature your honest love had hid?
How hungry she was then, how little food there was left in the stores, the depleted and shuttered supermarkets, and how dry your breasts were, empty as our larder—
And then what? How to feed our daughter, who you loved, whose forgiveness you wished to earn?
Remember how once, long before this gristle-spat daughter now munching and chewing in her highchair, remember how then you said my legs were my best attribute, that you fell in love starting from my feet and working your way up?
Remember how thick the muscle of my thighs, how fine the curve of my calves?
Say you remember, then look again upon our daughter’s re-fleshed face: As awful as it was to make a monster of her before, how much worse to have made her so once again?
Remember how once I claimed I would stop this—But how you believed me wrong, because who am I, without those legs?
Who am I, without those hands, offered in the absence of better gifts?
Who I am: I am still her father. I am still your husband, your partner, a half wedded to match your half, and even if you have made me less of a man to make her more of a daughter, still I mean to retake the whole of what is mine.
Come close, my one-time love. Come closer and find out our ravening daughter is not the only one with teeth, nor the only one who hungers.
Closer now. Closer.
Closer: Taste what’s happened to me, to you, to our daughter, this fat wedge shoved between us until we splintered. Open your mouth as we have opened ours, and taste how soon I will tear you both free, how I will wrench our daughter from you, from where you are together wrapped tight, trapped, floating mad within the weight of all she once was.
Meshach, Meshach, Meshach
We knew our firstborn might not last, his weak constitution revealed even before he could walk, signaled by his crinkled little fingers, his wet coughs full of sputum and phlegm. Still my wife nursed him, still I wiped the sweat off his sallow face and his caved chest. At night, we let him sleep between our bodies, even though his raucous breathing often woke us, even though there was no need to keep warm his small shape, not in the furnace of our bedchamber, our tiny hole of a home.
Each morning, we awoke from our dreams covered in the night’s soot, the expectorate that blew upward from the vents in the floor, the ash and worse that could not escape through the clogged height of the chimney above.
Once our boy could walk, once his toddler arms were thick enough to lift himself, then we wrapped his mouth and nose with breathable cloth and set him at the ledge of the chimney, at the bottom rung of the skinny ladder leading up into the narrow smokestack.
Up, we cried. Up, and loose what there is to be loosed.
Oh, and what a baby he was then! What cries and wails at being separated from us, at being alone in the dark of the stack. But still he climbed, did his best to keep the air flowing, to keep what came from below ascending to wherever it floated above.
By the time he was old enough to talk, his voice was already strained with the black glass the heat made of his lungs.
By then, his brother baked in my wife’s womb, growing to replace him when he inevitably tumbled loose, plummeting from the chimney’s great heights.
When we heard the thump of his crash, we set aside our brooms, left the newest ash where it lay, so that we might hold him as he went.
We cried for him as best we could, but those years the furnaces were so hot that no moisture lasted: not our tears, not the milk of my wife’s breast. Our second boy, he never had enough to eat, and when his growth halted I put another in his mother’s belly, even though there was no room for the three of us then birthed, even though we could barely stand the sight of each other in the heat-stunk cramp of our chamber.
Our second boy, he climbs as his brother once did, and when he comes down to see us he is black-skinned, slick with wide burns shut tight by soot. His only words are cries for mercy, entreaties against going back up the chimney— but of course he must go.
When he refuses, I tell him about the good of the many. About the good of my wife, about the good of myself, about the good of his baby brother, coming soon. I take him bodily and I force him into the chimney, push with my hands until he is above the damper, the trapdoor between our world and his, and then I hold the damper shut while I tell him the truth I have never wanted to tell.
I tell him I can make more of him, but there is only one of me, only one of his mother.
I tell him that when he is gone, I will still love him as much as I loved the brother before, as much as I will love the brother who comes after.
I tell him, This is why we gave you all the same name, so that you might be equals in our hearts.
This conversation, it is an understanding I began with one son long ago and will end with another, perhaps here in this hot room built between the furnace below and the floor above, or perhaps somewhere new, some earned place cool and star-struck, or else some other kind of heaven I have not yet imagined, set aside as reward for our long hot labors, our series of sacrifices.
I do not know. I have only been in this one room, and I cannot guess what others the world might yet contain.
I know only this: Myself, the father. Her, the mother. Them, the son. And between us all, this hot hell to be shared, and the crematorium chimney above to be kept clean no matter what the cost, lest all below choke on the ashes of our ashes.
Nessa, Neve, Nevina
All afternoon, we watch our kids scatter through the fields, lowing and bleating, until what storm they smell in the air chases them back to us, to the fence-line that separates pasture from village. They put their hoofed hands upon the rungs of our fences, then resume their sad noises, the warning signs our village long ago learned to heed.