See until you cannot see anymore.
Listen: Their first words in turn, three broken intonations of cure and mother and save her, save her. What stories they tell then, of places they have gone, of the things they have seen! What hard hurt of my heart follows, what ungrantable wish shaping this trembling flesh, this poor gravedigger again made quaking father!
Listen: The sound of herbs hitting the floor is a whisper, then a word. Roots collapse, tubers tumble, and what sentence can follow? What good noise can I make for my daughters then, clinging reluctant to my body, this earth they no longer love?
Travis, Travon, Tremaine
When we are sure the hospital is empty, only then do we leave the youngest to hold the mother’s hand, to stroke the clammy baldness of her head while the rest of us search and scavenge, bulge backpacks to bursting with clean gauze, ample medicines, new needles for her drips and fresh inserts for her catheters, everything else we will need for her care.
For ourselves, we take just what last food remains in the commissary, what few blankets we cannot go without.
We take as little as possible, because their mother is already so much to carry.
At the top of the spiral stairs we collapse her gurney, fold its wheels beneath its chassis, and then we lift, each as much as he can: Myself at the bottom, walking the heavy end backward into the decline, and then my small sons at the head of the bed, doing the best their little bodies can do.
At each landing, I bark orders, beg my boys to lift, lift higher, over the railing and around the corner, and then again we descend, again we dive through the deep toward the new dark below.
For twenty floors, we do this. We do this for two hundred vertical feet, and then we are in the lobby, then across the paper-strewn reception, then through the handprint-smeared glass doors and out onto the street.
What destruction greets us, surrounds us, hangs above us: The high-rises swaying in their foundations. The towers towering. The diseased dead crashed everywhere, up and over and around all the abandoned cars and trucks, the overturned carts and stalls.
And then the sky spitting black rain, and then my boys each opening their umbrellas, crowding in close to keep their sick mother dry.
I drag their mother. I drag their mother’s gurney. I drag the gurney flat like a sledge, with their mother atop it, with the boys and their umbrellas huddled close because the rain never stops.
At every rest, we do what the doctors once did, what they taught us to do before they fled: My boys know the names of their mother’s medicines, have learned every sequenced step involved in her care. Beneath their umbrellas they change her dressings, inject appropriate doses into her ports, pour cans of gray formula into her feeding tube until her belly bloats, until her waste-bag is ready for the emptying.
One after the other, they pump her legs to keep the muscles straight, flex her arms to do the same, because still they believe she might one day need them, because on our long walk I tell the boys that when I am gone she might once again carry them, as we have carried her so far.
We make weeks of slow progress across the city, until one morning I wake up fevered, the sound of my new cough enough to set my youngest to bawling, to clutching at my pant leg. By the next morning, my muscles have already begun to tighten, as the boy’s mother complained hers did, back when no doctor knew what these signs portended.
I look around at my three boys, my exhausted sons arrayed, each smaller than the next, each spaced too far apart to fill another’s shoes, let alone mine, and then I do the only thing I can: I take my oldest son aside, and I tell him that I will go on alone, that alone I will enter the rumble and ramble to prepare the way for their passage.
Through my hacking cough, I tell him that I love him, and that I love his brothers, and that he is the one who must watch over the others from now on.
Don’t go, he says. We need you yet.
No, I say. He has his mother, still alive, still sleeping. He has his brothers.
He has enough, I tell him. What he has, it will have to be enough.
And then he is the man of the family, and then I tell him so: Two separate events, happening so close together that I can barely separate them afterward, when I am crawling alone through streets of panic-crushed cars, disease-fat corpses, caught up in the tight spaces the mother-laden gurney would never have fit, no matter how hard I tugged.
And then the sins of the spirit, punished upon the flesh; until I cannot move, until my muscles clutch into paralysis.
How much later is it when I hear their voices following, coming behind me through the dark, shouting my name, my title, reminders of my renounced fatherhood?
And then their little hands lifting me onto the empty gurney.
And then their ignoring me when I ask or try to ask, Where is your mother?
In silence the younger two move my joints, bend my elbows and shoulders and knees to busy me while the oldest wipes clean a used needle on his stained trousers, then seeks its entrance to my veins. As they prepare me for transit, all I see are their determined faces, foreheads bent with their decision to trade one near-dead parent for the other—and also the mistake they have made, leaving behind the only person they were ever tasked with caring for, all so that they might preserve what’s left of me, this shell of an undeserving father, who tried so hard to abandon them first.
Ulmer, Ulric, Ursa
I wait until the winter moon peeks from behind its shadow and then I call to the harrow-hunt this pack, these sons and cousins and half-brothers and grandsons, all these evolutions of my own beast-headed form, an overlapping of altered progenies, some mimicking my own shape and some their mothers’, so that we are become a family united by blood but not body, our forms as far-ranging as our hunting grounds, as the sprawl of forest we’ve claimed for ourselves, where despite our differing shapes we live together by the same rules:
That each kill we make is shared among the pack.
That each wound incurred in the hunt is licked clean by a brother.
That after we hunt we eat. And after we eat we howl. And after we howl we run.
The moon waxes wider each night, and soon there is little time to pause, no matter how empty our bellies or how tired our legs. In single-file, we cross forest floor and snow-clenched clearing, each pack mate putting his paws in the unshared footprints of a father or brother, until together we reach the high rock, the place of decision agreed upon a year ago, when last the forest tribes met.
What spectacle there is to see upon our arrival, what new variety of form only a year past our last meeting: What bear-bodies, what cougar-hearts, what boar-teeth, and among them all the other wolf-head packs, flush with brothers despite the endless snow, the failing prey.
When all are assembled and greeted—when we have each sniffed and nuzzled and marked each other as friends, as temporary extended family—then each father-alpha relates his tale in turn, some with words, some with beast-noise, some with both at once. We speak loudly and with great length, give speeches that consume many nights, that take the whole fullness of the moon to complete.
We speak these many words as if we have to, as if the limitations of syllables could somehow mask the truer language of our shifted bodies.
The failure of our great hunt, the one each tribe is engaged in for the good of all others, it has already been communicated by our lowered heads, our tucked tails, and so even before our speeches all our boys know what we fathers know too: It has been years since any of us have seen a human woman, and the beast-heads make no daughters.