MY WIFE PUT HER HAND upon my face, said, I remember you now. You have righted yourself, fixed your face from out your beard, cut away the wrong hair.
She said, You changed without me, and I forgot how to recognize you through the changes.
And what was there to do but to agree?
My wife raised her free hand, placed it on my other bare cheek, and then her body burst black inside its flame, those flicking tongues white-blue, then hotter colors, colors hued indescribable, and the stone floor of the cave heated too, and all the foundlings cried out, their ghostly range of voices so narrow, so similar. My pooled and pooling blood sizzled, evaporated, and then I was falling, and still my wife gripped my face, held me from off my knees. She lifted me straight, pulled me to her, and then the flames were through my skin, inside my open body, razing away the last shreds of my wedding suit, and still I could not look at her, ashamed as I was of my old and broken shape, dying grotesque.
My wife, she took my slipping guts from out my hands, pushed them back in through my open belly, and then she said, Husband.
She said, Husband, I remember you.
She said, I remember singing you your vows, and then her hands were inside me too, so horrible and hot, what her fever must have felt like, the halls of memory enflamed, and still the fire spreading, spreading. I opened my eyes to see her, black before me in the dark and the flame, the surface of her shape again the negative of the one I had better known, and when she removed her hands she left me open, and then she moved against and around me in the fire, her long legs making circling steps, and in the fire she began to sing, and as the fire and the song grew it became a furnace, and we were in it together, and the foundlings too, the vastness of them, their child-faces pressed close, and now like us they were even less flesh and bones than before, and in their difference and their disarray they came faster and faster, and from each of their lips my wife took one note, and when the child was soundless he moved into the fire, and then the fire moved into me, into her, into us, and how full I got, how fast moving my thoughts, like a clock ticking full of futures new and unlikely and somehow possible, and how lovely my wife’s song was, and how long before it was over I knew there would be no foundlings left, that it was in them that my wife’s story was stored, the before and after of my leaving her, kept in her true child, the one I had buried in her last woods, and what she had waited for in her house was not me and my story but her son, returned to her and by the woods restored, as another woods had restored so many of the other lives I had failed to steward or to groom, and the song my wife sang was the finest I had ever heard, but it was not the song I had searched for.
This song, it did not restore me, but that was no longer why I had come, and no more would my want be to go on and on and on, to live without end, a desire that would not have stopped with the death of my body or my children’s or their children’s but only with the extinction of every possible world, so that my end would come at the termination of all things, that last threshold of possibility.
No more, I said, begged with my mouth filling with fire, my eyes and my hands and my stomach and lungs filled with the same.
No more was enough, I begged, and more than I deserved.
Only after the last of the foundling had passed between us was my body closed and my wife’s opened, enclosing me, drawing me in. It was not the love we’d had, but it was enough, and there at the bottom of the world I moved my broken body against hers, and in that cave I once more gave half a child into her, where our many wants might meet the half a child she had left, the memory of a song, and yes, throughout our coupling she sang, and it was a new song, made from the song that had made the fingerling and all his failed brothers and sisters, that had made the new moon and made the deep house and the deeper house and this deepest house, its dirt and lake and woods, its foundlings, its cave beneath them all, buttressed by the bones of the world, made a vault or else a safe haven, so that no matter how many levels collapsed above us still our child might somewhere be protected from the mistakes of its parents.
AFTER OUR RETURN TO THE house, we resumed for a time our lives together, as husband and wife.
My wife’s body paled again, and this new color lasted, her skin now flush only with her songs, a music employed to sing back the world we had known and also to better it: A sun rose in the sky the week after our return, or at least some convincing illusion of one, and that night, after it set, a moon followed its unrestrained arc. Clouds came later, and then rain falling, and then grass poking through the dirt, although from what seeds, from where? I did not know, did not ask. No longer did I need to know all the seats of power. It was enough that my wife’s songs added to what we had, and anyway I was not restored as she was, and so my old and tired body had not the strength to fight. At night we slept in a bed together—a bed of wood again and not of stone—but in the mornings I often arose coughing and sore to find her already gone, hanging again some photographs upon the wall or else rebuilding the nursery I had turned into my den. During the day she gardened, and as she gardened she sang to our child, the one growing within, made below the earth but destined to live upon it.
This time, there was no boredom at the slow progress of her pregnancy, the weeks of slimness nor the first small bulge that followed. Together, we touched and listened and sang, my rough and toneless voice doing its best below the beauty of her right one, and while only rarely had I sung with her before, now I did at every chance, whenever my throat was not too ravaged, and for less than a year, this was our life.
That near year, it was not without its sorrow, and its passing did not forgive us or help us to forget what we had done, but it was good enough for me to accept my fate, the fate of this place, the last of all the world I would ever see, and even as it was improved by measures, still I knew it would prove temporary.
It was the last world for me, but not for my wife, made young again, and not for our child, who with my wife I had determined must escape, must inherit what first home we had made, to make of it as she would or else choose to leave it behind, to return to that country from which her parents had embarked, the one on the other side of the lake, across the mountains, that busy land where we were born, all those many worlds ago.
My wife and I first denied the coming of the end, but the signs became manifest, multiplied. Even with her restored song and her many feats that followed, it seemed this last place was doomed to fall, and so it was the woods that failed first, their trees growing leafless with the advance of days, then rotting, toppling to the ground. There was no life there, and no bear to make more, to roar right the shapes it required, and eventually not even any cave, that hollow having collapsed some months into my wife’s pregnancy, after it became obvious she would not return. The lake was similarly diminished but faded more slowly, drying up with every day I spent on the land instead of swimming beneath its surface as my next nature desired me to do. From the shore, I sometimes watched the fingerling-fish flash through the water, plentiful without my culling but seemingly senseless too, now only animals that I pretended I felt no kinship to, no responsibility for.
With the trees leaf-bare and the water dropping, an ill-tasting wind began to blow across the dirt, eroding its surface into the air, and already that new sun was dimming, that new moon’s orbits growing less straight, more heavy looking upon the sky, and soon there would be no reason to stay here, and perhaps no way. My wife had made the shape we needed for our story, and now our story was ending, and so also its world.