I hope there will be a solution soon, the child whispers to her, before more white worms and more green worms and beetles or much worse comes. And the mother nods and sits all day in the center of the house and forces herself to eat, spooning in mouthful after mouthful of the blackening vegetables. Every variety of bug and slug call to the mother now, and she looks around and smiles because at least the child has gotten free. At least the child has escaped for another day.
The child recognized in the mother the charm of withdrawal this terrible nest presented, the dark lull of the vegetable world, mute but breathing in the room. It was dark and quiet and a little mossy in there. How easy it would be to bolt the door and sink into a stupor, into the stench and the heat and the strange echo made by the sponge-blackened decay.
Muffled, swaddled by layers of vegetative matter, the child feared the mother might find her permanent rest there, and she feared the empty cave of her mother’s voice in such a room, and the way of all flesh and the specter of decay, which so overwhelmed the space. When the child entered the decay of the room, she entered as a child, but when she left, she felt she was not a child any longer.
And even though when the mother woke herself it was still winter, and the world was white and not a single vegetable had yet arrived, she shuddered. She walked to the child’s room and smoothed her hair and pushed a few tendrils away from her face. That night, sitting there on the child’s bed, she vowed come spring that she would do whatever it took to keep the child safe.
When the child wakes it is still winter, but the mother is outside constructing a vegetable stand next to the Concrete Rabbit. At this stand, the mother explains, they will give all of nature’s bounty to the poor. Before one vegetable or fruit darkens their door, it shall be given away, and God will look with favor on their offering.
Blessed are the poor, for they are among God’s most beloved creations. Giving under any circumstances is joyful; feeding the multitudes under any circumstances is a pleasure. Blessed indeed are the hungry; they shall be fed.
At season’s end if there was anything left over, the mother, who could not bear the idea of waste, would allow the remaining vegetables into the house where she will store them in screw-top jars. When a person was mummified, their internal organs were placed in canopic jars and guarded by gods. The stomach was put in a jackal jar. The lungs in a baboon jar, and in a falcon jar, the intestines.
Perhaps the outcome, as foretold in a dream, would have been different had she known that certain fruits and vegetables emit an odorless, colorless gas that speeds up the ripening process and leads everything to premature decay. Perhaps, if she had known she should not put the spinach so close to the apples, or the tomatoes so near the cauliflower, things would have turned out differently.
No matter; the mother’s solution in the end worked perfectly: the hungry were fed and the mother was spared her madness, and the child, her burden of sorrow — a while longer.
23
FOR A WEEK, nothing had been heard back from the elders who had gone on the spaceship to Mars. They had all won the honor in a lottery. The mission was to be fueled only by solar power, but with winter and the distance they would be travelling away from the sun, they understood that they would inevitably succumb.
It’s snowing here, they had recently reported, and they watched the robotic arm unfurl to collect a sample of ice. They had all sent their video farewells because, as they said, their battery packs were getting low. With the verdict clear and so soon upon them, the mother imagined their voices might be filled with flickering and uncertainty and static, but in fact they came in loud and clear with their last thoughts and impressions and reminiscences.
. . beautiful like nothing else. .
. . I remember the drowned boy. .
. . the three-legged race. .
. . the Game of Graces. .
. . the Spiegelpalais. .
. . not to be believed. .
. . Marco Polo. .
. . the retina. .
Still, in the end, it was a quiet exit: the spacecraft put itself into low-energy safe mode. Daily, it revived itself for a few moments, but the solar panels could only generate enough power for the sojourners to fall into a lovely snippet pattern, fragments like burning and rabbit were heard, and then nothing more.
Soon, when the sunlight disappeared entirely, temperatures fell to–300 degrees, and carbon monoxide gas encased them. One final fully articulated and beautiful sentence was heard:
There is something. . exhilarating about. . the inevitable, the eloquent last man said, and the call. . to interminable sleep. . and the snow.
WHEN THE CHILD opens the door on the dark winter night, the house is lit from within, and she looks at the clock, and she nods her head.
Come in, she whispers, we’ve been waiting for you. What big teeth you have!
THEY WERE WALKING by the water when a jet plane materialized before them. It descended serenely and landed on the glinting silver river only yards away from where they stood. Though often when the mother saw an airplane she would flinch, this time she was not frightened at all. More than anything it resembled an enormous gray goose with silvery wings floating in the hypnotic blue-gray river.
There is a plane in the river, the mother said to the child, and the child, mesmerized, nodded her head and said, maybe Lamby is in there. Before long, a hatch opened, and one hundred or more small people stepped carefully out onto the wings. The mother and child took from their pockets their small inflatable boats and blew them up, with help from a few passersby. They paddled out to the little passengers, who had begun to shiver, as it was still winter.
SHE LOVES THE snowy, sealed-up world. The way they’ll never make it to the cash machine or the dance lesson. The remote world. The way the American President in black evening coat can appear from around any corner, with his melancholy musings about whether God will preserve or destroy the Union. Profound darkness inhabits him. She has seen him before on one bent knee at the Mothering Place. He tips his top hat now and bows to the mother and child in the white world, as they pass.
THE MOTHER STRUGGLED to wake herself but she could not. That night from the 101st floor, she fell. When the resurrection men came, she was waiting. She had forgotten about the resurrection men by then, and they frightened her. .
THE TIME OF the mysterious dyings had come. Bellwether creatures were falling from the sky. First it was the frogs, widespread over the continent of Africa, then it was the bees, and now it was being reported that there was, overnight, a sudden precipitous decline in the bat population. As many as had come once, in a torrent from the tree suddenly, quickly now were dying, and with their dying, a terrible foreboding settled in. The mother had grown accustomed to their presence. Not a day had passed when she had not thought of them, sensed them near. She’d drawn them close in her mind, the objects of her deepest dread and attachment, summoning them to her and gathering them in.
Bats perish, and no one knows why, the announcement read.
I’ll be your nursling for the end, she whispered. They should have been hibernating in the caverns on the other side of the river. Now she knew that every bat she saw, flying in the winter in the daylight, was a dead bat flying. The obscure objects of her fear, now covered in a white fungus, were flailing in the snow. They were falling, failing in the Bat Hibernaculum. So read the reports from the Vortex Man.