He looked confused. He pointed at the tanned and unblemished captured image of some younger husk of me.
“Who is that one?”
I felt my size.
“That’s me. Your mother. Who loves you more than all. Who would give and give and give and give.”
He took the photo from me, stumbling. His eyeballs jerked and spun. He wiped the grime from his mouth across his face. He looked at me. He was in there.
“No,” he said. “You’re lying.”
I told him how I’d never lie. How all I wanted was to have my boys together all around me, loving. He snorted through his nostrils. He looked into the slathered backyard with his brothers: the rash the steam the broiling. I felt the roof just slightly shift. Johnson looked at me again, something grunting, an idea hung between his lips. He kind of grinned to flash his teeth, the greening grubby things — they’d used their toothpaste on my eyes. One short, overtly hairy hand came up through the air to point.
“Mommy?” he said. “You?”
“Yes, yes me, my dear,” I said, breathing the moment. “My sweetest Johnson. My precious baby.”
His whole head clouded. His soft skin bluing. He cricked his neck. He pinched his fingers deep back in his mouth, pulled something out, and ate it. He shook his head horrendous.
“Not a baby,” he said. “I am fire. I know who you are now. I can smell everywhere you’ve been.”
He reached and dug his nails into my arm. My blood bubbled in splotches. Johnson’s tongue was white. I felt something seeping sink all through me as he pulled me hard toward the back door, through the smudgy glass of which I could see now shapes moving in and at the light. Several massive crosses propped erect and glowing, crowed beneath the sky that seemed to open. What wasn’t burning lurched with insect, the grass and limbs and hills and neighbors’ houses washed in crease. The air itself was sweat. This was what had happened.
I ripped my arm away from my youngest and fell back onto the cracking kitchen floor. I skittered to stand up as he watched me, still holding the photo crumpled in his hand. His eyes burst veined and raw. The smear of his etchings and bruises seemed to form a pattern. He shrieked out for his brothers. His tone was crystal, wounded as we were. The house around us shuddered
I turned from my son.
I ran out through the kitchen’s side door into the garage. My stomach swished, my knees gone goofy. The night was wrecked and drooping. The air was eaten through with smear holes. Large patches of blue mold hung on the burped crust of the moon — the moon that in recent months had grown smaller, sucked away by something much larger snuck behind it. The air was hot and made me sneeze. My blood. My blood. I ran into the forest half-blinded, thumbed by branches that made long scratches on my skin. I could hear the boys behind me. They whooped, calling out my maiden name. They put inflection in their voices to make it sound in trouble, hurt, causing a receding part of me to stir. I plugged my ears and thought of elsewhere. I thought of wrapping my arms around a younger Dan, my heart wet and drumming through my shirt.
I ran until I couldn’t see.
I ran until my brain was lather.
I ran until I felt the bottom fall out of me, drumming, and tumbled facedown on the earth.
Somewhere in the dead grass between the sanitation yard that’d once been a school lot and the rotten playground where Dan and I used to bring them through several summers, I knew I could not go on. I fell and scuffed my soft hands and rolled around with dirt. In this new dirt I still could not find the mouth—what had I become? My skin had opened up in several places, the center of me oozed. The smoke from our small house plumed in odd tufts on the horizon.
I waited for the boys.
I waited that they’d catch up and lift my body, carry me on their young backs to our home. To the small house where they’d grown up. Where I’d loved them and they’d eaten and we’d breathed. Such air we’d had together. The night was sticky. I was cold. Blood gushed down my forearms. Something throbbing at my forehead from all directions. All I could see was straight above me. Above and on and on and into nothing. I felt dumb for having run. I felt weird warmth brimming in my eyes. My gone eyes. My warbled wanting. My boys needed me to feed. They needed something like the rest of us. They’d had no great chance to change. Such long, bombed days of wait and television. Such backward years; such years to come. I would get up in a moment. I’d go to them and say their names. I’d fill their mouths and kiss their earlobes. The days would wash. The boys would listen. The sky would come uncombed and gleaming. I could sense it. I could seem.
STATIC
The earth had learned to scratch its back. In massive columns same as what we’d seen on TV during our worse storms, stretched check-pattern, warbled spatter. As well, the sound of a billion needles wheedling, tearing their tips against the grain. Sometimes I could hear laugh tracks buried under the floorboards, wedged deep under the sod. Somewhere down there was my father. His knuckled rapped against the beams. I began to feel everything inside me at once humming. I felt my organs hiss alive: the static replicated in me. When my mouth opened, it came out. The vibration cracked my mirrors. It split the foundations of my soft skull. It made me giggle just a bit. I couldn’t keep a hold on as through the windows I saw the wide scrim that for years had nestled me into sleep — the gray/ white/black transmission from gone channels, wavelengths no one had thought to walk.
THE GOWN FROM MOTHER’S STOMACH
The mother ate thread and lace for four weeks so that her daughter would have a gown. She was tired of not being able to provide her daughter with the things many other girls took for granted. Their family was poor and the mother’s fingers ached with arthritis so she couldn’t bring herself to sew. Instead she chewed the bed sheets until they were soft enough to swallow. She bit the curtains and gnawed the pillow. With one wet finger she swiped the floor for dust. God will knit it in my womb like he did you, she murmured. When you wear it you will blind the world. She refused to listen to reason. She ate toilet tissue and sheets of paper and took medication that made her constipated. She stayed in bed instead of sitting for dinner. Carrots don’t make a dress, she croaked. Her stomach grew distended. She began having trouble standing up. Her hair fell out and she ate that too. She ripped the mattress and munched the down. She ate the clothing off her body. The father was always gone. He worked day and night to keep food the mother wasn’t eating on the table. When he did get home he was too tired to entertain the daughter’s pleas to make the mother stop. Such a tease, that woman, he said in his sleep, already gone. Such a card. Because her mother could no longer walk, the daughter spent the evenings by the bedside listening to rambles. The mother told about the time she’d seen a bear. A bear the size of several men, she said. There in the woods behind our house, when I was still a girl like you. The mother had stood in wonder watching while the bear ate a whole deer. It ate the deer’s cheeks, its eyes, its tongue, its pelt. It ate everything but the antlers. The mother had waited for the bear to leave so she could take the antlers home and wear them, but the bear had just gone on laying, stuffed, smothered in blood. The mother swore then — her eyes grew massive in the telling — the bear had spoken. It’d looked right at the mother’ and said, quite casual, My god, I was hungry. Its voice was gorgeous, deep and groaning. The mother could hardly move. I didn’t know bears could talk, she said finally, and the bear had said, Of course we can. It’s just that no one ever takes the time to hear. We are old and we are lonely and we have dreams you can’t imagine. Over the next six days the mother continued growing larger. Her eyes began to change. Her belly swelled to six times its normal size. Dark patchwork showed through her skin. Strange ridges on her abdomen in maps. Finally the daughter called a doctor. He came and looked and locked the door behind him. Through the wood the daughter could hear her mother moan. A wailing shook the walls. Some kind of grunt or bubble. The doctor emerged with bloody hands. He was sweating, sickly pale. He left without a bill. In the bedroom, the air stunk sweet with rotten melon. The gown lay draped over the footboard. It was soft and glistening, full of color — blue like the afghan that covered her parents’ bed — white like the spider’s webs hung from the ceiling — gray and orange like their two fat tabbies — green like the pine needles past the window — yellow and crimson like how the sun rose — gold like her mother’s blinkless eyes.