The daughter wore the gown thereafter. It fit her every inch. It sung in certain lighting. She liked to suck the cuff against her tongue. There was a sour taste, a crackle. She could hear her mother murmur when she lay a certain way. The father, fraught by what he’d lost unknowing, began staying home all day. He stood in the kitchen and ate food for hours. He ate while crying, mad or mesmerized. He didn’t answer when the daughter spoke. Sometimes he shook or nodded, but mostly he just chewed. Most days the daughter took to walking as far from the house as she could manage. The gown made her want to breathe new air. She’d go until her feet hurt or until the sun went low. When it rained the gown absorbed the water. It guzzled her secret sweat. She got up earlier, patrolled. She wanted to see something like her mother had, like the bear, so that one day she’d have a story for a daughter. She saw many things that you or I would gape at — two-headed cattle, lakes of insect, larvae falling from the sky — all things to her now everyday. The earth was very tired. The daughter found nothing like a talking bear. She wondered if her mother had been lying or smeared with fever. At school the other children threw sharp rocks. They ripped the daughter’s gown and held their noses. The daughter quit her classes. She walked until her feet bled. Her father didn’t notice. Like the mother, he took on size. His jowls hung fat in ruined balloons. He called for the mother over mouthfuls. Her name was SARAH. The way it came out sounded like HELLO. The daughter couldn’t watch her father do the same thing her mother had. She decided to go on a long walk — longer than any other. She touched her father on the forehead and said goodbye. She walked up the long hill in her backyard where in winter she had sledded. It hadn’t been cold enough for snow in a long time but she could still remember the way her teeth rattled. She remembered losing the feeling in her body. Now every day was so warm. She swore she’d sweat an ocean. She walked through the forest well beyond dark. The gown buzzed in her ears. It buzzed louder the further from home she went. She kept going. She slept in nettles. She dreamt of sitting with her parents drinking tea and listening to her tell about all the things she would soon see. She dreamt of reversing time to watch her parents grow thinner, younger, while the earth grew new and clean. She walked by whim. She tread through water. She saw a thousand birds, saw lightning write the sky, the birds falling out in showers. The world was waning. The sky was chalk. She felt older every hour. She had no idea she’d come full circle to her backyard when she found the bear standing at a tree. It was huge, the way her mother had said, the size of several men. It was reaching after leaves. It sat up when it heard her. It looked into her eyes. Hello, bear, she said, rasping. It’s nice to finally meet you. The bear stood up and moved toward her, its long black claws big as her head. The collar of her dress had pulled so tight she found it hard to speak: What do you dream, bear? I will listen. She didn’t flinch as the bear came near and put its paw upon her head. It battered at her and she giggled. It pulled her to its chest. She didn’t feel her head pop open. She didn’t feel her heart squeeze wide. The bear dissembled her in pieces. The bear ate the entire girl. It ate her hair, her nails, her shoes and bonnet. It ate the gown and ate her eyes. Inside the bear the daughter could still see clearly. The bear’s teeth were mottled yellow. Inside its stomach, abalone pink. The color of the daughter became something soft — then something off, then something fuzzy, then something like the gown, immensely hued; then she became a strange fluorescence and she exited the bear — she spread across the wrecked earth and refracted through the ocean to split the sky: a neon ceiling over all things, a shade of something new, unnamed.
TEETH
I felt it formed in chatter: voices borne in the enamel. The sky sent teeth from cougar, leopard, shark, snake, kitten, cow, human, bear, dog, alligator, crocodile, deer, rodent, camel, zebra, turtle, rabbit, horse, and wolf. And bigger things we hadn’t quite imagined, teeth that wouldn’t fit inside a car. The massive incisors bashed through buildings. They impaled people huddled in their dens. They clipped the ground and erupted waist-deep craters large enough in which one could lie down. In the light you could hardly stand to look for all the glinting, the masked back-rattle. You couldn’t step without incision. The aching stretched our gums. I told the young ones how some new fairy had dropped her payload in mid-flight. The children wouldn’t wink. At this point we’d lost ways of sentiment. Overhead there hung a thing that seemed to want us nowhere. I couldn’t help but want to stay under. I couldn’t remember anyone I’d ever met. The names of people once relations hid chipped, minor abrasions into my brain. I’d had a mother, I knew, and someone besides her. I’d had people who would talk. But these days were so overloaded, so crusted over and back-bent, I didn’t know what else to speak of when I spoke into the brusque remainder of my household, into the crooks that hadn’t yet been demolished. I touched my own teeth with my soft tongue and wondered how long before they’d be the ones that rained down and ripped us open.
SEABED
Randall had a head the size of several persons’ heads — a vast seething bulb with rotten hair that shined under certain light. Several summers back he’d driven to a bigger city where smarter men removed a hunk out of his skull. They’d said the cyst grew from the wires hung above the house. Randall’s son hadn’t ended up so well off. The crap ate through the kid’s whole cerebrum. Radiation. Scrambled cells. One had to be mindful of these things in these days, the doctors said. Now, though, with the woman gone and the baby dead, Randall kept on living in that old house with the mold curtains where his guilt breathed in the walls. He lugged the kid’s tricycle all over, the handlebars shrieking with rust on account of how he even brought it in the bath.
The streets were ruined that evening as he sulked half-cocked among the light. There’d been a parade at 3:00 p.m. for the Governor’s next wedding, a celebration of his legal promise to a whore he’d got caught pants-down with by the paper — therein, stoned on flashbulbs, the elected had sworn the fraggy dyke his betrothed: all six foot four of her, thickly mustached, tattooed every inch. Like most days, though, Randall slept to dusk, so that by the time he got up and fit his pants on and cleaned the dead birds off the porch — those fuckers fell all hours due to, again, the power lines, another stunner in the long line of hell that kept him up — the crepe had been unraveled. The trombones pumped and champagne popped. The whole town seemed to have cleared out. There were no sedans, no street sweepers, no bastards out on the club porch, where most days by now they rallied barking, randy for date rape.