The child repeated: “Two woes more hereafter.” It seemed to gag on its own tongue. It looked into the father, blinking. It said, “My anus is a portal.”
The room around them slightly rolled.
The child’s mother shouldn’t see this, the father thought. He turned away and hid his eyes. He went back downstairs and locked the door behind him. He tucked a towel under the crack. Though for hours, through whatever insulation, whatever silence, the child’s voice still slammed his head.
Back in the living room, the father found the mother staring into the staticked face of the TV. Though the programming stations had been out for months, he still caught her watching rather often, usually with her nose inches from the glass bulb, humming in tune with the sound. For a while he’d refused to let her waste the generator, but now he didn’t even argue.
“Where have you been?” she asked. She didn’t press him. Her hands gripped both sides of the screen. She drooled.
The father watched her for another second, then went into the kitchen and he stood there.
And he stood there. And he stood there. And he stood.
That night, on the carpet, nestled in half-blankets wrecked by moths, the mother spoke her want for a new child.
“Surely it was some kind of error,” she said, pressed against him awkward, their limbs uncomfortable in tangle. “That first baby. That precious sorry little boy. My body needed flushing. We have to try again.”
The father didn’t blink. He could hardly hear her for the baby’s voice still lodged on his brain. He thought of the child there in the attic just above them, pressing its large pus-smothered ear against the attic floor.
“I wouldn’t try again for anything,” the father said quite loudly, to make the child hear too. He did not look at the mother. “No matter what kind of light was promised. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t even.”
The mother’s face became a knot.
“Are you so lost already you couldn’t imagine God’s grace?” She touched him, her fingers icy. He couldn’t look. His blood was still.
She got up out of bed.
She stood in the queer light through the doorway, seething, the gnatty skin crimped at her neck.
“If you won’t help I’ll find a way myself,” she said.
She left the room. The father heard TV static a second later, so loud he could feel it in his teeth. The walls around him seemed to sink. He spread out with his arms and legs in her absence, stretching, the carpet warm in spots. He spoke aloud and tried to reason with her even though he knew she couldn’t hear.
“God,” he kept repeating.
His tongue felt fat, electric near his throat.
Outside, the night was runny. The father cupped air in his cheeks. He breathed and swallowed, breathed and swallowed. He lit a candle and waded back into the muck. Underneath the surface there were currents. Hard clusters near his knees. He moved to where he’d pushed the baby under, if he could remember. He reached deep in with his long arms. The muck gummed his nostrils, shook his lungs. Reaching. Reaching. Nothing. The father bit his splitting lips. He grunted, stretching harder. Hot wax dripped in slow strings down his other arm. He dropped the candle in the wet. Then the sky was nowhere. The cold face of the moon was blotted out with birthing flies.
He could not find the child.
The father called for his wife into the silence to come and guide him home by voice, but she couldn’t hear or wouldn’t come.
By the time the father made it back to the house the muck had dried across his upper half, a crust that came off in greasy chips. The stinking made him dizzy. He stripped to naked in the front yard. He tried to think of what he’d do if the dogs returned right then. He wondered if he’d fight or just stand and let them rip. He dreamed of incisors, shredding into cells.
He felt his stomach rumble. Mostly, his body had gotten used now to nothing. On worst days they’d eaten cloth or rubble.
What might the child have tasted like? he wondered.
What would the wife?
In the living room, still naked, mud-clung in long patterns, the father found the mother passed out with her head propped against the TV. She had a bra left on and nothing else, a see-through thing he’d long since gotten over. Normally he would have carried her to bed and tucked her in but this time he left her crooked and wet, eyes aglow.
In the morning she was still there, inch for inch. Her neck sat crumpled with the burden of her head. He moved to shake her shoulder. Gnats muddled in and around her mouth. The tongue, the meat, already rotting. She’d jabbed a kitchen knife into her stomach. Blood spread around her in an oval. Static seemed to gather at her face. The father stepped back from her, hands wet and trembling. He looked at what she’d done.
He could hear the dogs outside again, hungry, barking, bashing their bodies at the boards. The sheen of the mother’s blood did not quiver in their rhythm.
Overhead he heard the baby breathing through the ceiling, smacking its gums.
Upstairs the child sat swollen even larger — now nearly five times redoubled. In its eyes the father saw translucence, the whirred white flesh of its cornea neon, raw. Its flesh was golden and covered in larvae. It was bigger even than the father.
“The second woe is passed,” it said, giggling and cutesy. “And, behold, the third woe cometh quickly.”
The father kept his face turned from the son.
“Soon your skin will rupture and your eyes will vomit grease,” the child continued, his voice now several voices. “Your balls will pop and worms will wriggle and the air will liquidate. The seas will rush to smash the sky.”
The breath coming off the child was spotted.
The spots, together, became light.
The father felt the thing behind his eyes spin centered, spraying.
“I don’t even see you,” he shouted. “You’re not there.”
The child guffawed. It slapped its thighs and spit up. In the spit there wriggled something. The father could not inhale. He hurried past the child and took the tools he’d long ago stored away. He left the attic again without looking. Downstairs he could still hear the child’s cracked cackle even with the door closed and locked again.
He carried his wife into the backyard by the armpits. The yard was wet and sunk with residue. The trees had rotted and fallen in. Vast shapes moved on the horizon. In the dead flowerbed he found a soft spot where she could rest.
In an hour he had a hole dug.
In another hour he had her under.
Atop the mound of overturned earth, he spoke benediction: what sacred phrases he could remember. His tongue gnashed at his palate though the words were hard to taste.
That night the sky rained soil.
At first the father thought the sound of the pounding on the roof was the child’s kick and stammer, the child’s long swelling, but through the crack over the high bedroom window the father saw the great crudded gashings of loose earth coming down. The sun hung somewhere muted, disremembered of its light. He tried to think and felt his brain’s wheels catching, grinding wells into his head. His extremities began to tingle, buzzed by the sudden loss of flowing blood. He felt lightheaded, zoning, dumb. He hadn’t slept in several days. He sat on the wrecked mattress with his knees crossed. There was an impression left among the shredded bulges where for all those years his wife had laid, and another shaped like him. He rolled onto the ridge between their two spots and wondered how long until the ceiling gave, until the earth grew covered over. He chewed his tongue and breathed and breathed. He could hardly think of who he was. He said his name aloud so he’d remember. In repetition, each utterance grew slightly further off from what it should be.