Name, he thought. A son’s name.
Son.
He sat until his head grew so heavy he couldn’t hold it up.
Inside his head it was all one color. His heartbeat skittered in his throat. He did not dream.
He woke to a sour mouth some time later with someone standing over him by the bed. At first he assumed it was the child having come to smother, rub him out.
Okay, he thought. Let’s go.
As his eyes grew accustomed back to the room’s light, he saw the grim, loosed lines of his wife’s face. She looked many years older now already. She coughed up gravel on the mattress.
“Do you remember the first time you fucked me?” she said. “How sweet your kiss was? We bought a room in an old hotel. There were flowers in my hair. I’d never met a man like you. I thought you’d take me places. Light my insides. Do you remember the way you spurted? I’d only known you ten days. You called me another name. How wise your eyes were, rolled back in your head. I had my mind on television.”
She moved toward him, her body hulking. She put a leg up on the bed. He could feel the chill in her forearms, the hair there already grown out long and matted.
“Let’s make this baby,” she said, begging. “A new life. Please, my dearest. Squirt me up.”
He pushed her off. He got up and moved out of the bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him. He waited for her to pound or push but there was nothing. There was no tick, no garbled gobbling. The house was still.
The father opened the door and saw just a room. A room he’d lived and slept in for many years.
Through the window, instead of dirt now, the sky was pouring roach. The critters hit the earth and wriggled upright, already a foot high off the soil. Other bugs erupted from a new budding crevice — leeches, gnats, mosquitoes, wasps. He could hear the collective hum of wings and cilia vibrating in the air.
The dogs were at the front door. They smashed themselves against the frame, howling, hungry, chewing each other. They’ll be inside soon, the father thought. His stomach gurgled. His brain began to click. There were things that he might have known once. Places he had been. Days and numbers, thoughts, corruptions, wishing, exits, lists, and vows. Everything seemed to wriggle in his shoulders. He spoke a thing he knew aloud — it came out wrong.
Upstairs, he found the child again. It had swollen through the attic. Its body pressed against the roof, warping the beams. Its huge bright red pupils spun for focus. The father recognized in the child’s face, even so bloated, certain of the mother’s features, and his own. This thing they’d made together.
The father wanted to kiss the ruined child’s dappled lips. He wanted to climb inside its size and live forever.
The child was saying something. Its voice had also grown enormous, even larger than the house. The child’s tenor seemed to scratch the room, to turn the very air to liquid dust. The child’s voice echoed in the father’s head — a self inside himself incanting with each the word the son then said. At first the words seemed, to the father, nothing, nonsense, a voice thrumming through his skin to rip it, though with all of these words coming out now, the father began to feel something soft inside him glisten. His body washed, an old tide rolling.
All these words, the father felt, were words he knew he wanted — these words were written in his flesh and on his flesh and all around it, in the dirt and water, on the air.
And now the massive baby lay before him, coocooing, while outside the earth began to writhe.
And now the father opened up his numbing mouth and gave his son a name.
MANURE
I will not speak of this day.
BATH or MUD or RECLAMATION or WAY IN / WAY OUT
When the final crudded current first burst somewhere off the new coast of Oklahoma, I was seventeen and cross-eyed. The storm spread in a curtain. It came and cracked the crust that’d formed over the fields, the junk that’d moored up in our harbors. It washed away most everything not tied down and most everything that was. All those reams of ugly water. All that riddled from the sky.
My family huddled hidden under one another in the house our Dad had built alone. The house where we’d spent these years together. The old roof groaned under the pouring. The leaking basement filled with goo.
LOST: my gun collection.
LOST: every board game you can think of.
LOST: mother’s bowling trophies (30+).
LOST: our hope for some new day.
For weeks after the onslaught, I spent each afternoon up to my knees, shoveling mud from off of what remained of our crushed huddle. The sun had come back black, redoubled. What hadn’t sunk or gone to mush now sat neck-deep, blobbed and burbling. The earth was bottomless and greedy. It promised to swallow whatever stayed out long enough to glisten. Me and my brothers, though; we fought hard. It was the twelve of us, blonde and hungry, each often nipples-deep and digging through the night. In the mornings, in the dew light, with the sun so hot it singed our hair, the gunk would form a crust — then we could take turns together sleeping, though you could never fully close your eyes. The mud might shift or moan. I’d seen trees get sucked in suddenly like spaghetti into lips. Sometimes, in my basement bedroom, you could hear the screaming through the soil — the folks from other homes who couldn’t fight the heave. I’d watched the Johnsons go down treading, their old muscles ripped and overheating. Mrs. Johnson’s bright yellow noggin with curled hair ribbon bobbed on the surface a full day before it sunk.
It wasn’t long before we fell too. One by one, I watched my brothers fizzle. Eleven boys, aged eight to eighteen, each so tired their pupils spun. You couldn’t do much once it had you — the mud held tight and suckled quickly. I watched with sore hands as each one tuckered, went under deep, their small heads gone.
At night I drummed up stories for our mother in her linens, so fat she couldn’t fit out from the house. Her gut had swelled to fill the bedroom mostly: the ocean swelled inside her too. She ate in misery. I didn’t blame her. She’d lost the most of all of us. I sold excuses for each drowned baby: Derry’s gone to Grandma’s, Momma. Phillip’s run off with a girl. She watched unblinking as I went on. She hadn’t spoke up clear in years. She sometimes croaked or cracked or gobbled, or sputtered gibberish, glassy-eyed: YHIKE DUM LOOZY FA FA, she said. ZEERZIT ITZ BLENN NOIKI FAHCH.
I knew she could still hear me. She felt my voice inside her head.
We remaining went on working even knowing how the mud would never stop. In certain seconds we even maybe believed we could beat it, live forever. Soon, though, even Georgie grew too tired. I kissed his forehead, just above the mud lip. Shortly after we lost Bill. Then Thomas. Freddy. Dennis. After Phillip faltered, there were no longer enough arms to hold the house. The windows popped and bubbled. The roofing puckered. The concrete turned to slick. The mud caked and swallowed over. Then there was nothing left but dark. I prayed Mother would forgive me. I could hear her just below the surface. Her together with the brothers. Then, soon enough, there was silence.
Our home’s foundation sat gashed and flat.
With no more brothers, nothing nowhere, I closed my eyes and waited, last of all of us, alone. I prepared to take my place, forthcoming. I lay in the mud and breathed and waited. I prayed my brain would shut off lightly, without aching, without sting — that when I opened my eyes under all that deep mud, I’d see all my brothers’ faces stretched with grins.
Instead, that night I watched the moon rise. I rolled and slathered, squealing. I pushed my arms in up to my elbows. The mud stayed firm, an evil bed. The earth didn’t want me. I screamed and nattered at it. I pleaded and I praised. I begged for it to open up. Overhead the moon burned through the ruining sky. I thought of heavy things, of ripping. I pressed for soft spots in the stink. I searched and cursed and, hungry, prayed. I let crap gather in my eyes.