I heard the cow say, in mom’s voice: YO VOT IXHT VOD SIBBUM KLIMMITCH.
Mom. Mom’s voice. I felt her.
I looked again.
Overhead the sky was melting, the cracked cream color rubbing off in cogs of brine. The fields far ahead around me in endless pudding, studded here and there with what had been: homes and houses, hair and heirlooms, habits, hallways, hauntings, hope.
Other shit began to happen. Behind the sky, I saw _____. The clips of drips of dropping muddle, scratching the face of everything in long bolts as flat as the back of my hand. And zapped in groggy columns things were melting out of nowhere, big rungs of hung gob spurting from sections overhead. And the skewed lobs of architecture and landscape bowled in rhythms clogged with problems, no repetition. I could hardly stick a foot straight; I was, like, wobbly hobbling through the dead grass. There was everywhere to walk now. Everywhere and none at all. I could feel my fiber peeling — my blood spread thin — my pupils slurred.
There couldn’t be much time. Time, the ship, the shit, the sentence. The earth still refused to suck me under. No, not so easy, not like that, it promised. It wanted to test and tempt and make me beg, and even then just _____ inside me. I had a vision of the girl above, then to my left and to my right, each one silent and gorgeous, stringing me alone, to here or there. I no longer believed that I had something — that there would be better — that we could nuzzle. I just wanted the air to fill inside me and compress and spread out and tickle the way it seemed to inside her. The way she winked and blinked in the _____ space I felt if I jumped right I might glide straight through, but each time I gathered the ignition, then she’d shift, she’d sweat around me.
I lunged angry, blind, corroding. I swatted at the sky.
I ran and chased her straight into that blob of nothing, into a leaning where all was still.
Here the earth lay flat and long and unrunny. I felt my thighs, now burning from output, suddenly solid and ready, standing on true dirt. A circle of clean trees appeared before me. I blinked and blinked.
Into the trees I trotted meanly, keeping them fixed center in my brain, fearing they would disappear again, some prolonged jinx.
Among the trees, though, in the center, the small girl sat on tufted grass. Her flesh pale as nothing. Her hair in steam and bright gown gleaming. I couldn’t see to see her eyes, though, so glowing they burned my teeth. I could only look just off to one side. Overhead — the sky still scrunched and overrun. In my coal stomach — her lone voice.
Where are your brothers? she said, knowing.
What brothers?
The ones you had.
I had brothers?
You did.
She watched, silent, while I tried to remember. She looked sad.
Dig, she said.
She seemed to hover off the ground.
Dig, she said again.
I didn’t have a shovel and I told her. Such things we’d all long lost, though now I couldn’t think of what. My brain wormed in want of recognition, turning over and over in cold sputter.
She shook her head.
She spoke a language.
Some feeling brought me to my knees.
With fingernails shorn and mud-clung, I scratched into the earth. I felt so numb I couldn’t stutter. Something buzzed behind my eyes. I ripped the grass away in handfuls. The gravel made me bleed.
Under the first surface, there was loam: sand, silt, humus, and manure. I slung it, reeling. I dug further. My forehead pounded in my gut. The girl stood above me, looking over. She whispered little things. She pressed a thumbprint into my neck flesh. I dug through deeper layers, heaving the earth. My arms ached with the yearning.
The earth changed colors every inch: from one bright red bed where the earthworms had stopped wriggling; to the grayish murk of deadened roots; to the gray-blue glisten of long-hidden soil uncovered; then into the harder crusting, where the soil slipped from brown to heavy black, so thick and enriched I could hardly pry.
Then, there, hung in the deepest mud, I heard my brothers singing from below. Set in the gunk, the spackled crack of it, I heard a melody I knew I knew. It was a hymn Mom had once sung to each of us when we were young enough for her to knead. They were in there, them, my brothers, whose names I could now recite in order, packed in clay: Derry, Bill and Georgie (twins), Thomas, Freddy, Dennis, Phillip, Joseph, Richard, Sumner, Murphy, Jim.
And somewhere deeper, snug below them, I knew, my mother—Ann—her bad back creaking with the bruised spin of the earth.
And deeper still, perhaps, my father—David—that soft old man with whom I’d never had a final word.
I dug quicker now, something in me unsealing, seething, swum in the pummel of my blood.
FLESH
For one long hour that red morning: gristle, cartilage, tissue, tendon, vein, and bone. Some would try to gnaw the gray meat. Some would choke with fistfuls in their cheeks. Others knew better from the stinking. The bubble of the sky. I’d already burned what I remembered. I didn’t search long for their names: the heads and necks and cheeks of all these raining someones someone once had likely loved.
WATER DAMAGED PHOTOS OF OUR HOME BEFORE I LEFT IT
(1)A framed print of our family dressed in Sunday best — my father wears a bolo tie; my mother’s hair is teased. Our skin is tanned, unstretched and peachy, except for Tommy, who seems fevered. We’re all looking just off to the right; wide-eyed, brimmed, unblinking, hypnotized by something just out of the frame.
— The glass over this photo, slightly cracked, has allowed small splotches in, leaving beads of spreading moisture to warp us polka-dotted, pepper-fired.
(2)The plum tree in our front yard the morning after it was struck three times by lightning. The branches are scorched and scraggly, amputated, the trunk split right down the middle. I’d watched the conflagration from my bedroom window — Mom refused to let me on the porch. I could feel the heat kiss through the panes. The tree burned beneath a crumpled sky. By the time the men had doused the fire the entire yard was mostly black.
— Here only the handwritten caption has gone runny, my mother’s handwriting washed illegible.
(3)Tommy on his ninth birthday in the bottom bunk. His cheeks are puffed and ruddy. His lids are swollen shut. I am sitting on the ground beside him trying to coax a smile. I’d helped unwrap his only present — a toy shotgun, long as he was. He kept staring down the barrel. Later that same evening we’d find him still clenching it against his bright blue forehead with gnats already in his ears.
— This photo appears to have been crumpled before even the water: someone had hated to have to see. Major warping near the middle obscures Tommy’s chin and lips, though if I had to guess I’d say he’s smiling. I cut my head out of the photo with a pair of pinking shears.
(4)The neighbors’ dog with hair grown out so long he can hardly walk. His pupils shine deep inside the matting. The neighbors nowhere and not returning. My mother refused to let me bring him food: even trash scraps he could have choked down. He was starving. In the night the dog would scream. Soon dogs swarmed around in droves — entire packs with hair that dragged behind them, caught on trees. Their shedding clogged the gutters. The streets would quickly fill.
— The photo paper is ruffled, crackling — the sound of it stings my teeth.
(5)A wide shot of the fence my father built before his exit. He needed something to occupy the days after having been let go from the electric plant — my brother’s sickness had spread into him as well. Each day he worked from before dawn well on into dusk until he couldn’t see his hands. The wall was made of stone and stood higher than the house. You couldn’t see anything beyond it. If it hadn’t been for Mother’s nagging, he wouldn’t have bothered to leave a gate. When he was finished, he sat in the evenings on a stool an arm’s length from the wall, staring head on right into it, waiting for it to speak.