The words I could not somehow pass to baby. I’d wield a ball and call its name, coo it cutely for my young one, B-A-L–L, and he’d shriek back, KA-KEESH!
I’d put a finger to my forehead and say, MOMMY, and my child, taller than me, went: PAWOOO PAWEEEE!
Stubborn, like his father, with the straight white teeth to match.
The things I knew he’d never be.
There was something ever coming, I said inside me, and it does not have a name.
At night I locked the front door and watched for hours through the peep. I locked the door that blocked the hallway and the one leading to my room.
So many doors forever. There never were enough.
Each door had several locks.
One lock was combination. Another required keys. Another was simple slide-latch. Another was strictly ornamental.
Another you could open by whispering the right thing to it at the right time, which is the type of lock most humans have.
CATERPILLAR
They slung in wriggling ropes of segmented flesh: fat and spiny, bright with mold. Some squirmed big as my forearm. Some small enough to creep inside an ear. I’d never seen so much color. The leaves of trees were eaten, stranding craning skeletons in midsummer. Those who’d thought to brave the hail and made it now stayed indoors, their skins lesions with teethmarks. Bronze tanks patrolled the city. There was nightly concern over what to eat. You could imagine anything infested. Bugs showed up nestled in every crevice: in the bed sheets, in the oven. Some nights I just chewed the clumps out from my nails. I heard of an old man buried in his basement. I heard of young ladies smothered in their sleep. Fat cysts and burrowed nodules and red growths of sludge. No skin was safe. No simple evening. The national rate of suicide quadrupled. Sale of aspirin, rope, and razor blades became condemned. Other ways became more messy: one night a hundred dove off some skyscraper hotel. People began to wonder what _____ wanted. The airwaves filled with preaching: how to repent; what might save us; whom to look to; what to think. At night you could practically hear the low sound of our prayer, a billion lips all mumbling together into themselves. Meanwhile, by now, the cities lay covered in chrysalis, silken tents stretched across expressways, over homes. Our front door sealed shut with hive building. The cocoons crushed each time a thing moved. We waited. We blink-eyed through the night. In the end, the great unveiling: ten billion butterflies humming in the sun, fluttering so loud you couldn’t think.
TELEVISION MILK
Moths and blackbirds flooded the front yard. The trees uprooted, clogged with smoke. Someone was out there somewhere. We’d been waiting for forever. Downstairs the kids were naked, screaming with TV. They heard language in the bad transmission. In recent days it’d told them to shit straight on the floor. It told them to rip their clothes up, break our mirrors, lock me upstairs in the bedroom. My husband’s scalp now hung from the ceiling along with several hundreds skins of local cats. In the long night you could hear them squealing. You could hear the children’s chortle. They made cat meat casserole, cat meat salad, fur flambé. They fed me through the keyhole.
Dan and I had once felt love. We’d made three sons — blonde heads each, like his, six endless blue eyes. They began as sweet boys with careful manners. I did what I could do to keep them near. Before the schools closed I’d been very active in the PTA. Sometimes I subbed for their gym classes, which made them blush. The school’s halls wormed with stabbing, maggots, grease, collapse, and homemade bombs. One boy in our neighborhood had his eye out. You should have seen what grew back in.
I didn’t want my children to grow up frightened, unprepared. We enrolled them in karate. We bought them safety helmets, pugils, latex gloves and boots and masks. Dan wrote out lectures to read aloud before dinner, new forewarnings. His voice contained a smidge of squeak, a female banter, yet he still seemed to command the boys’ attention. Sometimes he had to use his hands.
I‘d always dreamt of becoming Mother. As a child myself I slept surrounded: a billion plastic babies, each with a name. I would make them kiss and lay against me. I’d whisper them my want. I’d been afraid, as I got older, that I’d never meet the proper man. That I’d end up old and alone with no one nowhere. In the night I clasped my hands. I prayed. I asked. I asked. I looked. I watched. I praised. I found. Though Dan hadn’t been quite what I expected — balding and broke and older — he filled me full. He warmed my mind. He’d known the proper times to say the proper things.
In the end his blood had run all black and made another pattern on the carpet.
We’d made these babies despite the way at night the sky seemed drooping; the way sometimes the air hung thick as mud; so many buildings everywhere gone tilted, smothered, sucked into the earth or slung with sludge.
The TV static made our house vibrate. My teeth rattled at my brain.
The children let me out around the time for dinner and brought me downstairs to milk. It’d been several years since I’d nursed but somehow my glands could still produce. At first it’d taken some coaxing, a pinch, a punch, a howl, but eventually they had me gushing. I fed them each one after another, oldest to youngest, one by one.
Joey came on voracious, always starving. His skin was turning yellow. He blamed me for our trouble finding food. He gripped my left breast like a baseball.
Tum — awkward and fumbly, just near an age he might have begun to dream of women — he took my nipple in his mouth with his arms crossed over his chest, eyes anywhere but on me.
The youngest, Johnson, was losing his baby teeth so his was the easiest to handle. His mouth was soft and loose and nuzzled my areola without pain. Sometimes, when the other brothers had run off, he even let me hold him in the parcel of my lap and coo and clasp and hum a song. He’d always been the momma’s boy beyond his brothers, the love-lump I could nudge.
That night, though, he couldn’t keep me down. He kept hacking my milk across the carpet. His eyes were puffy. His teeth seemed slanted. He batted at my neck with fury in his eyes.
“Stop it,” I said. “Be good.”
He bit my nipple and I bled.
After feeding, we went into the living room and my boys tied me to the sofa. They’d caught Dan on the escape—he hadn’t warned me even with a premonition — he’d slipped into the night. The bonds gripped tight across my forearms, causing flesh to web and redden. The TV went on screeching. Their pupils bulged in crystal puddles. The stinging waves of whir flooded and coursed all through my babies’ eyes. I watched them watch till they were giddy-tired and then they came to sit around me on the floor. They demanded I tell stories of the way things were before.
As always, I took off on my childhood — how in the mornings behind my father’s shed I’d walk until I couldn’t see anything around me but long grass; how I’d lay down in the grass and look up at the ceiling of the sky and imagine being lifted off into the wide white flat nothing, my hair fluttering around my head, a mask, and every thought of scratch or ache or shudder washed out of me into air.
They didn’t want to hear about that.
I went on about the circus—the time I saw a man remove his head—the zoo—where babies grew in cages—McDonald’s—god, their value meals, what now? — I told them about anything I could think of that had been good once — anything that made me sting.
“Shut up and talk about TV,” Tum said, slurring, his neck bulged fat with mold.
So I went on about my programs, before the channels all washed out. I told about our last game shows—men in mud suits, grappling for food—soap operas—stretched to ribbons, the women bright orange and super-sewn—the weather channel—fat with layers, so many minor screens embedded into that one page, so small you couldn’t see—the nightly news—I won’t even say—all the talk shows with people screaming who was whose daddy and eating pills and throwing fists.