Matt Bell - Cataclysm Baby

I tell her how I see our once-daughter hugged by new parents.

I tell her how this girl has probably forgotten all about us.

How she’s never coming back. How that’s a kindness.

How instead of our daughter, we have chosen each other, and how I am sorry.

I tell her, The power will be restored any minute. They promised us.

This for that, I tell her. This for that is what they promised us.

I tell her, Stop crying. I tell her, Stop crying right now.

Perhaps only their mother could distinguish between the boys, could reckon their slight variations in weight, the distinct cervix-bends of their skulls. I never could, not when they appeared as three redheaded infants and not when they were toddlers, all dressed alike in the preference of my good and then gone wife.

As teenagers they each ate the same amount of porridge each morning, the same third of a meat-can at dusk, and even the first time I caught one masturbating, I caught all three, circled between their bunks, each mimicking the motion of another’s hands. Ditto drinking, ditto the glass-pipes, ditto the new milk-drawn drugs I’d never known before their schoolmaster called.

With their mandatory facemasks and goggles affixed, no one could tell my boys apart, but then no one could recognize anyone else either, not after the baggy state-issued jumpsuits, the preventative head-shavings.

Even after this handicapping, some people remained more charming than others, and if there was an attribute each of my sons possessed equally, it was charm.

All these excuses and more were given by the women in town after every wife and daughter and matron and maiden from fourteen to forty-five swelled with my sons’ oft-spilled spunk, with the fruits of their inseparable loins. Later it grew difficult to prove whose child each mother carried, amid whole seasons of confused houses packed with breaking bellies, those quick-sequenced summer and fall and winter months filled with spread legs, with the emptying of wombs, with new mothers seeking out my sons for shotgunned weddings and promises of child support.

Hidden away in my house, my sons now celebrate their success: This is how you start a dynasty, one says over family dinner, a meal eaten behind blackout curtains, barricaded doors.

A kingdom, says the next, then corrects himself. A franchise.

In a world that’s dying, says the third, isn’t this all sort of beautiful?

I ask you: What possible solution to these childbirths overpopulating this town with more redheaded babies, with fiery scalps awaiting the state-razor, whole streets lined with my sons’ progeny, with their strong genes wiping out the faces of their children’s mothers in deference to their own perfect jawlines?

How many babies are born before we realize that all their children are boys? That our town’s women are the past, thanks to my one-note issue, to their deadly sperm making deathly pregnancies, taking each of their partners the way of their own mother: blood-wet, breath-gasped, split-wombed, at best to linger, never to recover from the makings of their children?

Now these babies left behind. Now only me and my three sons, only us four shut-ins against a town full of adulterated widowers, of shamed cuckolds and seething fathers, all parading our yard, my many grandsons in tow.

Now the first babies being left on our doorstep. Now the rest, following soon after.

Now my walking out onto the front porch to see the rows and rows of abandoned twins and triplets, the exponential crop of my line.

What loud reverberations their hunger-cries make! What diaper-complaints, what pain, what suffering, and amid it always my boys, unfeeling for what they have done, and so what else to do but discipline again these three failed fathers, these three no-use sons of mine?

What next but to make them take up the scythe and the shovel, if they will not take up their right roles instead?

What point in anything else? What good fathering could boys as bad as they possibly do?

So at last their lesson in how to reap. And how to sow. And how, when there is nothing better, to plow the world back under.

The day came when we could no longer hide the glistening sight of our daughter’s flippers, nor the secret of her skin, its oils and fur.

Like the other parents afflicted before us, we took her to the lonely end of the island, to the cliffs hung high above the breaking surf. There my wife kissed our daughter’s wet nose, after which I bound tight her swaddling, stilling her wide limbs to her sleek middle, and then together we let our baby tumble from our hands, through the tall air, into the swallowing sea.

Afterward, what endeavors we undertook to forget, even as our guilty bodies tried again for some more right-birthed baby, even as our bodies proved unable to produce another—even as we entered this famished sea, this season of nets cast out and collected empty, until throughout our village every stomach was as hollowed as our crib.

And now these legs, walking me back to the cliff, my guilt-path worn through the jungle.

Now these eyes, watching the ocean crash its anger-fist upon the shore, a parade of knuckles on top of knuckles on top of knuckles.

Now this hurt-drowned heart, when I see how other times the ocean is flat like so much glass, like the unwalked beach below, its sand stormed upon, lightning-fused and mirror-smooth; when sometimes I catch my own face staring back from the water beyond.

Those waveless days, I see my face or a face like my face, but not the faces of the fish that once swam in those depths.

Our fish are gone, and our daughter too, and together her mother and I pray for some rewinding of waves, some reversal of what awful ripples we have made, so that our daughter might one day find her way to the flatter side of the island, to the yellow beaches, to the path leading to our small hut, our home meant once to be her home.

And if it happens? If our pup returns? Then what?

Then how: With anger? With forgiveness? With love?

Or with what thing we deserve instead, a new mood from our new daughter, dredged deep from the dark, rising slow and sure, purposed only to take us back down.

Even at birth they were already damaged, their brittle bones opened and crushed, powdered by their mother’s powerful organs, her pressing canal: All those thin ribs snapped and splintered upon the stainless steel of the operating room. All those skulls crooked and cracked, all those twisted greenstick limbs. We lifted each child out from the mother’s body and into surgeries of its own, did our best to splint and screw our prides together.

So few survived, and for what next chance? On what legs would they stand, with no milk to grow them strong except from the body that had already failed to make them so?

If only there was some other mother, some second receptacle for the babies we want so badly to make. But no, there is only me and my brothers, only this last-caught woman between us.

To quell my brothers’ anger, to beg their patience, I say, This woman may not be capable of producing what heir we need, but perhaps she may yet birth the one who might, if only one of her daughters lives to have a set of hipbones strong enough to better bear our advances.

I say, The end isn’t short, but long. And so always we must not rush, must be in no hurry.

And so we fill the mother with powdered milk, with canned peaches, with vitamin-paste squeezed from nearly empty tubes.

And so we fill her with meat.

Every new wish is followed by another waiting, followed by another failure: Push, we say, our voices speaking in unison, our wants aligned after a lifetime of bitterest division, of brotherly strife. Together, we make what we can make, and we save what we can save. Push, we say, and then comes this next baby born just as broken, its first cries already choked with the chalk of its bones. Its newborn everything else shattering into dust. This daughter-like reminder that not all birthed into this world shall see it reborn—and then again our determination, our willingness to try once more.