x Tx: Billie the Bull

The Great Barrier Reef (1,243 miles)

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Volcano (9,600 cubic miles [volume])

General Sherman, a giant Sequoia (275’)

Blue Whale (110’, 172 metric tons)

African Bush Elephant (12 tons)

Red Kangaroo (6’3″, 220 lbs.)

Giraffe (19’3”)

Southern Elephant Seal (11,000 lbs., 22.5’)

Flemish Giant Rabbit (28 lbs.)

Eastern Lowland Gorilla (500 lbs., 6’)

Saltwater Crocodile (16’, 3,000 lbs.)

Green Anaconda (23’, 550 lbs.)

Leatherback Sea Turtle (9’, 2,050 lbs.)

Ostrich (9’, 345 lbs.)

Chinese Giant Salamander (6’, 140 lbs.)

Largest book (5’x7’, 133 lbs.)

Largest motorcycle (11’x 20’, 6,500 lbs.)

Largest burger (123 lbs. [80 lb. patty, 30 lb. bun, 160 slices of cheese])

(Before the bull is put into the ring, he is prepared.)

Billie Marcus cradles the larger one in arms made only for him. He settles safe in a crook that fits his growing arc. She can already see how his feet are beginning to test the skin of his shoes. His legs, his arms, won’t be far behind. She will need to get sewing again.

The growing comes in painful waves; of this she is well aware. He turns infrequently in his sleep, but when he does it is with an unintentional strength and muffled noise like the growling of a feral dog. When his body jolts, she holds strong. Repercussions of a weaker grip from a smaller mother echo in her memory; Billie winces.

Her smaller one, so baby-bird-pitiful lies lonesome on the floor. Some blankets. Safer. From the beginning she felt she would break him, but this was what she was given. This is what she would live; as she must with everything else.

The smaller one fit well in his easy thrift store clothes, second-hand shoes. His feet won’t force the fit. His feet, she knew, would take their time before making new ways; and when they did, it would be nothing unusual, nothing special; blue skies of shelves of everything for that one. No struggles will mark his path, nothing like the sufferings the one in her lap will come against.

He sleeps with the noise of a pin, tucked into the wood of the floor.

Worthless.

When the restlessness of the larger one settles into quiet slumber, only then can she close her eyes. She sinks into the two walls of the church that make up their sleeping corner. The last vestiges of her gaze upon the two strong doors that keep them safe.

The man is Indian, from India. His brow furrows while his hands work. His hands weave colored fabric made from the threads of the downy hairs of unborn children; harvested from a source known only to him. The colored fabric spits out on the other side of his loom in large folds. The pile is high; hours worth of labor. Every so often, sweat from the man’s brow drips onto the threads, making him one with his fabric. Short of investing his blood, this fabric cannot be less of who he is.

He is a weaver. His father was a weaver; his father’s father also a weaver. His three sons will be weavers. Every day they put their small hands up to his and frown with disappointment.

“Why can’t I weave now Papa?” they ask.

“When your fingertips reach mine, then it will be your time to weave,” he tells them.

When he sees the skin of his sons’ fingers, he is reminded of how hands are born; smooth, thin, delicate. His hands are no longer that of a child’s. They’ve evolved to look like a weaver’s hands, thick and fat with calluses; a product of a life’s labor. There is pride in these hands.

On Sundays the weaver brings his cloth to market. He charges a high price which nobody haggles with because it is well worth the cost. People come from afar to buy his cloth. It is renowned.

At the end of the day, his booth is always empty. He puts the money into a pouch at his waist. This money will care for his family. This money keeps them alive.

At the crest of the last hill the weaver must climb in order to reach his home, he is robbed and murdered. The thief, careless with hurry, leaves two coins behind in the sand.

Each of his sons will carry one of these coins with them until the day that they die.

One month later, in a land undefined and boundless, in a house filled with many things, The Collector’s Finderman presents to him with a beverage that cleans, polishes, whitens, and straightens teeth, a Bonsai raisin tree, and 12 yards of an exquisite, rare, woven fabric from India, made from the hair of unborn children.

“Well done,” The Collector says, plucking a raisin from the tiny tree.

“What would you like me to do with this fabric?” the Finderman asks.

The Collector pops the raisin into his mouth and chews silently. He reads the label on the bottle of Liquid Dentist. He swallows.

“Dog pants,” he says. “Make some pants for the favorites of my smallest dogs.”

There is a hesitant pause as the thoughts of the Finderman revert back to the weaver: those sons with their treasured coins.

“Yes sir,” says the Finderman.

“Oh, and any progress on my most wanted?”

The Finderman stops, drops his head, lifts it again. “No. Not yet sir. But, as always, I will press on.”

“Very good. I cannot rest until then.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Collector makes his way past the chairs and tables and lamps to a corner he considers quiet. It keeps The Scroll of Records. From underneath a pillow he frees the end of the scroll. It spits forth, spilling to the floor. He tells the scroll, “Liquid Dentist, Bonsai Raisin Tree, exquisite, rare fabric made from the hair of unborn children,” and for the smallest moment the list is three items shorter. Within that instant The Collector feels a stir deep inside him that feels like the word “almost”, but before he can put a name to it the empty spaces are again filled, reading the needs still lodged in his mind.

The Collector sighs before giving the scroll a gentle tug. It retracts back into the cushions with a whoosh and a snap.

Hands and feet, Billie dreams. Legs, arms, fingers, toes in the sizes she hardly remembers. Barely. In this vision she harbors them with a cling that cements warm to her insides; savoring. They will be floating soon, fleeting; even as she dreams she knows this, as she’s dreamed this dream before. It recurs tortuously, inflicting and inflicting. How it feels to be dainty. She caresses the tiny bits of skin with her dream-version bits of skin: treasures of never becoming. She runs through fields taking an hour, not minutes, to traverse. Her face looks at the bottom branches of trees. She wades knee deep through streams. She cannot catch animals with her hands. She scares nothing. She calls to the bears and wolves, waiting to be vulnerable. “Chase me!” She runs and trips, feet catching not crushing. Her fall disturbing nothing. “Where are you? Come bears! Come wolves! I am a morsel!” A scream, a laugh, a spin, all of them a baby’s squeak she will never tire of. She picks flowers under a blue and pink sky, her fingers pinching the delicate stems, her teardrop nostrils only allowing in the smell. She becomes the sky; a white bird with wings; the sky again. She is a whisper, weightless and so very small.

(While the crowd waits, the bull has wet newspapers stuffed into his ears and Vaseline rubbed into his eyes to blur his vision and cotton stuffed up his nostrils to cut off his respiration and a needle stuck into his genitals. A strong caustic solution is also rubbed onto his legs, which will help to throw him off balance. In addition to this, drugs are administered to pep him up or slow him down, and strong laxatives are added to his feed to further incapacitate him.)