Matt Bell - In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

All around me was the squid, and all around the squid was the black of our ink, my own personal black, a trap carried for so long so that it might snare the bear, so that within it the squid might drag her down, and I wondered then: Did she remember the first squid, in the lake above, how he too showed her the bottom of his lake? How there he promised her its future?

Did she realize that future had happened, and that here at last it was at its end, the last of the present, the beginning of the forever-past, and the bear was no human woman anymore, no bear-mother either, but some other thing, adversary made killer made legend: And although I might have felt remorse at the killing of a woman, how could I feel the same for a myth, this unlovable story?

We sensed only the slightest resistance as our hooks swung through the slice of space between the bear’s head and neck, just a small snag and then another as those sharp edges dragged through the windpipe and the jugular and the carotid, and then the squid pushed forward, shoved our head into that space as another squid had entered into my chest, and with our beak we tore the bear until a loud rising of air filled the water, then pink foam, then black, and then and then and then, and then to be the squid and to have the squid be me, to together be a hunter who had hunted: to swim unflinched as the bear jerked inside our embrace, then to feel her loosen, limp out. And after we finished tearing loose her throat, then we released her bulk to swim arcing away, so that her unblubbered bones might slowly sink, burdened by the heavy weight of the many fingerlings, their shapes come hungry to feed.

WHAT ACCOMPANIED US THEN BUTa child’s cacophony, the fingerling’s voice not one speech but a thousand, a thousand thousands, all together the sound of a break, and of a fracture. I had given him an innumerable number of pains, and he had returned to me the same, and now all of those hurts would own the depths of this lake, would feed on the bear for as long as it took to take her inside their many mouths, and so at least he would possess the mother he had wished to possess, as much as I had possessed him.

As I swam, I wanted to call out to the fingerlings, all the many schools fluttering around. I wanted to speak to them, but not to give them commands, not fatherly warnings or threats or pleas or admonishments. At last I wished to offer only names, all the names we had meant to give our many children. I wanted to give the fingerling what he had long ago asked me for, but I had no human mouth and so could offer nothing more, and anyway it was nothing he gave me back, neither satisfaction nor forgiveness nor a surface on which to attach my sadness, my relief. Whatever forms the fingerling next took on, none would be my son, and not my wife’s either. The fingerling had gone too far already, even though it had been only minutes since our separation, the annulment of our sharing the space within my shape. Now he had taken his leave of me and I of him, and whoever next heard his many voices would not be me.

The squid gathered the foundling in our two largest tentacles, our strongest arms, then in powerful spurts jetted us back to the shallows, where I could again stand, become the husband, and in my arms the foundling became the son, the only son. As I came out of the water I came out of the squid too, and as a man I smelled the foundling’s death differently, took in the decay that had rushed forward from the restarting of the clock. Upon the shore was my satchel, its strap cut from my back by the bear’s last blow, and as I gathered it up I smelled it too, the two bearskins within it. All felt foul and also fouled, and I could feel the wrongness of their long carryings, my keeping them from the grave or the pyre or the lake. I had brought these as offerings for my wife, but what good thing was I bringing?

A corpse and the coverings of corpses.

To the very end, I had always been the weakest one, and yet it was only I who had gone on and on. Among all the unfair worlds in which we lived, all the other elements had fallen and failed, and still there was me, still there was husband . Now here I was, arrived, alone—and always it was in my loneliness that I had best survived—and in the next moment the front door of the house opened, and from that portal out stepped my wife, but not the wife I had known.

I EMERGED FROM THE LAKEto see her standing in the doorway of her house, the house that was only hers, so much like the one that had been ours. My wife lingered half in and half out, her hands clenched against the doorframe, that bordered threshold between the dirt and the house, and as I jerked my body up the path I saw even at that distance how the muscles of her face made her mouth to move, but also how no words escaped. With the foundling in my arms, I hurried as best my ruin would allow, and as I walked I rang out her name, voiced it forth into the air, made the shape of its three letters, vowel and consonant and vowel again.

I called her as she was called, but she gave no sign that she heard, or that if she heard she recognized the name, and when I called again her only response was alarm, perhaps fear: at my presence, at the sight of the foundling and me together, pathed from the lake to the house. As I got closer, I saw she had been changed as I had been changed, not just by age but by some other circumstances too: Where once she had looked the part of a woman I had known, now she was fevered into some new person, a scorched wife. As the foundling had described, there had been a fire lit within her, and while it had not consumed her flesh it had filled her with its heat, so that she could wear no clothes, so that her pale skin was darkened like burned and crackled paper, and her hair was become white, robbed of its pigment. And no matter what I said, still my wife did not speak, still she did not say a single word.

This last memory of my long search, memory as failure, as failure, a faltering: To scream her name again. To kneel before her, and then to lay prostrate at her smoking feet. To thrust wildly at the air with her single syllable, that balanced word, that unanswered name savaged with disuse. To kneel, holding the foundling, rocking his shrouded shape, unable to make my wife accept what had been brought.

To want already for that moment to be over but to fear that afterward there would be only worse moments to come. And so to still be the husband and to be the father but to have neither role acknowledged and in this absence of expected station to want for time to stop again, but to know that clockless hours were gone for good.

UPON THE PORCH, ALL OFme dripped, gushed, my naked wounds made known before my transformed wife: The trap-crushed ankle throbbed again with the wrongness of its healing, and without the fingerling’s support the bear-wrenched shoulder hung crooked from its socket, and while those old wounds cried first it was the most recent that spoke loudest. The blood from that wound streaked, streamed around the almost-aligned knuckles of my spine, over my gooseflesh and old scars. Damaged breath wheezed from between the small remnants of my teeth, and as I sucked more air to say her name again I dizzied, my vision all sparks.

I did not know what other words to say, and so I said her name, said it until I was emptied of its sound, and then when I was hoarse and breathless I breathed it back in, and all I wanted in return was for her to speak some part of what I had come so far to hear: my own name returned, perhaps, or else an accusation, best followed by the terms of my eventual forgiveness.

Only after I quieted myself did she crouch down beside me, sinking her knees into the pool of my leaking.

She took my face between her hot hands, and then holding my cheeks—and then the smell of singed beard, of steamed tears—and then holding me, she said, Who are you?