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

Here a third, one fist full of a rock chipped sharp, marked with the makings of the scalps worn ragged around his waist.

All these children, worse than I’d imagined, and then, fleeing from their brothers, those others more gentle, less prone to violence or at least less capable of carrying it out, and as I hid in the brush and the bramble I saw that there were perhaps three tribes forming loosely, banding together to parent themselves in the absence of better versions of ourselves. Each grouping had only the barest of identities, shifted and still mutable, and while it took my wife longer to see them I had no such difficulties. I observed our memories made flesh again, and as they returned some of them were killed again, and afterward more came to take their place, to become new killers or else again the victims, and while they were greater in number they were lesser in shape, just as the animals I’d trapped and skinned had returned, poorer for having crossed my path just once, and if this time it was not a bear that provided that mechanism then I did not know what else.

The foundlings were not all of one kind: The first were almost as the foundling I knew, their features taken from that face that held no relation to our own, to those of their supposed mother and father. That face was the foundling’s from his theft and transformation until his sixth birthday and the scarring of his face, and now it was easier for me to recognize its origins: Under his boyish skin, there was the face of the bear, high and sloped, with a squat nose, a mouth filled with too-early teeth.

Soon after these came other foundlings, more like the one I had known but lacking the wide range of the first: These all shared the same face, or closer to it, their variations of a smaller order, all just different ages of the remade foundling’s face, so much like my wife’s, remade as such after his scarring, his injury at my hands. These mother-faced children were bigger, but they were not big: Just as the foundling who came to me in the last days of our dirt was not as grown as his age should have rendered him, so these multitudes were hindered, shaped too small for their older voices, their developing adulthoods.

The last foundlings to appear at the tree line were something other, more raw potential than memory: It was only among their number that I counted some teenagers, and also some near-men as old as I was when I met my wife, before I moved farther past, into the endless years I now inhabited. No matter their age, these were the worst to behold, scarred and half shaped, for what they were made of was too slim to be a person. Some missed fingers, others limbs, even the parts of a face that made it a face instead of some other, dumber appendage.

It was these children that were the most dangerous, violent in their wrongness, and often I found one of their number dead upon the fresh-stomped paths or else one of the other children ended by their hands. Soon I walked the woods always with my shovel so that I might bury these children before my wife saw them—although perhaps she never would have, since she did not venture as far as I did, did not go past the more-adoring children at the woods’ edge. It was only I who went deep, who interred again the dead, and who slunk all day through the thickets, searching for what my wife, now ignorant in her innocence, could not search for: the child with the right song, with the full knowledge of the elements, with the combination of the two that might save us.

Often I was sneaky in my observations, but other times fits of coughing gave away my presence, or else my cramps left me immobile upon the forest floor, easy prey for the taking, and while the worst of the foundlings had not yet cornered me in such a state, still I watched them grow braver, approaching, and in their eyes I saw some memory of my own, of the way I felt the first time I stalked toward a still-living deer, trapped in my traps.

My fear then? That one day the foundlings would pass the threshold of their hesitance, as I myself had when confronted with that thrashing buck, all those years ago.

THE RULE THAT PROTECTED USinside the house, upon the dirt around it: Despite their growing numbers, the foundlings still could not leave the woods. At dusk I observed how they withdrew deeper into the woods, hiding far from the tree line, but still I often lay awake, wrapped in my blankets beside my wife’s bed, listening for the day the foundlings found some way to overcome their reluctance, as the bear eventually had.

But then one night I heard a new sound instead, a humming made by many voices, far off in the dark: not a song but rather a single note, thrummed out of their many throats, one I recognized, remembered.

This single note, possessed by all? I thought perhaps it was the last note of the song the foundling had used to raise me, a tone able to restart my heart upon the floor of the first house: What they hummed, it was not nearly that song entire, but if they had one note now, then perhaps they would produce more later, and although I knew better I went out of the house and back onto the dirt, back down the path to the woods, and what I saw there was only the empty darkness between the trees, filled not with bodies but with this sound, a child fragmented into noise, and upon my knees I closed my eyes before the buzzing hum, and from the dirt side of the tree line I let it stain me with its promise.

What day was it when my wife and I returned to the tree line together, still hand in hand, as we had taken to walking? What hour was it when we found the woods choked full with children, with all the possibilities of her child, made here into an army of flesh roiling at the tree line, no longer clothed in the white garments they had made from what we had buried, instead pressed naked at the edge of the trees?

What memories we had buried were exhausted now, consumed by what had come after, and still my wife wanted to go to them, cried out as I held her back, because my wife did not see what I saw.

Wanting again to mother, she saw only their nakedness, heard only their cries for her, for any other mother that might appear. I saw and heard that too, but I keened also what waited behind those fronted foundlings, the bear-children, the child-bears, the stained-mouth children who had fashioned their own clothes from a material that could only be their brothers, dead somewhere in the wood and now skinned, and how I gagged to spy it, and this was no way for a mother to see her children, no way for children to act in front of their mother.

It took all the strength left upon my old bones to drag my wife from that tree line, thrashing against my sick grip when the foundlings began to wail, when they cried to her, calling out not the single syllable of her true name, which only I still used, but the joined sounds of her maternal title, the one she once wished to be called instead.

My easily exhausted wife went limp in my arms, and I lifted her off the dirt, carried her away from the woods. Inside the house she fought me again, and I fought her too, dragged her through our rooms, her wrists in my wrists and her legs kicking out, kicking away at every table, at every other furniture, until all surfaces along our path toppled, spilled their contents, filled the house with the shatter of their breakage. When I reached the bedroom, I pushed her inside, and before she could turn back I shut the door and set my weight against it, and when I had it steady I turned my key in the lock, locked her in that room as she had once locked me.

I set my mouth against the door’s thick plank, and through the wood I said, You say you are their mother, but you do not even remember their first face.