Amber Sparks: May We Shed These Human Bodies

After her daughter has left the mother picks up the pad, reads her daughter’s neat, angry notes scattered like shouts across the page. DAD, thunders the notepad. HEART IN SWIM POOL! AND GOOD!! WHAT ABOUT HOUSE? FIND OUT!!! The last sentence — the extreme imperative — underlined three times.

I don’t want the house, the mother tells Anderson Cooper.

I know, he says, I know. You never want anything, do you? He approaches the couch, begins removing the rubble that surrounds the mother, as if she were a small child to be salvaged. Remain seated, he says courteously. Be saved.

The sister doesn’t live on the moon. But she might as well. She lives on the 41st floor of an enormous building, in a tiny apartment surrounded by quiet carpets and nice older couples. They bake her cookies and brownies and bread and tell her to eat, eat. She eats but can’t swallow, speaks but can’t spit out the words. They clog like the food in her throat and it always reminds her of how she tried but couldn’t wedge her fingers between the nylon and her neck, the way they always do on TV. It was dark and she couldn’t see, but she managed, just before the sirens sounded, to put a long deep scratch down the side of his face.

Here on the 41st floor, men sometimes shimmer into being, like dreams skating soundlessly through the apartment. She meets them all with calm posture, violent headaches. She knows she is supposed to be enjoying her youth and her body and men in her youthful body. But every man that appears, her eyes linger on his cheeks. She brings only beardless men to bed.

Late at night when they are sleeping, she licks her finger and scrubs hard at their skin, just to be sure. Just to be certain of the smooth terrain.

The daughter finds it is getting harder to say no. The world keeps asking, and she is, if not kind, at least polite. She has been brought up to believe refusal as rude as spitting. So she caves at last and says, fine. Fine. I’ll make a baby. Because the approval of the world is important to her. The world’s approval tastes like chocolate cake with butter cream frosting, which is, after all, her favorite.

So she heads down to the basement, drags out the dinged-up toolbox, sets up the sawhorses and puts plastic over the floor. She straps on her safety goggles and makes sure the cats are locked out, so they won’t get curious about the circular saw. Then she switches on the power and picks up her tools, and she builds a baby.

She builds him out of pine, with a toggle up the middle so he’ll stand up straight. She hammers blocks into the corners of the boards to hold him together. Then she nails unbleached muslin to his frame, and uses waterproof paints to give him her black hair, her brown eyes, her small stubby hands and her mauve-and-white skin. She paints some baby clothes on him for decency: blue coveralls with yellow ducks lined up across the front, and a navy t-shirt matched with navy socks and navy plaid boaters. She sets him up in the front window, so the world can see him and know he is perfect and hers.

But the cats don’t like him. They keep nosing at him and scratching his back with their claws, until his supports finally go and he falls to the floor in a flat cloud of sawdust. The cats take turns peeing on the baby’s mauve-and-white face until it is mauve-and-white-and-goldenrod instead.

The daughter watches, disgusted. The baby doesn’t cry or laugh or move. What kind of baby is this? The daughter looks out the window and sees the world pointing, calling names, laughing at a woman who couldn’t make a baby that would last. The daughter wonders what it would be like to love a thing you made, a thing that was you in so many ways and yet not you in all the ways that matter most. She wonders what it would be like, to live with love. To live with even just the hope of something like it.

The Wives Are Turning into Animals

The husbands are almost sure of it. They have strong memories of an earlier time, of the wives with soft smooth faces and ten fingers and toes.

But lately, things have changed. Some of the wives have grown scaly patches, or sprouted thick pelts. Some of the wives have shrunk considerably. White, wide wings have unfolded, horns have appeared, tongues have grown longer and rougher and pinker, noses wetter and more sensitive than before.

The husbands have grown uneasy at night, listening to the wheezing and snorting of the wives as they sleep, as they embrace their husbands with tentacles and talons and long tails. The husbands aren’t sure what to do, whether to say something. They wonder if it would be rude to ask about the wives’ new appetites, their sudden hunger for mice and mealworms and raw, wriggling fish. They worry that they won’t be able to keep their ravenous wives fed. They worry that the neighbors will complain about the carcasses littering their lawns.

The husbands worry, most of all, that their wives will finally fly or crawl or swim away, untethered from the promises that only humans make or keep.

Father

He is too fond of the child, for all the wrong reasons. He hangs success higher and higher, a star out of reach, hoping this will expand the child's capacity for wishing. But the child never looks up at the night sky. Sirius lopes along unseen, Canopus steers his ship in vain. The child is firmly rooted to the earth. Her eyes are a steady lantern; they light the way over the rough and raw terrain.

Mother

She washes the child every night, a scrawny thing white and smooth as the tub she stands in. The child shivers and goose pimples pop up all over her paper skin, over dark purple veins, mauve pools under the young/old eyes. The mother understands that her child is special; as she towels off the drops of wet she tells the child, You are a thin strong weed, born to rule. You were born to take care of us. You were born to take care of us all.

Child

The child is wiser than her parents, as all children are. The child understands the world is made of disappointment. Nothing the child wants has ever come to pass since the earliest days; once the child's desires grew more complex the world began to say no, and has kept on saying no ever since.

People say spoiled and the child does not understand, the child can never understand. People say spoiled and what they really mean is the innocence of children, and what they really mean is something that does not exist, has never existed, will never exist as long as there are years to stretch a life into and no way to stop the stretching.

Home

A house, a hut, a village, a mound, a grove, a flat, an apartment, an alley, a meadhall, a basement, a condo, a truck, a car, a trailer, a dirt floor, a castle, a thatched cottage, a church, a sanctuary, a stronghold, a storefront, a hospital, a park bench, a bed, a grave.

Growth

Love, fear, and habit. Three things that will grow in you and hold you fast, no matter the chemical makeup of your soul. They will be stubborn tumors in the dank dark of your insides. No matter how your beleaguered blood tries to expel them.

Heart

A fist in your face; a red, rotten face in your chest. It tells things. It told the mother she would be better loved elsewhere, told the father he'd never really loved her at all. It told the child she would bask in the warmth of the cities we build, but also that she would burn in their ruins. This was the saddest part of the story, this discovery.

The heart said, Child, you will wander the world and bring happiness to all you meet, and the world will make you its favorite daughter. But even you must come to an end. And this is the terrible prophecy that we hold close and secret. This is the always-whisper in our ear.