Gutshot (11 page)

It was a nasty set of tricks to play, but truly she chose her destiny throughout. The curse we sent arrived in the form of a line of ants marching in from the swinging glass door and heading for her ankle like they smelled honey under her skin. We watched them shrink as they approached her, to pinpoints and smaller, so small that she wouldn’t feel them when they sped over sneaker and bunched sock onto her bare skin, finding individual hairs and pushing into her pores.

She felt them soon enough. We imagined it was like sensing her blood was moving independent of bodily whim, which must have felt ticklish in an unsettling interior way. She reached over and clutched Morris so hard that we squealed. The ladies at the clinic were acquainted with dramatics but they weren’t prepared for Mother’s violent dance. One of them came around the counter and restrained her with both hands. The women looked into one another’s eyes and Mother started crying out of pure shame.

The woman gathered her up and said, “You twinsies follow us.” It was rude of her to deny us our intricacy, and in response we caused a small blaze among the paperwork on her desk. The fire was large enough to startle the desk staff and waste a pitcher of water. We were thrilled at our new and exciting control.

We were brought to a checkup room and the woman went back to attend to the mess on her desk. Without delay a doctor arrived and ignored Mother in favor of examining the stretched web of baby skin connecting our arms to the shared hand. “I’ve heard about you,” he said, smiling at us. This pleased us immensely and we saw to it that his dinner that night would be delicious. Morris nuzzled the doctor’s hand.

Mother gripped the table, her blood surely writhing. We started to feel a little bad about it, but there was nothing to do but wait until the ants shrank to a cellular level. They would remain, their antennae a swaying villi mass in her small intestine, but she might not be so discomforted. The doctor was asking us about how we dressed and slept and Phillip was explaining the shared seats and tailored shirts while she thrashed.

“Remove these demons,” she cried, terribly hoarse.

The doctor glanced at her file and put it down. “I’m not sure how to begin,” he said, producing an otoscope to examine our ears. “Your record notes a rash and hair loss, but I wouldn’t jump to any conclusion that involves a demon or demons.”

“These boys—” she said, before Morris touched her with a gentle hand and removed her ability to speak. She jabbed at us, and we focused our thoughts until the blackness on her nail spread. Finger and nail dropped onto the floor like a crust of bread. The sick spread from her finger to her arm and she watched it, weeping in pantomime. The doctor began testing our reflexes with a rubber mallet and marveling at the transference of reflex.

“I wonder sometimes what it would be like to have a sons,” the kind doctor said. We laughed and laughed!

Blood

Your boyfriend’s dad taught us how to explode mosquitoes. All you needed to do, he explained, was flex your arm and some mechanism would lock the insect to expand until it burst. Your boyfriend’s dad was a contractor who worked on places in the neighborhood and lived on a street lined with unfinished homes. He said that all we’ve got is our minds and our muscle and so we ought to know how to use both. He would jab at your arm and say Isn’t that right, Joshua? And you would laugh and rub the back of your neck and agree that he was right.

The neighborhood was the type where all the houses went up at once, so fast that their wood all surely came from the same trees, sheetrock from the same stone. You let me tag along with you and your boyfriend and sometimes he gave me ten dollars to get us some cheeseburgers.

We tried the thing with the mosquitoes for months, skipping the sprays and creams that might ward them off. We never saw them get us. We were pocked with welts that stung under tanning oil. I remember running across unfinished rooftops, jumping from house to house, but that wasn’t right. It was your boyfriend’s dad who did that and only once, striding a gap onto a garage extension to avoid climbing down and climbing back up. He was strong and cocksure, and seemed fairly confident in his own immortality. I’m still attracted to any man who can whistle.

Your boyfriend was all right. He played the violin. The three of us were lying on a roof once and he said that after death your consciousness snaps out and that’s all. I thought he had fallen asleep. You said that when you died you wanted your ashes cast into marbles and distributed to your family. I would get the one that looked most like a galaxy, and your boyfriend would get the second. If anyone died, you said, it wouldn’t be one of us. He shrugged and said it didn’t matter either way. We climbed down and looked at the beams where one of the guys had drawn maybe one thousand separate pairs of tits. I was reading a book in school about a girl who folded paper cranes and so this made sense.

*   *   *

The three of us rode our bikes to the community pool and watched the girls playing tennis. I always found three or four spokey dokes for my bike in the playground by the court, the plastic nibs half buried like they had grown there. We once broke a ramp constructed at the base of a hill for our red wagon and that was the worst thing that happened to any of us, as far as I knew or cared. The idea that everything was fine laid the delicate foundation of my life.

You figured out the mosquito trick right at the end of the summer, before you went to high school and I stayed with the little kids. It was the sweet spot of August and almost my birthday. We were sitting in a half-finished house at the time, drawing in the wood dust on the concrete, when you called my name and I saw it was stuck in your arm, at the prime point of your bicep, placid and feeding, swelling like a tick. Once it burst we shouted with joy. We spread its mess around with our fingers. Afterward I would wonder why the mosquito didn’t fight harder against your skin, why it didn’t strain to free itself, if it maybe knew how special you were.

Precious Katherine

The doctor chewed on his lower lip as he worked. “That explains it,” he said.

Mark and the doctor looked into the metal pan together, in which a lump of bloody tissue rested, plain as the afternoon and free from Mark’s anesthetized shoulder.

“I don’t see it,” Mark said.

“There it is.”

They leaned in close. The tissue was perforated by white flecks and a ribbon of darker stuff.

“There’s a nearly functional endocrine system here.” The doctor ticked up a tag of flesh. “Explains your mood swings. There’s a little heart, right there. And look,” he said, coming away with one of the white flecks balanced on his blade. He held it up to the light.

“A tooth,” Mark said.

The doctor clapped him on the back. “After all that, a goddammed resorption. Never thought I’d see one outside a book.” He gave the pan a gentle shake, revealing a rib cage as delicate as a bird’s.

“Can I keep it?” Mark asked.

“Her,” said the doctor, snapping off his surgical glove. “I mean, technically. I’ll get you a jar.”

*   *   *

Mark tried buckling the jar into the passenger seat but it slipped too much against the belt. It rolled too loose in the glove compartment against the car-care manuals, and so he held it between his legs as he drove, snug against his jean’s crotch.

At home, he cradled the jar. The doctor had filled it with a fluid that suspended the mass without dissolving it. Observing the contents, Mark was reminded of a time he went fishing and found himself sitting close to a slop bucket of fins and eyes.

He called his mother. “When you were pregnant with me, did they say you were going to have twins?”

“Of all the items you could have addressed,” she replied and hung up.

Though he was proud of it, he didn’t want to display the jar on the mantel like a trophy buck. Instead, he placed it on the sill in his kitchen. On fine mornings he enjoyed standing at this window and observing the sparrows on the rail, and now he had a companion.

The afternoon sun caught the curves of glass and sent an array of soft light through the jar and into the room, making both the jar and the room beautiful. It seemed wrong to leave the contents unnamed, as a mass of tissue or a fetus, but equally wrong to give them a kind of birth name, for they had not been born in any traditional sense.

“But you were birthed,” Mark said. “I birthed you, and you came to include a jar and an amount of liquid. And so I will call all of you Katherine, after my mother.” The cloudy fluid revealed a section of spinal cord floating like a salt-stained twig. Outside, one of the sparrows flung itself into the snow and died.

*   *   *

The winter sun had been kind to Katherine, but the warmth of spring was too aggressive. Mark touched her one morning and found she was warm indeed, enough to be in danger, and so he moved her to his bedside table. She was kept in good company there, alongside his favorite books and that sweet sparrow he had taken immediately to be preserved, wings spread, tipped slightly groundward in the spirit of its final flight. The sparrow’s body, elevated on a copper pike, served as a protector of Katherine.

Mark sat up in bed, reading aloud to Katherine and the sparrow. “The poet parted the crowd to approach the loudest man, a worker who had raised his voice out of a professional concern,” he said. “The poet clapped his hands on the man’s shoulders.”

The sparrow’s pushpin eyes followed along with the words.

“You go ahead,” Mark said.

The sparrow was silent for a moment and then spoke:
Raise high the cathedral walls with oak and pine. Make a church that becomes an ark when turned. Load the ark with men and women and set it to sail. Paint our city in blue and yellow. Paint it to face the sun and sky, paint it to greet the bay.

“Very good,” Mark said. “Very, very good.”

He ran his finger gently along the bird’s head. Katherine glowed with pride and fluid. Theirs was the happy family he had wanted for five or six days at least.

*   *   *

Mark’s mother arrived with the monthly fund. “Katherine, look who’s here,” he said.

“You break my heart every time you open your mouth,” his mother said.

“Well well,” he said. “Well well well well well.”

“I wish you would take your medicine,” she said. “It is trying to kill you. I hate you and I wake up every morning wishing you were dead.” She lifted a plastic grocery bag that was of course bulging, as they do. It was not a safe environment, and Katherine right there on the bed. He opened a drawer and tossed its contents at the woman’s feet. She trumpeted, the material of her bag grotesque and pooling. A dark fog seeped in under the front door, confounding Mark and the sparrow alike. When the woman was blinded by the fog, Mark pulled off his sweatshirt and wrapped it around Katherine. “I’m straight on,” he called out. “I’m straight as a go-dam row.” The fog rose like the tide and he gagged in it, finding the woman had become a central part of the fog, that it steamed from her. She went into his body by his mouth and completed a procedure. He held tight to Katherine in her sweatshirt, which had also become Katherine due to principles of matter and transference. “Obviously,” he said, sucking the top layers of fog into his mouth and holding them. The sparrow tipped its head above the fog and found its way anew and the sparrow spake:
Once the rhythm is maintained, nothing can pull the orbit askew. We look to Katherine, soft within soft. Katherine, heart aloft, legs tapered reeds. Reigning queen of our bedroom universe. Matriarch and maiden in one, body within body, sourced and pulled free from the whole. Take care to maintain and sustain this tide. Take care!

*   *   *

Mark’s field of vision glowed amber. He returned to find Katherine pressed against his face, her cushion part wrapped protectively around him. Placing her behind him on the bed, he examined the area for danger. Hazards of fog skulked in the corners of the room but the woman was gone.

“Good God, we made it,” he said. “We went into it together and came out alive.” The bed held Katherine so safely, a raft on silent water, and he saw that she had grown to include the bed as well.

The sparrow on its perch had toppled over in the excitement and landed without ceremony on the floor, its brown feathers gathering sticky dust. It wasn’t right.

Katherine floated massive in the room. Mark sat cross-legged beside her on the floor, cradling sparrow and perch. “Fine then,” he said, resting his head. She was already deeping down into the planks and spreading across the room, broadening strong along the wood and becoming the lamps and books, the walls, the door.

On the Teat

I curl under my mother’s breast and bring my lips to her teat. It gives me comfort to do this and has since before my memory.

She carries me in her arms. Her legs and back and arms are solid from years of this action and there is even a place for me, a divot in her arms and stomach, where my body fits like a shell. I suckle while she speaks of how the span of one’s individual memory functions in the same way as a vinyl record, that there is a distinct moment when the needle is placed—by God, she supposes—and the music begins. Assuming all goes well, she says, stroking my hair.

Her own needle was placed forty years ago, at the moment of my conception. I had just begun walking when she first knew my genius. My mind was in a developmental stage akin to a rock rolling down a steep hill, and she was already supplementing my diet with nutrient-rich foods: smoked salmon and handfuls of blueberries, crushed flax. Each morning she gave me a bit of coffee mixed with whole milk. It was all with the idea that she would start the powerful engine early. Breakfast was followed by her special blend of math tutoring and recitation practice, wherein I would recite a poem after each time I had properly summed a fraction. And then our lunch, where she would drink a chilled glass of sugar water and I would lie down and latch easily. Even then I could feel a groove of skin growing in a place under her arm, the fleshy lip hooking over my chest and holding me close. And so the years passed.