Before and Afterlives

by Christopher Barzak

  The Boy Who Was Born

  Wrapped in Barbed Wire

  There was once a boy who was born wrapped in barbed wire. The defect was noticed immediately after his birth, when the doctor had to snip the boy’s umbilical cord with wire cutters. But elsewhere, too, the wire curled out of the boy’s flesh, circling his arms and legs, his tiny torso. They didn’t cause him pain, these metal spikes that grew out of the round hills of his body, although due to the dangerous nature of his birth, his mother had lost a great amount of blood during labor. After delivery, the nurse laid the boy in his mother’s arms, careful to show her the safe places to hold him. And before her last breath left her, she managed to tell her son these words: “Bumblebees fly anyway, my love.”

  They followed him, those words, for the rest of his life, skimming the rim of his ear, buzzing loud as the bees farmed by his father the beekeeper. He did not remember his mother saying those words, but he often imagined the scene as his father described it. “Your mother loved you very much,” he told the boy, blinking, pursing his lips. The beekeeper wanted to pat his son’s head, but was unable to touch him just there—on his crown—where a cowlick of barbs jutted out of the boy’s brown curls.

  The beekeeper and his son lived in a cabin in the middle of the woods. They only came out to go into town for supplies and groceries. The beekeeper took the boy with him whenever he trekked through the woods to his hives. He showed the boy how to collect honey, how to not disturb the bees, how to avoid an unnecessary stinging. Sometimes the beekeeper wore a baggy white suit with a helmet and visor, which the bees clung to, crawling over the surface of his body. The boy envied the bees that landscape. He imagined himself a bee in those moments. As a bee, his sting would never slip through his father’s suit to strike the soft flesh hidden beneath it. His barbs, though, would find their way through nearly any barrier.

  One day the beekeeper gave the boy a small honeycomb and told him to eat it. The comb dripped a sticky gold, and the boy wrinkled his nose. “It looks like wax,” he told his father. But the beekeeper only said, “Eat,” so the boy did.

  The honeycomb filled his mouth with a sweetness that tasted of sunlight on water. Never before had something so beautiful sat on the tip of his tongue. Swallowing, he closed his eyes and thought of his mother. The way she held him in her arms before dying, the way she spoke before going away forever. The memory of his mother tasted like honey too, and he asked the beekeeper, “What did she mean? Bumblebees fly anyway?”

  “Bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly,” said the beekeeper, closing the lid on a hive. Honeybees crawled on the inside of the lid like a living carpet. “Their bodies are so large and their wings so small, they shouldn’t be able to lift themselves into the air, but somehow they do. They fly.”

  When the boy turned five, the beekeeper sent him to school with the town’s other children. At first the boy was excited, standing on the shoulder of the highway where the trail that led back through the woods to the beekeeper’s cabin ended. But soon the bus came and, as he stepped inside, he realized none of the other kids had been born wrapped in barbed wire. They were regular flesh children with soft hair any adult could run their fingers through. They looked at him, eyes wide, and said nothing. No one offered him a seat, so the boy sat behind the bus driver.

  They all knew of the barbed wire boy, of course, from tales that had circulated since the day of his birth. But only a few had actually seen him. The one story the children lived on was told by a girl who had seen him in the fruit section of the grocery store late one night, shopping with his father. He had reached for a bunch of grapes, she said, but the grapes got tangled in the wire around his hand. His father bent down to remove them, carefully pulling the vines away, but several grapes remained stuck on his barbs, their juice sliding down the metal. “The manager made them buy that bunch,” the girl said with an air of righteousness. After all, those grapes were ruined.

  On his first day of class, no one talked to him except the teacher, Ms. Morrison, who told him where he could sit. She pointed to a desk in the back of the room, far away from the rows of desks that held the other children. When he looked up at her, she could already see the question forming on the cage of his face and said, “For their safety, dear. And for yours.”

  Ms. Morrison taught the boy how to read, how to write, and how to add numbers. He already knew how to subtract. His father had taught him that. So he was ahead of the class, or behind them, depending on your view of subtraction.

  This is how the barbed wire boy learned to subtract:

  “How old am I?” he once asked the beekeeper.

  “It’s been four years since your mother died,” the beekeeper replied.

  “Four,” said the barbed wire boy. “How much is four, Father?”

  “Four is one less than five,” said the beekeeper. “Three is one less than four. And two is what your mother and I once were together.”

  It was only once Ms. Morrison took an apple and orange and put them together that the boy realized things could grow in number.

  The barbed wire boy kept to himself, but his solitude was not of his own choosing. The town parents had warned their children. “You could get hurt playing with that boy,” they said. “You could get tangled up in his barbed wire and then what would you do?”

  The barbed wire boy understood their reluctance to engage him, but it would be lying to say he did not long for a friend. For someone to at least confide in. Day after day he sat on the teeter-totter during recess, waiting for someone to climb onto the side opposite, someone whose weight would lift him high into the air.

  It was not until years later, after the boy’s limbs grew long and ropey, after he nearly reached the same height as the beekeeper, after his body began to fill up the coils of barbs around his body—the wire sinking into the meat of his flesh—it was not until after he’d given up on the prospect of communion that something just like that began to happen.

  What happened was, a minister came to town holding a Bible in one hand and his daughter’s hand in the other. This minister had plans and was telling everyone about them. He was going to re-open the abandoned church that stood in the center of town where the two main streets intersected.

  For years the town had gone without a preacher, but although the people had lacked a spiritual leader for several generations, you could not say they were unspiritual. And this, the minister said that first Sunday, was the reason why the Lord had led him to them. “You are a flock,” he told them, “without a shepherd. Come. Follow me to the Lord.”

  During services, the minister’s daughter sat in the first pew, occasionally raising her hand to praise the Lord or her father. Sometimes it wasn’t apparent which one she lauded, but that didn’t matter. To most people, and to the girl herself, the minister and God were one and the same. She was a righteous one, the minister’s daughter. Everyone could see that from the start. When the minister asked the congregation to sing, “Shall We Gather at the River,” she played the organ to accompany his strong, dark voice. When the minister asked the congregation to make a joyful noise, her voice curled up and over the others, rising up to reach the rafters.

  Soon a great revival was in full swing and people began taking one another, friends and neighbors, to hear the minister. Several town mothers even gathered their courage to walk down the winding dirt road to the beekeeper’s cabin in the forest. The beekeeper needed God as well, they all agreed. But when the beekeeper stood in his doorway and wouldn’t hear of it, they implored him to at least let them bring the barbed wire boy to the Lord.

  “He’s never been baptized,” said the mothers. “Since his life here on earth has been so mangled, you can at least secure the child a place in heaven.” These same women had never before shown an interest in the condition of the barbed wire boy’s soul, nor in their own children’s, but now that the minister had spread the good news, they worried over this part of their existence, which previously they had never known to be lackin
g. “His soul!” they cried, as if it were an endangered species. “His soul!”

  The beekeeper was not a religious man, but when he saw the look in his son’s eyes at the sight of those mothers crowding the doorway, he decided to allow them to take the boy to church.

  To say that a church is home to God and anyone who follows Him is to speak in sacred literality. Let us speak in metaphor then, because what the barbed wire boy saw after he crossed the threshold and sat in the last pew, listening to the hymns of his fellow townspeople, what he saw after one of the town mothers came over to give him a large Bible, apologizing for its age and thickness but saying she hoped he’d enjoy it “as a gift from the church”, what he saw when he opened the book was nothing so much as the image of his own being. Upon the first crisp page he turned to, Christ hung on his cross. And although the blood seeping from his eyes reminded the boy of his own occasional bleeding, it was the crown of thorns upon the Lord’s head that caught his eye. He licked his lips, wanting to cry, wanting to give a great shout or to fall on his knees. Never before had he felt so not alone in the world. Spread out before his very eyes was someone else who suffered the torments of body and spirit. Jesus hadn’t been born wearing a crown of thorns, but metaphorically—and we have established that metaphorically is how we are speaking—we could say that the Lord was born with that crown of thorns, for that crown was waiting for him since before his birthday.

  It was during the preacher’s sermon on Unity, how the town had fallen apart without God to bring them together, that the barbed wire boy was overcome with something he could only call holy. “Yes!” he shouted, mimicking the others. “Hallelujah!” he cried. Soon everyone’s eyes were on him, as if he’d been saying hallelujah at an inappropriate moment, so he closed his mouth and sat down. As he took his seat, the wooden pew creaked in the silence, and in the front row the minister’s daughter cocked her head to the side and smiled.

  After the minister received the offering, everyone stood to leave. As they departed, the minister grabbed the hands of each member of his congregation. To shake the men’s firmly. To hold and caress the women’s palms, soft and noble as a knight. But when the barbed wire boy came to him, the minister only smiled, curious and wary. “Well now,” he said with a squint in his eye. “I see we have a visitor.”

  “Not a visitor, sir,” said the boy. “I plan to come every week.” He almost reached out to take the minister’s hand, to thank him for introducing him to Jesus, as if the minister’s being in the Lord’s favor would make the man immune to his barbs, but stopped halfway through the motion. Not even ministers, he figured, were immune to pain.

  “That’s a large cross you bear, son,” said the minister, stern but fatherly. “You carry it well now, hear?”

  The barbed wire boy beamed at hearing these words come out of the mouth of the very minister! He, too, saw the similarity then. Finally, thought the boy, finally I am home.

  For the next few days, the barbed wire boy talked about nothing but Jesus. He was Jesus this and Jesus that, and the beekeeper could only shake his head in annoyance. “What’s all this about Jesus?” he said, and the boy blinked as if his father had asked the stupidest question in the world.

  “Jesus is our Lord,” said the boy. “He died to cleanse your sins.”

  The beekeeper shook his head, though, his eyes darkening with frustration. “You sound like your mother,” he said, and turned to leave. But before he could make it out the door, the barbed wire boy grabbed hold of his father.

  “How?” he asked, while at the same time a long barb sunk into the flesh between his father’s neck and shoulder.

  “Ow!” shouted the beekeeper. He pulled away from the boy’s hand and blood welled in the spot where the barb had lodged, a fat apple. It burst a moment later and dripped down under the beekeeper’s collar.

  “How,” said the boy. “How do I sound like her?”

  The beekeeper took the boy up to the attic. He rummaged through boxes until he found what he wanted. “Aha,” he said, and pulled out a dust-covered book. “This,” he told the boy, “was hers.”

  It was a Bible, the pages tattered and yellow. “I hadn’t known she was religious,” said the barbed wire boy.

  “She wasn’t. But she often read it.”

  The barbed wire boy sat on the floor of the attic, paging through his mother’s Bible. It did not have many pictures in it like the Bible the church mother gave to him. His mother’s name had been written in pencil on a page recording the births in her family history. Below her name though, he found an empty space. There had been no time to enter him into her story.

  He put aside his mother’s Bible and took up the church mother’s Bible, seeking out the picture he’d found earlier that week, after he’d returned from his first day of church. There it was, the one that made his heart swell, tightening the barbed wire coiled around it. The one of Lord Jesus with his mother, holding him in her arms, his side pierced, his forehead wet with blood. That embrace, the love in her eyes as she held her child, now a dead man, in her strong arms.

  The beekeeper did not bother his son about church any further. He spent most of his time with his hives. The hum, the smell of honey, the flutter of light on wings—those were the beekeeper’s religion. Some days he would do nothing but lick honey straight from their combs. The nectar of heaven, he called it. The only pure substance on earth. He seemed able to somehow get drunk off the sweetness. Sometimes he’d suit up and let the bees cover his entire body. He would hold his arms out, his face tilted toward the sky. And in those moments he’d think of his wife from the time before their son came through her. He would stare at the sun as bees covered his visor, eclipsing any visible light.

  The barbed wire boy remained in the last pew for the next few weeks, learning when hallelujah was appropriate and when it wasn’t. He learned the words to the hymns. He learned how to pray. Like most places he went, here people steered clear of him. But it didn’t bother him as much since he was at church and Jesus felt closer.

  One day, after the minister had preached a particularly vehement sermon on Job’s burdens, the minister’s daughter stood up to ask if anyone was sick. “I can feel it,” she said. “Someone here needs healing. It’s okay to raise your hand. Stand and let the Lord know your troubles, so He can take them away.”

  At first no one stood, so the girl continued. “Someone here is in pain,” she said, closing her eyes, seeking out the shy, pain-ridden person with an inner sight. “Someone here is in a lot of pain,” she kept saying.

  She opened her eyes and stared past the pews of identical oval-shaped faces until she found the barbed wire boy with his spirals of wire making any sense of symmetry impossible. He stared back, lips slightly parted, knowing she wanted something. He nodded and she came to him then. Everyone turned to watch her walk to the back of the room, where she asked the barbed wire boy to stand. “Let God’s touch heal you,” she said. Then she placed the palms of her hands on his shoulders.

  Closing her eyes in deep concentration, she muttered prayers while everyone looked on. The barbed wire boy himself couldn’t understand why she was doing this, or even why he had nodded when she stared at him. He stood there, surprised as the others, and found his eyes full of tears. He could not remember the last time anyone had touched him.

  When it was over, the minister’s daughter pulled her hands away slowly. He could feel the suck of her flesh as it slipped off his barbs. She held her hands up then, showing them to the congregation. And there, in the middle of her palms, was the mark of the stigmata.

  Someone shouted, someone fainted, someone praised the Lord. The minister himself said they had witnessed a miracle, though no one truly knew what the miracle had been. That the girl had been courageous enough to touch the boy’s barbed wires? They weren’t sure if that wasn’t just plain foolishness.

  “Let us celebrate this holy event by hosting a Feast of Love next Sunday,” said the minister, but everyone stared back at him close-m
outhed. “What is a Feast of Love?” they asked, and the minister took this opportunity to remind them of why he had been called to them. “Of course you haven’t heard of the Feast of Love,” he said. “That is why the Lord led me here.” He went on to explain that the Feast of Love used to be a tradition of the church where everyone in the community gathered, rich and poor alike, and feasted at table together.

  “Why was it abandoned?” one of the town mothers inquired, and the minister explained that the rich people had grown tired of eating with the beggars. And as it’s not a command in the Bible to hold the feast, they agreed it would be in better taste to just cancel it.

  The congregation thought this was a wonderful idea, and soon everyone was talking after services about the following Sunday’s feast. “Now this is church! This is church!” one of the mothers shouted, and a hallelujah was sent up after her proclamation. In the bustle and excitement of planning the feast, the minister’s daughter took the barbed wire boy by his hand and began to walk him home.

  “You aren’t afraid to touch me,” the barbed wire boy said when they found themselves deep in his father’s woods.

  The minister’s daughter shook her head.

  “But everyone’s afraid to touch me,” said the boy. “Even my father.”

  The minister’s daughter considered his question. “I liked the way they felt going in,” she said, “coming out again.” She smiled fiercely.

  She stopped then, in the middle of the woods, and put her hands upon his face. Wincing, she stood on tiptoes to kiss him. As she lowered herself again, he saw that her mouth and chin were smeared with blood. “You’re hurt,” said the barbed wire boy. “I hurt you.”

  But the minister’s daughter shook her head, wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her head on his chest. “I like it,” she said, and they walked further into the woods, until they came to the place where the beekeeper’s hives hummed in their boxes.