35
“Unh… Clyde… Clyde… what are you… unh… doing?” Momma asks as I slip into bed beside her and slide my ding-a-ling into her woo-hoo. It’s been a while since we’d done this so I’m not surprised Joyce is surprised. I wonder if she can tell how much bigger my pecker’s gotten since the last time we did it.
I reach around her and grab hold of her giant belly and push further in. “I’m making us another baby, Momma. I want more. I want my land populated… with… my… unh…” I say, filling her with seed.
Joyce pulls away from me, slides off the mattress and stands, wrapping herself in the tattered blanket. “Well, that was exciting,” she says.
I roll onto my back and watch her.
“But that’s not how babies work, Clyde, and—”
“Ah-ah…” I say, wagging my finger at her. “Call me Papa, Momma.”
“Clyde, you imbecile, you can’t make more than one baby at a time.”
“Shows what you know!” I say, having a gotcha moment. “Ever heard of a little thing called twins?”
“Oh, Jesus,” she says, dropping the blanket and pulling on her pants and extra-extra-large t-shirt that has a pictures of kitties in space on it.
“Octuplets, even!” I say, jabbing my finger in the air, having a eureka! moment.
“Yeah, sure. Octuplets. Let’s just turn me into a goddamned factory,” she says.
I hear little clicks and guttural chirps coming from her belly.
“Monster factory,” I say, quietly, staring at her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What do you think comes out of there?” I ask, pointing.
“Babies, you stupid shit.”
“If it comes out wrong, maybe we can eat it,” I offer.
“Are you crazier today than you were yesterday?” she asks, a half-smirk on her face.
“Yes,” I tell her.
Her smirk slides away.
“Can I feed now, Momma?” I ask.
“Feed?”
“Yes, feed,” I say, pointing at her enlarged breasts.
“You want to suck milk from my titties?” she asks, a little flabbergasted.
“My Momma let my Papa do it. She let me do it, too.”
“Yeah. When you were a baby!” she says, laughing.
“When I was a man, too,” I tell her.
“That’s sick. What’s wrong with you? What was wrong with your mother?”
“We loved each other.”
“Is that what love is?”
“It’s what love looks like in my Kingdom.”
“Well, you’re not feeding, you little pervert.”
“I’m going to drink your milk,” I tell her.
“Enough.”
“I’m going to feed off you, Momma.”
“Stop it.”
“I’m going to fill my stomach with you and sleep the sleep of a warm baby.”
“I’m not even—” Joyce starts, one hand out in a halting gesture, the other resting atop her mountainous tummy. She walks out of our shanty so I slide into my pants and follow her.
“Where are you going?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. “There’s monsters out there.” She’s just waddling eastward, away from Monster Island, plastic cups kicking up at her feet.
“I want to drink Momma’s milk again. I haven’t had Momma’s milk in so long.”
“But it… is the poison… still swirling through your… veins.”
“If I slit my wrists, Momma’s milk will bleed out of me?”
“Spoiled… milk.”
Voices echoing in the morning light. Voices echoing off the trash.
Voices coming from the trash.
After Church with Dylan, I keep away from Monster Island as long as I can. I stroll past the remains of Dante’s Inferno and kick ash around. I walk through the maze of skeletal vehicles and dead trees at The Used Car Lot. I slip books off shelves at The Library and pretend to read while Rosa and Petunia gaze upon me with eyeless envy. I clamber over Best Buy Bluffs and walk along the base of Mount Circuit City, kicking at charred motherboards. I listen to those fucking birds squawking overhead, but I’m too distracted to even think of braining them. I walk around what used to be my Kingdom and listen to the music still in my head from those times sitting atop the wall with Joyce. I listen to the wind pushing garbage around and try to hear the music in that but all I hear is garbage clattering. I listen to my footsteps and my heartbeat and I don’t think it’s ever gonna stop. I hear Grace’s bones snapping between my teeth. And I don’t think it’s ever gonna stop. Now I’m back Home, the sun directly over this dump, and all I hear is screaming screaming screaming.
36
“It’s time!” I scream. “She’s having it!”
“Having… what?” Dylan asks, hunchbacked within Dylan’s Den, just standing there as if all he can do when I’m not around is await my return.
“The baby, you fucking idiot! The baby! What—goddammit! What do I do?”
When I got back to Monster Island and found Joyce in the throes of labor within our shanty, I panicked. I panicked and ran away from her. I ran away from her and Sam who loomed over her, asking, uselessly, how he could help. I ran away from both of them. I ran away from Joyce’s cries of pain. I ran here to Dylan, my blood.
“What the fuck do I do?” I scream.
“Deliver… it,” Dylan says calmly, his wide, bony shoulders heaving.
“Deliver it?”
“Deliver it… to… me.”
“To you?”
“Yes.”
“My son. You want me to bring you my son?”
“Yes.”
“Why? What are you going to do with him?”
Dylan shrugs his scabby, orangish shoulders. “Just… deliver… the baby. Deliver it… to me.”
On that crusty old mattress, Sam’s propped behind Momma and her legs are spread wide before me. Joyce’s face is red and sweaty and her cheeks puff as she performs the breathing technique she read about in that book with all the pictures I couldn’t bear to look at. Right now, a hairy, red orb is splitting Momma in two, and my stomach tumbles. It’s all I can do to keep from blacking out. Behind me, the other Momma, my first Momma, breathes in my ear, hot and wet. “Shove that thing back up inside her,” she tells me in her wavy voice. “Don’t let that monster out of there.”
“Shut up, Momma!” I yell.
“Don’t you tell me to shut up! I’m having a goddamned baby! Just get this thing out of me!” Joyce orders.
And before I know it, it’s just like Joyce said it’d be. All I had to do was catch the slippery red bastard. When I have that thing securely wrapped in my arms, Momma gathers the umbilical cord up, sets it between her teeth, and gnaws until it splits. I reach into the baby’s mouth, push two fingers down its throat, and scoop out all the goop in there. I nearly vomit but hold it back and fling the phlegmy gunk to the dirt. The baby, which had been quiet, lets out an ear-wrenching wail, its tiny little eyes scrunched tight while its tiny pink mouth makes sure all The Kingdom knows he has arrived. And it is a he. My successor. The future King of The World of Trash. I look him all over and he’s beautiful and not a monster at all and it breaks my heart. For a moment, I can’t help myself and nearly snap his neck. But I can’t do it. I can’t do what my folks should have done the second I sucked in the foul air of this place. Instead, I grab a blanket off the mattress and wipe the boy free of all the viscous red and purple coating him.
Everything appears OK. There’s no V-shaped spine. No dry, scabby, orange skin. No fangs or grotesquely long limbs. He’s not a monster. For now. But, it could sprout fangs and its bones could grow elongated and painful-looking once it’s no longer an infant. Once it has become a man. These things happen. Men were known to be monsters long ago, right? Men started wars and eventually destroyed the world as we know it. Like I said, I read books. My boy, beautiful as he is—as much as he makes my heart soar this very moment—could become a mon
ster. You never know.
I try to shake the thought from my head and Sam asks why I’m shaking my head and I tell him I’m just so excited and he gives me his confused look then smiles and shakes his head wildly, too.
Joyce finally leans back into Sam, breathing normally, a wave of relief washing over her beautiful face, a morsel of afterbirth at the corner of her mouth. For a moment she closes her eyes and I think she’s fallen asleep. But now she’s holding out her arms, telling me to give her the baby.
I start to offer her the baby, but stop. I just freeze, completely motionless. I believe even my heart has ceased beating. I can’t hear it between my ears. I can only feel a cracking plastic hollowness in my gut. I look at Sam, attempting to anticipate what that big oaf might do. Then I pull the baby back from Joyce and her face screws up, confused. Fear quickly invades her features when I step away from the soaked, bloody mattress and hold the wailing Prince to my chest.
“Clyde… wha—what are you doing?” Joyce asks me, exhausted.
“Do it,” Momma tells me. “Do as your brother tells you. Take this boy to your brother. Your true family. We’ll raise him together. Just the three of us. Just us three. Hide him away. Hide your prince. Don’t let this bitch have him.”
I look back and forth between Momma and Joyce, cradling the baby against my shoulder. Joyce weakly attempts to push away from Sam and up into a seated position, but, poor thing, her strength is all sapped away by the little prince that crawled out of the hollow between her legs.
“Clyde—Clyde, you get back here,” she orders as I start walking backward, away from her and Sam. Sam doesn’t budge or say a thing. He just pets Joyce’s sweat-soaked hair, that constant look of pained bewilderment painted across his giant mug.
Joyce calls for me once more, but I’m already turned away and pushing through the curtained doorway of the shanty, holding the baby tight, then treading over mountains of garbage as if carried in God’s massive hands.
“Where is he?” Momma asks, walking gingerly toward me across the trash-strewn path between my Kingdom’s magic mountains of rubble. A dirty old sheet’s draped over her like a gown. As she walks, she clenches the sheet between her legs in a fist. The sheet in her fist is blood-soaked. Her face no longer glows as it did the moment she pushed our son into the world. No, instead it’s pallid and grey. Grey, like the dirt used to be. I hold my hands up, reassuring, and say, “Momma—slow down, Momma,” and she sneers and looks ready to spit at that suggestion, moving in a slow limp straight at me.
“The baby’s fine,” I continue “You should just go back to the camp and rest. You need your rest. You should be resting. I read in that book that—”
“Where is my baby?” she screams. Joyce reaches me in a few more strides and, with power I couldn’t have imagined she had, shoves me down into the dirt. I land right on a tin can and have a moment’s worry about tetanus and my dick falling off.
“I’m only trying… to do what’s best for everyone,” I offer. My eyes tear up and my cheeks grow hot with… pride?
“Where is he?” she wails, standing over me, the sun haloing her.
“He’s with my… brother. My brother,” I admit.
Joyce scoffs. “Your what?”
“My brother. The baby’s fine. His… uncle… is watching over him.”
“You’re mad! You’ve gone completely fucking crazy!”
“I haven’t. My brother. He’s come back to me. To his… family. His only family left.”
“Jesus. You—you were never right, boy. You were never right.”
“I’m not a boy!” I shout. I want to get up, but I feel the weight of her fiery gaze pinning me down in the dirt. “I’m being a man! I’m doing the right thing. I’m doing what my folks never could have done!”
“You tell me where he is right now, Clyde, or…” she looks around herself, still clutching at the sheet-gown. Carefully, she leans down and unearths something from the dirt. It pulls from the earth with a suction noise. “Or, I’ll beat you to death with this,” she tells me, holding a dirt-caked lead pipe back, ready to brain me good. I wonder if she’d let me squirm around for a while first, just for fun, as she watches my brains mix with diseased soil. I wonder if she’d come up with a good name for that game.
Before I can quit my wondering, Momma’s swung that lead pipe right into my upper arm, good and hard. I yelp and roll away but then I’m on my back and Joyce straddles me and holds that pipe with two hands across my throat, attempting to cut off my oxygen and bring about the Prince’s reign much too soon.
Again, her strength is surprising and, even though I’m a grown man now, and still the King, despite everything, I cannot push her from me or get that pipe off my Adam’s apple.
“Where is he?” she screams, pressing that pipe into my throat, her face inches from mine and as wild as a rabid hound’s. Her sour spit drools into my gaping mouth.
“With my brother… near The Drinking and Washing Fountain,” I offer, coughing, once she lets up a little.
Joyce lumbers off me and there’s blood staining my shirt across the chest. Hers, of course. Scrambling out of the dirt, I quickly get to my feet and call out to Joyce, but she slowly walks down the path between dull mountains of trash, one hand clutching at her sheet-gown, the other holding that pipe. I call out to her once more and when she doesn’t turn, I retrieve my trusty slingshot from my back pocket and load that tin can of tetanus and aim right for Momma’s wild mess of hair.
I hold that tin can back tight in the slingshot until my hands shake and my sight blurs, then I slowly relax the tension and let the can drop back to my feet. Joyce disappears around the bend and I feel like one of them trees in The Used Car Lot—firmly planted in the earth, but lifeless.
“She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes,” I mumble-sing to myself a song Momma wrote for me when I was just a baby. “We’ll be singing hallelujah when she comes…”
The trash heaps, the garbage mountains, and the rubble ranges ripple around me as the sun beats down and rots everything in sight. I hear clicks. I hear chirps. I hear ragged breath sucked over forked tongues. My feet remain planted, paralyzed. Atop the wall to my left, about forty yards away, something orange scurries. The trash mountains nearest me are restless and shedding their epidermis in cascades of crushed plastic bottles and aluminum cans that skitter down their slopes and clatter onto the dirt path. More orange creatures slink along the top of The Kingdom Wall and slither down it, out of sight, behind other giant garbage heaps. In my peripheral, an explosion of trash into the air like confetti, and something massive and orange escapes the mountain and scurries into my blind spot. On the other side of my periphery, another blast of trash into the air and another orange creature pulls itself free from its garbage grave.
They’re here.
The invasion has begun.
The monsters have finally infiltrated my Kingdom’s walls.
Or perhaps the monsters have always been here, all along.
“You threw him in the trash?” one woman screams.
There are two women coming toward me. One is fierce and angry. The other is helpless and weeping.
“She’s taking my baby! My baby boy!” the other woman screams.
Joyce stalks toward me, holding the wailing baby to her shoulder. Momma walks behind her, as if in quicksand. Momma’s reaching for the wailing baby, but seems to sink a bit more into the earth each time she draws near enough to snatch him.
“Clyde! Clyde, she’s taking my baby! My baby boy! You said you’d bring me my baby boy! You told me you’d give him to me! Don’t let that monster steal my baby!” Momma pleads, tears melting her face.
“That’s not your baby boy, Momma!” I shout suddenly. “That’s not Dylan!”
“Shut your crazy goddamned mouth,” Joyce orders, stopping five feet from me. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Clyde?” Behind her, Momma weeps, collapses to her knees and puts her face into the earth, as if in prayer or worship.
“That’s not Dylan, Momma. That’s just… that’s just another monster,” I tell her, directing my gaze through Joyce toward Momma lying prostate before God.
Joyce thwacks me good across the cheek and my feet finally become unstuck as I stumble back. Momma’s gone. It’s just Joyce now. Just Joyce and our future monster son.
“You threw him in the trash? How dare you! Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you, Clyde?” Joyce screams.
“What? I… I didn’t…. No. No. I left him with my brother. I…”
“You threw him in the trash! You buried your own son in garbage!”
“No… I…”
“I wouldn’t have even found him if he hadn’t been crying. Jesus, Clyde! Jesus. He’s just a baby! A newborn baby! You hate him, don’t you? He’s just another goddamned Out-of-Towner to you, isn’t he? He’s your son, Clyde! Your son!” she yells, shaking, almost out of breath. All the veins on her neck pop out.
“I didn’t put… I didn’t throw him away. I did that… I did that to my son… I mean my… son… goddammit, you’ve got me all confused! I did that to my brother! My brother! Not my son! Not my son!”
“What the fuck are you talking about? What brother?” she shouts, exasperated, holding the baby’s ear to her heart while her other hand shields his other ear from her yelling. “What fucking brother, Clyde?”
I want to hold my ear to Momma’s heart. I want to read her poetry and kiss her full on the mouth.
“I just… I don’t want you to go. I don’t really want you to go. But you have to…. Can I… can I sit in your lap, Momma? Can I listen to you read me poetry?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“My brother. Not my brother. My brother. Joyce. Oh, god, my brother. The one I cut from Momma and held by the toe and flung into Hades…”
Something comes over Joyce and calms her. Something like resolve. Her lips cease quivering and the baby seems to sense this sudden tranquility and quits its bawling. She doesn’t say anything. Her eyes simply move all over, scanning my face for something. When she doesn’t find what she’s looking for, she strides past me, headed back toward Monster Island.
The Sun My Destiny Page 18