by Paula Guran
Elli
I wake up on my birthday thinking about how I dreamt I had a baby. With wings! And my mom did too! I dreamt almost all the mothers came to our house for a funeral. I dreamt my dad killed my baby and the mothers tied my dad up in the barn. What’s that saying? We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
When I open my eyes, the first thing I see is the empty crib. This nightmare is my life.
“Mom?” I call. “Mom?” She doesn’t come. She’s probably busy with Matthew. When I look at the crib, my breasts drip milk. What does it mean, anyway? “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Does he mean the dreams of sleep, or the dreams of hope? And how are they made on us? Are we, like, scaffolding? I can’t figure it out. I can’t figure anything out. “Mom?” My breasts hurt. My arms hurt too. My whole body hurts. Maybe this is what happens to old people. Maybe it starts to take its toll, holding up all those dreams.
But I’m not old! Today is my sixteenth birthday! When I open the bedroom door, I can hear the voices of the mothers downstairs. Why aren’t they gone? I can’t decide how I feel about them tying my dad up in the barn, even though he killed Timmy. “Mom?” The voices go quiet. “Mom, could you come up here?” I don’t want to see the mothers. I hate them. I don’t want to see the babies, either. I hate them too.
“Elli?” someone says.
“Could you tell my mom I want to talk to her?”
There is all kinds of whispering, but I can’t make out the words, before one of them hollers, “She’s not here right now.”
That figures, right? This is how my mom has been ever since Matthew was born. But then I think maybe she’s out getting my presents, or something. I feel better for about two seconds, until I remember Timmy is dead. I can’t celebrate today. What is she thinking? “Could you get my dad for me then?” The whispering starts again. The mothers are really starting to get on my nerves.
I go downstairs. There are mothers everywhere—in the living room, in the kitchen. When I look out the window, I even see some in the yard. Babies are flying everywhere, too. One almost hits me in the head, and I have to clench my fists and hold my arms stiff so I don’t hit it. The mothers sitting at the kitchen table look shocked to see me. “Your dad can’t come right now, either,” one of them says.
I don’t know why, but I feel like I shouldn’t let on that I know how strange this all is. I shrug like, okay, no big deal; and say, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” This gets them looking at each other and raising eyebrows. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to say. I walk to the refrigerator and take out the orange juice. I open the cupboard, but all the glasses are gone. Then I see the dishes drying on the counter. I try to find my favorite glass—the one with SpongeBob SquarePants on it—but I don’t see it anywhere. I finally take my mom’s glass, the one with the painted flowers. I pour myself a tall orange juice. When I turn around, all the mothers are staring. I take a big drink. The mothers act like they aren’t watching, but I can tell they are. When I put the glass down, they all pretend, real quick, to look at something else. “I think I’m going to go to Timmy’s grave,” I say. They look up at me, and then down, or at each other. They look away as if I am embarrassing. I shrug. I have to be careful, because I can tell that this shrugging thing could become a tic. Martha Allry, who is a year behind me in school, has a tic where she blinks her right eye a lot. People call her Winking Martha.
“Would you like me to come with you?” one of the mothers says.
She is a complete stranger. Even so, I hate her. She’s one of the ones that tied up my dad in the barn. She’s here when my mom is not. I say, “Thanks, but I’d rather be alone.”
The mothers nod. They nod quite a bit, actually. I walk out of the kitchen. I don’t have on shoes and I’m still wearing my nightgown. This is how we do things on the farm.
It’s a beautiful morning. The birds are singing and some babies fly by, which is totally weird.
One of the mothers comes up to me and says, “Where are you going?” She sort of looks sideways at the barn when she thinks I’m not looking.
Right away I know my dad is still tied up. The mothers are not my friends.
“I’m going to Timmy’s grave.”
The mother’s face turns into a bunch of Os—her eyes, her mouth, her whole face goes all round and sorry. I walk past her, already planning how I have to get into the barn and rescue my dad. I think I’m going to rescue him. I can’t decide for sure. He’s my dad, but he’s also my baby’s murderer. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he was just trying to scare everyone. Maybe I hate him. I don’t know what I feel, but I should have some say in this; it’s my baby he killed.
I walk down to the apple tree where there are two mounds of dirt. No cross or anything. Nothing to tell me which one is Timmy. This makes me angry. It’s like I get hit on the back of my shoulders, that’s how it feels, and I just drop to my knees and start crying, right there in the dirt. I can’t believe Timmy is dead. Nobody knows my horrible secret about how many times I wanted him to die. Nobody knows how evil I am. I am a very evil person. Nothing can change this. I wanted him to die and he did. That’s the whole story. It doesn’t matter that I’m sorry.
My breasts are dripping right through my nightgown. The apple tree is buzzing with bees. A plane flies overhead. My whole body hurts. It hurts to breathe. I can’t stop crying. Will I ever stop crying?
Then, just like that, I stop crying.
The mothers are calling their babies. They are taking their tops off and spreading their arms and the babies are diving for their breasts. They go into the house. Some of them glance at me, and then, real quick, look away.
The yard is empty except for a couple of crows. I don’t see anyone looking out the windows. The mothers have forgotten about me. I stand up, check the house again, and then walk, real fast, to the barn.
At first I can’t really see, ’cause it’s dark there. Not like middle-of-a-moonless-night dark, but shady, you know, and there’s a strange smell. I can sort of see my dad, tied up to the pole; I can see the shape of him. “Dad?” I say, but he is totally quiet. I can’t believe he fell asleep. I get a little closer. That’s when I see what they did to him.
The mothers are evil; worse than me. He doesn’t even look like my dad anymore. There are flies buzzing all over him. I try to shoo them away, but they are evil too.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on. I can’t carry the dreams anymore. I can’t hold them up. I am sinking under the weight. I can’t look at him anymore. The mothers are monsters. I need my mom. She’ll know what to do. She’ll make the mothers go away.
I look at the beams my dad was always talking about. I look at the holes in the roof, showing bits of blue sky. I look at the tools by the door, the shovels, the hoe, the axe, nails, rope, Dad’s old shirt, and Mom’s gardening hat; I am spinning in a little circle waiting for Mom to find me, and that’s when I find her: tied to the other pole, her back to my dad, but chewed up just like him.
I get the rope and the ladder. I make a noose in the rope and try to throw it over the beam that goes in between both of them, but it doesn’t work until I weigh down one end with an old trowel my mom uses for tulip bulbs. A couple years ago I helped her plant red tulips all around the house. Afterwards, we sat on the porch and drank root beer floats. We used to get along better.
I finally get the rope over the beam and twist the rope around it a few times. I have to be careful, ’cause that trowel swings back towards me. I know it doesn’t make sense to be careful, considering, but the point is that I didn’t want to feel pain. By the time I stand on the ladder and check the rope, my arms are really tired.
I pull on the rope and it holds tight. I put the noose around my neck and I don’t like how it feels, but then I step off the ladder and kick it with my feet and I can feel the breath getting sucked right out of me, and there is this horrible noise like a bomb, and the next thing I know, I am free. Then I feel the weight of the world on me, and b
y the time I climb out of the wreckage, I know I have failed. The rope is around my neck, the barn collapsed, and all the mothers are staring at me, until the one with the gun says, “Well, all right; we can use this wood to board up the windows and doors.”
The Mothers
We do not know how Tamara’s husband snuck away. For a while he was quite a regular on the local news. He insisted we were not a cult. (We are not a cult.) He also denied allegations that we were some sort of militia group, though he did say he had no idea how many weapons we had. (We only have one gun.) We thought he was our friend until he started calling us monsters. “Tamara, honey,” he said, looking right out of the TV screen at us, “I’m sorry I left you. I thought I’d get back in time. Please be careful. I’m here, waiting for you. You’re not in trouble. I told the sheriff and the FBI and Homeland Security about your situation. They understand that you are being held against your will . . . ” And on and on. We did not know that Raj, who had been so silent around all of us, could talk so much.
The mothers do not completely trust Tamara, and suspect she offered to be chronicler only to get our secrets. After all, she has nothing to lose. Her baby is already dead. We feel bad that we are reduced to such cold calculation, but our life now depends on calculating. We also do not trust Elli Ratcher. We’ve been medicating her with various mood modifiers and enhancers that we pooled from our own supply. Though we started with a rather amazing amount of medication, the stash is dwindling at a suspicious rate. Several of us suspect Maddy Melvern of pilfering it for recreational purposes.
We cannot say we blame her. We pace about the house like restless animals in a cage. We are restless animals in a cage. We have played all the Ratcher games: checkers, Monopoly, Life, Candy Land.
We miss our babies terribly. We miss them with every breath; we miss them in our blood. For a long time we missed them with our leaking breasts. But we know we did the right thing. We think we did. We must have. We hope.
We were watching the morning news the first time we saw Raj, his dark eyes wide, his black hair like a rooster’s, ranting about flying babies and murdering mothers. We hoped nobody would take him seriously, though it was unlikely that he would be completely ignored. “We need to fortify, and protect ourselves,” Emily said.
That’s when the barn came crashing down. We found Elli Ratcher climbing out of the rubble in her nightgown, a rope tied around her neck. She tried to run into the cornfield, but we brought her back to the house. We think that was the right thing to do. What was she going to do out there? Where was she going to run? This is her home, after all. Of course she objected, but that’s how teenagers are. We try to take good care of Elli—and Maddy, of course—but they resist us. Perhaps we are overprotective, after what happened with our own children.
The hardest thing any of us ever had to do was release our babies.
We were not even finished nailing all the wood over the windows and doors when the first cars arrived. Pete Ratcher apparently had only one hammer; so there was that to contend with. We resorted to using books and shoes and other tools. We have to admit that not all of us pursued this task with equal vigor. Many of us weren’t completely certain that Emily Carr hadn’t also gone nuts. But we had bonded over the Ratcher deaths, as well as the revelation that all our babies had wings.
We had not yet figured out we were a family. It was only later, after Jan and Sylvia got in a fight over Scrabble and began throwing letter tiles at each other, when we had the discussion that eventually resulted in the remarkable revelation: Jeffrey had fucked us all.
The first car was full of high school kids. They drove by with their windows down, screaming nonsense. We continued to hammer wood over the windows and doors. The car stopped and the kids inside were silent. Then it made a squealing U-turn back towards town.
The next car was Mrs. Vecker’s Ford Explorer, with its skylight and fancy hubcaps. It pulled over by the side of the road. Roddy Tyler stepped out, shading his eyes with his hand and squinting at the house. He walked over to the barn wreckage (in his duct-taped shoes) and started poking through the rubble. We are not sure what he was looking for, but he jerked back as though bitten by a black widow. He looked at the house again and then ran to the Ford, jumped in, and made a squealing U-turn, driving too fast.
We continued nailing. Perhaps with a bit more resolve.
Tamara
There is a certain scent in the Ratcher farmhouse now that its windows are boarded and the doors nailed shut. It is the scent of sweat and skin; and the sickly odor of bodies wasting away on a diet of jelly and pickles; and the pungent scent of pickles on breath made sour by slow starvation and the toothpaste long since eaten. Sometimes a vague perfume wafts in through the cracks and bullet holes. Elli Ratcher has been discovered many times standing with her little freckled nose right in one of those holes, hogging that sweet air.
On just such an evening, Sylvia sat barefoot at the table, weeping. This was not the life she had imagined for herself: trapped in a farmhouse listening to Rod Stewart’s scratchy voice over loudspeakers, eating grape and strawberry jelly while Homeland Security and FBI agents, reporters, and curious onlookers camped outside with bulletproof vests and guns and cameras. Once, before they shut the power off, she’d even seen on one of the news channels that someone was selling food from one of those trucks on the road in front of the house—hot dogs and nachos. She really didn’t want to think about it.
Lara Bravemeen watched Sylvia, as she had many times before, and finally did the thing she had always wanted to do. She walked over to the weeping beauty, placed a hand on her shoulder, and, when Sylvia looked at her, leaned down and kissed her on the mouth—which, yes, was sour and pickled, raw with hunger, but also flavored with the vague taste of roses. Sylvia stopped crying, and Lara, desperate to paint, took a jar of jelly and began smearing it across the wall, though she knew she risked her life to do so—that’s how serious the penalty was for wasting food.
Shreve Mahar told her to stop, but Lara just laughed. Shreve thought of her fiancé, who died before the world changed; and she thought of her little boy—released, as they all were, when the mothers realized what was coming; and she thought about Jeffrey. “Maybe we should just tell them that the babies are gone,” she said.
That’s when Jan Morris walked into the kitchen, with the petite body she had always wanted and the satisfaction that she had been right all along; it really did take starvation to achieve. “We’re not telling them anything,” she said. “What the fuck is she doing? Hey, is that our jelly?”
“It’s like a poem,” Sylvia said, “with color.”
“Poems have words.” Jan smirked.
“Not necessarily,” said Shreve.
“Well, you better tell her to stop it or you-know-who is going to shoot her.”
Sylvia and Shreve considered their options—tackling Lara to the ground or letting her continue her jelly painting, a death sentence for sure—and each of them, separately and without consultation, decided not to interrupt.
The Mothers
What was it about him? The mothers still cannot agree. Was it his blue eyes? The shape of his hands? The way he moved? Or was it something closer to what Elli said, something holy? Was it something evil? We simply do not know.
Tamara
Once, Tamara answered the house phone and spoke to a reporter.
“My name is Fort Todd. I wonder if you care to comment on some information I’ve uncovered about someone you might be interested in. He’s a wanted man, you know.”
“Who? My husband?”
“No, no, not him. Oxenhash. Jeffrey.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Tamara said.
“I’ve uncovered a great deal of information about these winged creatures.”
“What winged creatures?”
“People mistake them for angels, but they aren’t. Apparently this is one of the ages.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“They’re coming into fruition. There have always been some, but we live in a time where there are going to be thousands.”
“What do they want?”
“I thought if we could talk—”
Tamara hung up, which she sometimes regrets. She often thinks of turning herself in. What does she have to lose? Her baby is dead, and her husband has abandoned her, saying things like, “Just walk out, honey; nobody will hurt you.” How can he, despite all that has happened, remain so naïve? So she stays with the other mothers who share the secret the authorities have not yet figured out: the babies are gone.
Tamara stays with the mothers out of choice. She’s given up her freedom, though not for them. It’s for the children.
The Mothers
On this, all the mothers agree. As long as the authorities think the babies are in here with us, well, the babies are safe. We hope.
(If you see one, his small wings mashed against his back, perhaps sleeping in your vegetable garden, or flying past your window, please consider raising him. We worry what will happen if they go wild. You don’t need to be afraid. They are good babies, for the most part.)
Tamara
Emily paces throughout the house with the gun slung between her breasts. Perhaps Shreve was right all along, Emily thinks, though their friendship has been strained lately. Maybe it is all an illusion. Certainly the men and women pointing guns at the house are under the impression that there are babies inside. Emily is convinced that that’s the only reason why any of them are alive. “There ain’t gonna be another Waco here, that’s for sure,” the sheriff said, when he was interviewed on Channel Six.
One night there was a special report about the standoff at Waco, Texas. The mothers sat and watched, for once not arguing about whose head was in the way, or who didn’t put the lid back on the peanut butter jar, or who left the toilet paper roll almost empty and didn’t bother to change it. (Thinking about this now, Tamara smiles at the quaint memory of toilet paper. Wouldn’t that be nice, she thinks.)