by Matt Bell
Once our boy could walk, once his toddler arms were thick enough to lift himself, then we wrapped his mouth and nose with breathable cloth and set him at the ledge of the chimney, at the bottom rung of the skinny ladder leading up into the narrow smokestack.
Up, we cried. Up, and loose what there is to be loosed.
Oh, and what a baby he was then! What cries and wails at being separated from us, at being alone in the dark of the stack. But still he climbed, did his best to keep the air flowing, to keep what came from below ascending to wherever it floated above.
By the time he was old enough to talk, his voice was already strained with the black glass the heat made of his lungs.
By then, his brother baked in my wife’s womb, growing to replace him when he inevitably tumbled loose, plummeting from the chimney’s great heights.
When we heard the thump of his crash, we set aside our brooms, left the newest ash where it lay, so that we might hold him as he went.
We cried for him as best we could, but those years the furnaces were so hot that no moisture lasted: not our tears, not the milk of my wife’s breast. Our second boy, he never had enough to eat, and when his growth halted I put another in his mother’s belly, even though there was no room for the three of us then birthed, even though we could barely stand the sight of each other in the heat-stunk cramp of our chamber.
Our second boy, he climbs as his brother once did, and when he comes down to see us he is black-skinned, slick with wide burns shut tight by soot. His only words are cries for mercy, entreaties against going back up the chimney— but of course he must go.
When he refuses, I tell him about the good of the many. About the good of my wife, about the good of myself, about the good of his baby brother, coming soon. I take him bodily and I force him into the chimney, push with my hands until he is above the damper, the trapdoor between our world and his, and then I hold the damper shut while I tell him the truth I have never wanted to tell.
I tell him I can make more of him, but there is only one of me, only one of his mother.
I tell him that when he is gone, I will still love him as much as I loved the brother before, as much as I will love the brother who comes after.
I tell him, This is why we gave you all the same name, so that you might be equals in our hearts.
This conversation, it is an understanding I began with one son long ago and will end with another, perhaps here in this hot room built between the furnace below and the floor above, or perhaps somewhere new, some earned place cool and star-struck, or else some other kind of heaven I have not yet imagined, set aside as reward for our long hot labors, our series of sacrifices.
I do not know. I have only been in this one room, and I cannot guess what others the world might yet contain.
I know only this: Myself, the father. Her, the mother. Them, the son. And between us all, this hot hell to be shared, and the crematorium chimney above to be kept clean no matter what the cost, lest all below choke on the ashes of our ashes.
Nessa, Neve, Nevina
All afternoon, we watch our kids scatter through the fields, lowing and bleating, until what storm they smell in the air chases them back to us, to the fence-line that separates pasture from village. They put their hoofed hands upon the rungs of our fences, then resume their sad noises, the warning signs our village long ago learned to heed.
Within an hour we are gathered in the meeting-hall, where, one after another, we men say what we always say first: What bad timing our children have, when all around us grow these fields of barely-hay, of almost-wheat, our first true harvest in almost a decade, more precious than anything else we’ve grown on this blasted plain.
Still, if it comes down to our children or our crops, then for once we must pick our children.
We say this, and we do our best to mean every word, but without our crops, we will starve.
Without our children, without their wool-covered skins so easily shaved, we may be cold, but we will not be hungry.
I am not the richest man in the village, nor the tallest nor the strongest nor the smartest, but I am a married man with my own farm, and so in the meeting-hall my voice is the equal of any other. Once everyone has spoken, I stand again and say what must be said next, what has always been called out whenever wild weather waits on the horizon, whenever our children have warned of some dust-storm or sod-twister threatening our homes and our fields.
What I say is this: It is not all of our children who have to go.
One will be enough, I say.
I say, One has always been enough before, and then my neighbors clamor to their feet, clapping their hands and stomping the wooden floorboards in assent, praising me for my bravery.
This praise, I have seen it given to others but have never received it, and so I beam as I organize the writing of our children’s names on slips of paper, then the mixing of the slips into my hat.
All that’s left is for someone to pick a name, knowing that for the next year he’ll be the most reviled person in town, hated for singling out someone’s son or daughter for what must be done to save the rest.
When no one steps forward, I volunteer myself, because my wife and I only have one child, and out of all the other possibilities what is the chance of her name being the one I choose?
And then reaching into the hat.
And then pulling one slip out.
And then reading my daughter’s name, first to myself, then slowly to the others assembled, who again chant my name, applaud my ability to save their families.
While my wife wails, I go with the other men to lift my daughter over the fence-line and into the town square, the open butcher-block of this shared abattoir. I stroke her head, her long ears. With my nose to her muzzle, I tell her I love her, that her mother loves her, that what happens next is not her fault.
I say, You’re just a little girl—all child-fur and finger-hooves—and so how could it be?
Even though this is her eighth season, still she bawls when we shear her, and even after, when she is naked of wool, folded and trembling in my arms. By dusk-light I hold her quiet so each husband and wife can lay a hand on her forehead, so all that we have done wrong—our petty crimes, our coveting and untruths, our backward parenting, inadequate for these new children— all can be displaced upon my daughter’s back.
As I walk her out of the village with my wife and our neighbors trailing behind, then I try not to look at the empty sky, at the lack of storm our children’s crying prophesied. At the lack of obvious reason for what we are about to do.
I try not to think about how we haven’t had a plain-storm in years.
Not since I was a boy, maybe.
Thanks to this ritual, I tell myself. Thanks to these sacrifices.
Past the far limit of our fences, at the crossroads between our village and the wilderness, there I set down my daughter.
I step back, and from the distance between us I take a stone.
While she quivers, cold on skinny legs, I choose another.
It is enough to simply drive her off, so to the others I say, I do not wish to see my daughter hurt—but as all around me the rocks fly, what hurt there is, what whimper in her throat, what storm in her eyes!
And in return her herd sounds from beyond the fences, adding their voices to her crying, her begging caught beneath our hail of scape-stones that must continue until she is gone away. The other children bang their bodies against the slats, bleat with their mouths so different from ours, enough to distract us, to give us pause.
To give us pause, but not to make us stop.
Oneida, Ophelia, Ornella
My siren-daughters, my sweet-singing beauties: Whose songs pierced even the thickest of our soundproofed buildings, even the home where once they lived inside, when they were still part of my fractured family, still children under my care. Who, long before the floods began, once lined up beside their mother upon her piano bench, each daughter differing only in age and size, otherwise bles
sed with the same white-blonde hair, the same eyes so green they glittered even after we extinguished the lamp-light.
While their mother pressed each key in turn, these three daughters hummed along, matching their voices to the piano’s percussion, to the tones that escaped its upright body. One by one they captured its voice, contained it in their chests, so that soon we heard the piano even when no one was playing, its notes coming from our white-fenced yard, from their playroom, from the tight porcelain confines of their shared bath times.
It wasn’t until the rains started that the oldest learned to mimic her mother’s mouth-noises, and so it was she who first licked her lips at the dinner table and then repeated every sonorous syllable of my wife’s speech, the description of her day at the dykes, binding dams with all the other mothers recently pressed into service, no longer allowed to stay home with their children. Soon the younger two could do as well as the oldest, all of them speaking in their mother’s many voices, matching the pitch and timbre that accompanied each shift of mood and mannerism.
How soon after did they learn to throw their own voices, to call out from places they could not possibly be? When did I first hear my wife’s words from every room, calling me to dinner, calling me to work, calling me to bed to make another daughter, so that the song might go on, might swell?
What choir of sisters my daughters wanted, and what chorus they were denied, for my wife had already shut her womb to me and to the wet world around us, saying that if we could not ensure the future of the children we already had, then what point was there in bringing more into our flooding home?
Still our daughters pestered. Still they mimicked. Still I fell for their many tricks, because I too wanted the next child they wished my wife to make.
With their changeable voices, they lured me out of the study, out of the house and into the drowned neighborhood left behind by the breeching of the levees, those imperfect barriers giving way to the rush of rainwater, to the floating freeze of recent hail. And if I never caught my daughters, I at least found what they wanted to show me, the new landmarks of our remade neighborhood: First, a dog floating short-leashed and bloated, then the submerged beauty of our once dry library. Other things they’d wanted, and by our failing world were denied.
What family meeting we had then, loud of volume, each daughter throwing out her mother’s speech and then mine too, until all our parentage was lost to their same-enunciated disavowals, on and on until my lungs hung empty against my sorrowed heart, until I could no longer give voice to the word no, to the word stop, to the words no please stop.
And what then? What could we do to these daughters after we were forced to move onto the second floor, those cramped rooms stuck atop our submerged stairs? Or even later, when our neighbors rowed over to bring us news about the first of the drowned, victims rushing out into the water to save some loved one screaming for help but finding only undertows thick with brambles and water snakes?
To pretend it wasn’t happening. To go to rooftop funerals and say nothing. To stand with my hand in my wife’s or some daughter’s, while widows and widowers lamented that they’d never hear their loved ones again, and then to say, Well, perhaps not, but perhaps yes too.
And then my wife being lured out. My wife who should have known better being trapped in water over her head, treading for hours in the river that used to be our tree-lined street.
And then my not going to help her, my believing her dying words only the voices of our missing daughters, another of their tricks: That it was me they were trying to kill, and their mother’s voice the bait.
And then those daughters returned to my side, mock-crying into each other’s mourning dresses, each bedecked with my wife’s pearls, her costumed brooches and rings.
Long after her funeral barge had been pushed away, still I heard my wife begging me to save her from the steep waters beyond the bounds of our town, swirling beneath the all-day and all-night pitch of our cloud-darked world.
When my rowboat left again and did not come back, when my daughters who took it did not come back either, even then I did not fear for their safety, because still at night I could stand on my roof and listen to my wife crying out in the downpour, accompanied only by the frog-song and wind-roar that replaced all the other sounds I once heard upon our submerged street.
And now? How many wet years has it been? How long since I last saw land, since I knew the smell of grass or tree or rock or dirt?
How far removed those things seem, despite their voices still out there, somewhere upon the surface of the water, remembered only by my daughters who cry out in the yip of the coyote, the slither of the snake, the rustle of oak and fern.
Now there is only me, floating after them in the dark.
Now only me and also this barge, built from the flotsam and jetsam that bumped into my sunken home, and above me only these clouds, and around me only this rain, which I must bail every second I am not steering, not sinking my pole toward some hopeful bottom.
All this, so someday I might walk again on dry land, so I might stand before my three wife-voiced daughters, so I might tell them that I am not mad anymore.
That although they have cost me everything, I will not punish them.
That because everything they took from me was all they had themselves, they have already been punished enough.
Prescott, Presley, Preston
Know how we once believed our coming children would surprise us. And how we were wrong.
Know how as soon as he can speak our oldest tells us the day and date his first brother will be born, and then together they apprise us of the youngest’s coming, disclosing the hour of my wife’s water breaking, the length of her labor, the exact moment of the crowning of their brother’s head.
Know that by the end of each family breakfast they predict the rest of our day: What hour it will rain. What my wife will cook for lunch and dinner. What horrible words I will say when my sons will not stop talking, and also how I will try to make them, to force them into saying anything that is not a prediction, that is not the certainty-cursed future coming our way.
Before my wife can send them to their shared bedroom, my sons have already told her she will.
It’s there that our oldest starts his book, the book he calls his diary even though its every word is the future, some event coming later, some doom to fear, to be traumatized by both before and after.
The day he turns thirteen, he tells me I will wait three more months before I sneak into his room and read this diary, and that by then it will be too late.
He says, You could save us if you read it today, but I know you won’t.
Know it’s a lie, another adolescent taunt, a poke at what he knows has already happened, because I have read his diary, including the early entry predicting I would: At the end of the summer, our house will burn, and all my boys will burn too, caught in their shared bedroom because their mother cannot stand anymore to always be told what will happen next, cannot bear her life being scripted by her oldest son, appended and corrected in the margins by his younger brothers.
Know I could stop her. Know my sons knowing I could.
Know how when the day comes they bang their fists against the locked and nailed door, the thick-boarded windows. Know how they curse and accuse and scream for mercy when the house begins to collapse, and even after it crumbles, while still they struggle beneath its weight of wood and stone.
My wife and I hold hands in the street, at the end of our yard, safely past the widening circle of heat-blackened, smoke-wilted grass, and what joy crosses her face then, despite the last screams of our sons: To again have a world unknown, beset with unexpected joys, unplanned tribulations. To again live our lives with both doubt and hope.
Know how she says, Will you ever forgive me?
And how I say, Not yet. But soon.
And then my wife staring at my face, wondering but not knowing whether I have stolen the diary she believed still hidden in the boy’s room,
secreted under their bunks.
And also not knowing that our eldest told me I would take it. That I wouldn’t be able to give up possessing the future just because he was gone.
And also: That there are only a few pages past today’s date, and on each page only a single day.
Know there is not much else to know.
Know there is a finite amount of everything remaining.
Know this future is almost over, know we will live to see it end.
And afterward: Whatever cataclysm follows, at last a surprise.
Quella, Querida, Quintessa
How beautiful our daughter is in her white Tethering dress, dancing her younger cousins across the decorated length of our yard: First the waltz, then the cha-cha, then the tango. Old people dances, she called them when she was eleven, but now, twelve years old, feet shod for the final time in bobby socks and dress-flats, she can’t wait to teach the others every step, every turn and twirl, every last aching contact of foot upon grass.
The band plays on while my wife cuts the cake, while she passes out thick frosting-dripped slices of vanilla to everyone present, whether they want cake or not. Only afterward is our flush-faced daughter allowed to open her presents, her gifts from her many aunts and uncles, this family extending to include our entire community, all us lonely adults closer now than when we were kids, when there were no Tethering parties to bring us together.
My daughter is all teeth and dimples as she says thank you to each gift-giver, to each sad-eyed parent in the crowd—and as she lifts her ankle to show off the present her mother and I gave her, opened during the Tethering itself: a steel cuff, clasped around her ankle, concealed by the fanciest lace and pearls we could afford.
After the party ends, I help her pack, placing each gift—each sealed bottle of water, each nonperishable food item, each oversized cable-knit sweater—into her tether-bags, attached to the braided-steel cord already fed through the carabiners and guide-loops, already secured to the clasp on her tether, that anklet which will for a time keep her life close to ours.