by Matt Bell
How sad they must have been as they each drifted upward, floating frightened in the drafts until they caught here in the first rung of clouds, with all the rest of their sisters.
My daughter-voice says, Pa, you have to build. She says, You’re so old now.She says, I’m so old now too.
Please, she says. How long before your other ear goes? Then what good are these towers? What good is it to reach mother’s voice, still shrieking in the heights, and you with no ear to hear her?
Build, my daughter says, and for the rest of my life I build and I climb and at each new story I strain to hear the first voice I ever loved, the only one I still wish added to the crowded air around me, the dozen daughters singing static from every earpiece and speaker and receiver and crank-powered radio installed along the way.
Their voices lift me, and upon them I climb until below me are only clouds, and below them some lost world I need never see again, because what I want most is already up here with me, or else waiting above. I climb until all I am is wind-carved wrinkles, sun-bleached whiskers, until my hands are crippled by the hammer and the saw and the wire-snips, by the frost that dusts my knuckles every morning.
I climb until my eyes are as empty and useless as the clouds, and always my first daughter teases me with her mother, keeps me chasing my wife, this sky-flung memory she promises still floats.
Higher, the daughter-voice says, her voice crone-rasped, cough-hacked.
Higher, until the sun burns you free of your weak meat. Until you are nothing but voice too. Until you are the same as we, the last loves you have left.
A life is not too much to give, my daughter says.
After how you tortured our mother, a life is hardly anything at all.
Zachary, Zahir, Zedekiah
And then the last crib combusting. And then the wallpaper smoking and the carpets melting. And then the hallways coursing fire room to room, the master bedroom, the master bath. And then the whole house engulfed. And then the timbers splintering, shattering, crashing against the foundations. And then the chimney crumbling. And then the roof-tar slopping across the yard. And then the yard catching. And then the fence, the long-dry grass beyond. And then this great conflagration burning bright, hungry for wood and plain and village. And then all these recently emerged landscapes, ruined first with failure and now with flame. And then the cities blazing. And then the skyscrapers swaying unsteady upon their supports. And then the bridges tipping into their rivers, the overpasses falling onto overpasses. And then whole cities buckling into the dirt. And then the collapse of everything between making sudden highways to nowhere. And then the satellites all falling voiceless and empty from the sky. And then the rain. And then the hail. And then the sleet. And then this pyre taking unmarked decades to smolder out.
And then ashes to ashes. And then maggots in the ash.
And then for a time no more centuries, no more millennia.
And then for a time no more time.
And then only ages: The age of bones. The age of worms. The age of flies. The age of locusts. The age of devouring. The age of dust. The age of sand. The age of flooding. The age of earthquakes and eruptions. The age of erosion and landslides. The age of mud. The age of clouds. The age of oceans swelling. The age of waterspouts and tornados. The age of snow and ice. The age of glaciers. The age of avalanches. The age of melting. The age of new stone, new clay, new soil.
And then at last, at last, the age of seeds.
And then. And then. And then.
And then every morning, some new and constant sun, born upon the horizon.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors and staff of the following publications, where portions of Cataclysm Baby previously appeared: Alice Blue, American Short Fiction, Annalemma, Anthills, Artvoice, Everyday Genius, FANZINE, Gargoyle, Guernica, JMWW, > kill author, Knee-Jerk, The Literary Review, Ninth Letter, Poor Claudia, Puerto del Sol, The Reprint, Sleepingfish, TripleQuick Fiction, Wigleaf, and Wrong Tree Review.
Thanks to David McLendon for serving as the first editor of Cataclysm Baby, and for his invaluable friendship throughout the writing of it; to Dan Wickett, Steven Gillis, Brad Green, Sean Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Ellen, Wendell Mayo, Lawrence Coates, Michael Czyzniejewski, and all my colleagues at Bowling Green State University for being early readers of the manuscript that became this book.
“Walker, Wallace, Warren” owes a debt to “Applewood Figure,” kept in the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore—and to Michael Kimball and Tita Chico, for making sure I saw it.
“Xarles, Xavier, Xenos” owes a similar debt of inspiration to Mike McCormack’s “The Terms,” which it wouldn’t exist without.
Most importantly, thanks always to my wife Jessica, whose love and support enables every word.
About the Author
Matt Bell is also the author of How They Were Found, a collection of fiction. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and Willow Springs, and has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and Best American Fantasy, as well as shortlisted for Best American Short Stories. He can be contacted at www.mdbell.com.
The Mud Luscious Press Novel(la) Series:
WE TAKE ME APART
MOLLY GAUDRY
AN ISLAND OF FIFTY
BEN BROOKS
WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS
SASHA FLETCHER
GRIM TALES
NORMAN LOCK
THE HIEROGLYPHICS
MICHAEL STEWART
I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR
MATHIAS SVALINA
THE OREGON TRAIL IS THE OREGON TRAIL
GREGORY SHERL
CATACLYSM BABY
MATT BELL
DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL
KEN SPARLING
THE ALLIGATORS OF ABRAHAM
ROBERT KLOSS
www.mudlusciouspress.com
Praise for Cataclysm Baby
“In extraordinary language, with deep feeling, Matt Bell has crafted a baby name book for the apocalypse, a gorgeous, brilliant, often darkly hilarious and always moving novella. Written with an ingenuity and joy that call to mind Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, each chapter is a treasure: Here are beast of burden children, larval girls, subterranean daughters and choirs of sirens, combustible baby boys. I loved this book and want to recommend it to every human parent and child I know; if trees, rocks, and stars were literate, I would recommend it to them, too. "Where do babies come from?" children ask their parents, and Cataclysm Baby has an alphabet of answers as beautiful and mysterious as that ancient question, while always posing its haunting corollary: ‘Where do they go?’”
—Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
“You can read Matt Bell’s apocalyptic abecedarium as a grotesque allegory of the devastations of parenthood, or as a grim realist extrapolation evoked by our crumbling world order. But these lovely, harrowing pieces do not float off into the Ideasphere; they remain tethered to the dusty, arid earth by their palpable nouns: baby, hair, teeth, womb, seed, porridge, hut, crib, bone, mouth, hatchet, shovel, flesh. Like The Red Cavalry Stories or The Age of Wire and String, Cataclysm Baby is both surreal and vividly concrete, as much a Feeling Experiment as a Thought Experiment. The trope of end time is always about revelation, and what is revealed here, among other things, is Bell’s brutal compassion.”
—Chris Bachelder, Abbott Awaits
“The baby born as fur ball, the one who chews up its sibling in the womb, the amputated limbs, the child sacrifices, the girl untethered into the sky, the skewed biblical cadences and the mythic tropes, the continuous horror begot by parenthood and authority—Matt Bell’s collection of condensed narraticules, Cataclysm Baby, is Avant-Gothic at its most remarkable, unsettling, potent.”
—Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“Here is the alphab
et of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.”
—Lucy Corin, The Entire Predicament
Praise for How They Were Found
“Matt Bell has built a national reputation on his own terms, completely outside the support system of New York publishing, on the strength of his stories and novellas, which are wholly original and singularly his own. He is that rare sort of writer whose work the reader would recognize even if it were published anonymously. It is formally daring, high-stakes, languaged-up stuff.”
—Kyle Minor, HTMLGiant
“With How They Were Found, Bell joins the company of the great fabulists like Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, or closer to home, the American masters, Steven Millhauser, John Crowley, and Thomas Pynchon. These tales are mysterious, recondite without being just intellectual exercises, extravagant and fanciful, and ultimately winning. And [his] control of his material is imposing and his spectrum often dazzling.”
—Corey Mesler, American Book Review
“Body toll notwithstanding, How They Were Found is anything but bleak. For one thing, there’s the prose: generous, urgent, rhythmic… his rhetorical repetitions echoing the events and obsessions on the page.”
—Reese Okyong Kwon, The Believer
“Bell doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of his character’s lives. Unlike many writers, he isn’t afraid to reveal their true natures… His fiction is honest and raw, frightening and powerful. His writing is lovely and moving—a perfect pairing for the grisly moments his protagonists face.”
—Jennifer Taylor, Bookslut
“In narratives that feel almost uncomfortably honest, Bell exposes unusual acts of desperation, uncovering raw, new representations of heartache and hunger… No less original or thought-provoking than contemporary fabulist stalwarts like Aimee Bender or Etgar Keret, [he] expands the scope of experimental writing.”
—V. Jo Hsu, Fiction Writers Review
“His wild manipulation of form and genre makes the bulk of contemporary fiction feel bloodless and inert in comparison, but it is Bell’s recurring arrival at something sturdy and true about human behavior that makes the stories… so rewarding and resonant.”
—Matthew Derby, Super Flat Times: Stories
“Bell, here, at the start of his career, displays the kind of intelligence, self-awareness, and care with regard to his prose that suggests he may become a major talent.”
—Jeff Vandermeer, Omnivoracious
Copyright
Copyright 2012.
Cover design by Joshua Hagler.
Prepress & typesetting by David McNamara.
Distributed by Small Press Distribution.
Print ISBN 978-0-9830263-7-2.
LCCN 2011939805.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-6175068-2-6.
For further information: [email protected].
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