by Matt Bell
My wife frowned but did not deny me, for in those days we refused each other nothing. She created and created, and when I could not abide any more of her objects—shapes meant for a once-expected childhood, now only mocking, robbed of any right utility—then I began to take more of my hours outside the house I had built, inhabiting instead the lake and the woods, whose strange failings could not be laid so squarely upon my deeds, nor the body of my wife.
And yet for a long time after their making I delayed putting my traps to work, because it was fishing for which I was best built. The lake was thick with salt and did not freeze, and that first winter I took only such numbers as were necessary for our table, lured the lake’s silver swimmers from the depths with hook and line, with wriggling bait and heavy sinkers. In those days, the fingerling did not often speak—he was still in his infancy, and even as a ghost there was perhaps some semblance of rules, progressions—but upon the lake he stirred, swimming throughout the channels of my body more easily than when my feet were planted upon dry land. Between casts, I placed my palm up under the blousing of my shirt, probed for his presence, and as the fingerling left his hole in my belly to swim against my surface I was more easily able to learn his movements, often swift beneath my skin, and also the peculiar numbness that accompanied his too-long presence in one organ or another, as if my senses had been sundered, as if it was his will my body spoke to then, instead of my own.
It was only this first child that I swallowed, secreted away, and by the time the fingerling had wintered within me for several years, in between had come and passed some other brothers who did not take, some sisters whose cells refused my wife’s bloody chamber. With each of their passings my wife made again the angry words I did not want her to have to speak, and then again there was her bloodied dress dragged into the yard, again my begrudged rowing her out upon the lake, again the calling down of the stars by the strength of her song, its harsh syllables always sung after we let float away the body of some newest child, so unprepared we could hardly call it stillborn.
At last the sky was so dimmed and emptied of its ancient alphabet that we lost the shapes of even the oldest stories, the comforts of our parents’ myths, for now there was no more sky-bear, no tall-tree beside it or gold-crown to rest upon its head, and also no more lake-whale or salt-squid hanging in the sea of stars above the dirt. From then on whatever sky we lived beneath was not the sky of our parents, and whatever stories we might tell our children would not be the stories we had been told.
Now the fingerling came into possession of his full voice, and often he whispered darkly in my ear, revealing the objects my wife sang into being but then hid or else buried: the mismatched booties hidden beneath the bed, long after she had promised to stop their creation; the tiny bonnets hanging behind her own in the closet; the dresses made for the late maternity she had not yet had, their austere fabrics meant to drape over the swollen object of those expectant months.
Out back of the house, the fingerling showed me the first bassinet, the one I had made and that she had improved, now broken and buried beneath the nightshade, the monkshood, the pennyroyal—and then he asked what it was my wife intended to grow, knowing I had no answer for his smirking question. Already I was made to learn to despise him by his words, and also sometimes her, and as each child sputtered inside her, my wife moved away, or else I did, until at last we were rarely in the same part of the house, our voices kept too distant to easily speak to each other.
It was only then that I first saw what else the fingerling had been trying to show me: the newly variable nature of our rooms, of the house that contained them, and how my wife’s rolling apart in the night tore away more than just the blankets. As her side of our bedchamber grew some few inches, I did what little I could to right our arrangement, tugged hard at the blankets that barely covered the widened bed—until again all things were distributed evenly, even as they were somehow also farther apart.
THERE WAS FRESH JOY IN my wife’s voice when she announced the beginning of her last pregnancy, and in the weeks that followed some same feeling of hope came to inhabit my own chest-space, as if after so much disappointment I could so easily be filled with love for this child she claimed was better coming. Buoyed by her words, our best marriage resumed: We began again to eat together, at noon and at dusk, our fish filleted and fried upon our plates, garnished with vegetables from her garden. Each evening we met in our sitting room to read the scattered, unordered pages of our few remaining books, and then at night we lay side by side, bodies close but always not touching—as then I believed her delicate, capable of being disturbed from her pregnancy—and also that our next child was just as fragile, some uneasy swimmer in danger of being jostled from out her body, as all his lake-bound brothers and sisters had been, as the fingerling had before them.
After my wife had remained pregnant for a full season, then she took me by the hand, pulled me up from my chair and out onto the dirt beyond the front porch, into the place where the dirt had become most glassed, most reflective of what sun and moon shone upon it. There my wife again began to sing, and with some new song—one more powerful than any other I had yet heard or imagined—she took something from me, and also a similar portion from herself, and into the sky she lifted what she had taken until it took on some enlarged shape, until it became a heavenly body with its own weight and rotation and orbit: At the request of her melody, our flesh became a new moon, a twin to the one already hung.
Beneath its new light, my wife explained that her moon was a shape meant not to reveal the sky but perhaps to split the dirt, to destroy what house I had built, its shifting walls. Not a memorial to her sorrow, but at last a way to end it: With the crashing shatter of the moon, the lake would empty its waters, and the woods would burst into flame, and even the cities across the far mountains might shake with the horror of our divorce. The moon would someday fall—this she promised, regardless of her pregnancy’s outcome, for the sky was not made to hold its weight—but with song she could delay its plummet into the far future, for the sake of this new joy in her belly.
And if there was no child coming, only another in our line of small disasters?
My wife’s smile broadened, so wide that for the first time in many years I spied a certain number of her backmost teeth, her pinkest gums, and then she said, I have grown so weary of these many beginnings, and it is only endings that I still crave, only middles I might agree to bear.
WE HAD NEVER BEFORE EATEN meat, only fish, but the woods in those years brimmed with life, and at my wife’s request I began to trap that bounty, so I might bring home new sustenance for her table, so that she might make the furs into blankets meant to keep her warm while she grew this best last chance of a child. But the smell of seared rabbit or boiled squirrel turned my stomach, and I could not be made to try it, preferring instead the catch from the gray waters of the lake. My wife had no such hesitation, and so took apart whatever I found with fork and knife, with savage fingers tearing seared muscle into smaller bites fit for her greased lips. I faced into her new gluttony, its sight offending from across the table, and at the fingerling’s suggestion I asked her why she needed these new foods, this meat that came to displace fish and fruit and vegetable until all her diet was red and bloodied, as never it had been before.
In my father’s house, she said, we ate only fish, but I am no longer in my father’s house, and the old ways no longer bind me.
She slid her pooled plate toward me, said that in this small world there were pleasures and powers I had not yet imagined and that through them we might find some strength to share.
She said, Together we will remake this dirt, the sky above it and the ground below, and all the animals and birds and fish that crawl and fly and swim upon and around it, and by our own new laws we will be better married, made anew.
A family, she said. What you have always wanted, at last arrived; for one way or another, I have found the will to give it.
I did not k
now then of what she spoke, was afraid of this new manner in her speech, its sound so like my own worst thoughts, like those of the fingerling. And so I shook my head, asked her not to speak this way again, and after she withdrew her plate I returned to the woods, where afterward I spent more and more of my time.
In my absence, my wife filled our rooms with more new-sung objects, baby-things for her baby, made this time from no template of mine but rather out of her own imagining. Meanwhile I turned my anger to task as I worked to empty the woods of all the animals favored by the bear, who I came to believe was lord over that shaded domain.
When I say belief, I do not mean I knew what I believed, not in the way I had believed before coming to the dirt, in steepled buildings made to organize such feelings. Things were odder here than they were elsewhere, and most stories were not written as clearly: On the other side of the lake, across the mountains, the truth had been inscribed in the stars and could not be changed. Here, upon the dirt, my wife had wiped clean that sky-flung slate, and so I was not sure what to believe or where to look to rediscover what once I had simply known.
Throughout this pregnancy’s middle months, the fingerling and I continued to trap the woods, to bring home what meat and furs we earned. Our nights stretched troubled, some feeling in the gut appearing in my dreams as in the fingerling’s, its shadow disrupting our sometimes-blended nightscapes with unsure worries. From within those sleepless hours I would emerge blearily from the house, returning to the woods to check my traps for ferret or fox, for the rabbits or wild hounds stuck in the steel jaws of my mechanisms, and because I did not know what else to do with those whose meat she refused, I took up the taxidermist’s craft, the tanner’s: To skin, to scrape, to preserve the furs. To make my wife shut them with needle and thread, for when our first clothes had turned to rags. To reclaim them as memory, their bodies arranged with glue and wire, their skins stretched over wood forms meant to decorate the walls of our house, to displace the long-empty picture frames.
Above the traps, where shafts of moonlight descended through the boughs, often a space existed wherein some segment of the shifted sky could be seen, where the last stars remaining did not retain their original seats but rather slid along new curves, their paths distorting as the second moon’s weight tugged the sky. Each night the fingerling catalogued this movement, and together my eager watcher and I searched for other signs, like how the once-white glow of my wife’s moon was perhaps even then tinged some shade of pink, and the sky was not all we watched, nor all we wondered about. More and more, we pondered what my wife learned in the cave, that house of the bear, when we lived there without knowing to whom the cave belonged: How long did she know about the bear before it awoke from its long sleep?
How long did my wife know, and what did she find between the time of her first knowing and that awakening, the bear rising to chase her from its home?
Whatever she found, was this the source of her stronger songs, of the voice that made her words more powerful than mine, even though it was I who had claimed this dirt to rule? Or was it something else, something she and I had done together?
That was the question I worried at, that I gnawed at like a bone, a cast-off rib too stubborn to share its marrow. And when at last that bone broke, what truth escaped its fracture, was by it remade: for even our bones had memories, and our memories bones.
LATER MY WIFE LEFT FOR the woods too, perhaps for the first time since our fleeing the cave of the bear in our earliest, more innocently childless days: I knew only that first she was beside me in our bed, and then she was gone, into a night lengthened beyond reason; and though I did not sleep, I pretended to, so that when her absence ended she would not have to explain. I trusted her then as I would not trust her later, not even early that next morning, when upon her return and her resumption of sleep—and also time, I thought then, oddly—the fingerling seized the dawn-light’s warm chance to show how it was not just mud that caked brown my wife’s heels and ankles. And still I refused to see what I was shown, even as the fingerling urged me toward right thinking.
I did not want to do what he claimed was necessary, to lift my wife’s nightclothes and confirm the new stains streaking dark her white thighs, and while the fingerling begged me to show him, to show us, I told him I would not push my wife farther into this misery, would not compound her sadness with the forced and early addition of my own.
I watched my sleeping wife, hovered my hand over the scroll of her hair. And to the fingerling, I said, Wait.
Wait, I said.
Wait until she awakens.
Wait until she washes and eats.
Wait until she has readied herself with freshest clothing, until her hair is returned to its bindings, until her face is rouged and powdered. Then she will tell us all we need to know: what has happened, what will happen next, and when at last it will all be over.
MY WIFE EMERGED FROM OUR bedchambers late, as was her custom throughout those childless years.
Dressed only in her nightclothes, ankles stained, she walked through the kitchen and out the front door to the dirt beyond, while I sat at our slab of table with my fork and my fish, while in my half-filled stomach the fingerling looped anxious orbits. He begged me to follow her onto the porch or at least to spy upon her through some opened window, yet I maintained what slim calm lingered—for if my wife’s pregnancy had truly ended—if our last good chance had indeed passed unborn between her legs—then she had promised to end our world, then surely that end was come.
But then morning passed into day into evening into night.
I listened, but the song did not come, the calling-down sung after each of her other pregnancies, and when at last I opened the door, there was no wife out upon the dirt, or near the lake, or in the woods, no matter how or where I searched: Again she had disappeared from the surface of all things, just as she had the day the bear destroyed our wedding gifts at the mouth of its cave.
When at last she returned, her pregnancy seemed not ended, despite the grief bloodshot through her eyes, the stagger pained into her step. I asked her where she had gone and what she had done, but she said only that she was tired, that she did not wish to speak. Her body betrayed none of the quick deflation it had before, and so I did not know what to say or do, and afterward I kept some distance during the day and also in the night, and I gave her more than her share of what I trapped and fished, so that she might feed this baby better, so that if it were somehow still within her it might find the strength to live.
From that night on, my wife avoided our bed, sleeping instead alone upon the dirt, beneath the moon and also her moon, bidding me not to follow but to promise to remain inside the house—and even though I promised, my promise was not enough.
Each evening I again agreed to retire to the bedchamber, agreed as if I had never been asked, my wife’s voice betraying no recognition of our patterns, of my nightly exile to our lonely bed, where only the fingerling’s terrors would keep me company.
Then my wife saying good night, muffled through the closing and closed door.
Then the key moving in the lock.
Then the latch making it easy not to break my promise.
Then the waiting until dark, until the darker dark inside, and then moving to the window, where I believed I would not be seen.
From that vantage, I could not spy where she lay, but I could hear her voice, and as I listened she filled the nights with a song she had not sung before, the purpose of which I could not divine. Each morning, she returned at dawn in her draped and dirtied nightgown to unlock the bedchamber door, and no matter what she said I did not question her, only chose to believe the best of the many possibilities, that her acned skin and ruddied cheeks and heavied body were some good sign, some assurance that this pregnancy continued, that there was still some child coming. This was the story I wanted most, and so it was easiest to believe, no matter what the fingerling claimed—and also there was the matter of her moon, neither ascending nor desc
ending. If her pregnancy had ended, then I thought there would be no need for these locked doors, these separate nights, not against the language of her eyes, the promised danger of her sung moon.
In my hopeful naïveté I made believe that the moon’s place in the sky assumed or assured a child’s place in her, but while I slept the fingerling begged my eyes open, watching and waiting and never allowing me to forget what we had seen, that night my wife had returned bloodied to the bed.
YOU KNOW THERE IS NO CHILD, the fingerling said, his shape curled in upon my ear, circling its ugly organ with each word, each soft-slung syllable. THERE IS ONLY A LIE, WHICH IN YOUR WEAKNESS YOU ALLOW HER TO KEEP, TO HOLD AGAINST YOU.
EXPOSE HER, he said, and then he slipped his shape across my face, around the curve of my jawline, down into the spiral canals of my other ear, crowding that too-small space so that he might command my attention, so that he might speak longer than he had spoken before: EXPOSE HER AND MAKE HER PAY. FOR HER DECEPTION, FOR WHAT SHE DID TO YOU, FOR WHAT SHE DID TO ME, TO MY OTHER BROTHERS AND SISTERS.
He said, I HAVE SEEN THE INSIDE OF HER SHAPE, AS I HAVE SEEN THE INSIDE OF YOURS, AND I TELL YOU IT IS NOT OUR LACK BUT HERS.
Despite the tickle of the fingerling in and around my face, still I dissented. Long had I saddened at the failure of my children, at the ghost I had set to seed, but never had I blamed my wife, not in full, not as we expanded the distance between our bodies, not after we had ceased to smile at each other in doorways or through windows. Some part of that distancing had been reversed by this pregnancy, and in this last-found closeness I wanted to believe all the fingerling claimed I should not; and even if her pregnancy was over, then perhaps I was willing to blame her actions on the twisting unreasonableness of heartbreak, and so I did not agree that my wife had done me wrong.