by Matt Bell
AND LESS TO END IT, reminded the fingerling. AS YOU HAVE PROMISED. AS I PROMISE YOU WILL.
And in this room: the sound of my wife’s knuckle first sliding beneath the beaten silver of that ring, a sound never before heard, or else forgotten amid all the other business of our wedding day.
And in this room: the footprints she made on the beach where we were wed, where we had stood atop that platform, separated by the priest and then joined by the same, and all this upon that other sunnier shore, where it was not always summer but where often it was summer enough.
And in this room: where my footprints that evening were, not always at her side, only sometimes so. And how I wished it had been different, that I had not walked away at the beginning of our marriage, when I thought it would always be so easy to return.
And in this room: the words I used nearly every summer after, to beg from her one more child, even after she was determined only to stop the trying and also before she found she wanted her motherhood again, wanted it this time for herself, wanted it more than even I had ever wanted or realized.
And in this room: the scent of my wife’s perfume as she passed, a smell once lovely, now stale as glue. And how I missed its original, how I had missed it.
And in this room: every graying hair she pulled from her head or her body in the failed years between the fingerling and the foundling. Every piece of skin she rubbed raw in the bath, when between miscarriages she could not scrub away the hormone-stink of motherhood, falsely begun. All that hair and skin, stuck wet to the floor.
And in this room: A white suit that no longer fit. A shirt that wouldn’t button, a tie that drew its knot too quick around the neck. The relics of a body betrayed against itself, and against my wife, who had not agreed to love what fat and hair it acquired, nor the blank spaces replacing what it had lost, those first few teeth, those other small kindnesses.
And in this room: My wife’s garden, if she had not abandoned its offerings to eat the meat of the woods. What she might have grown with the labors of her hands instead of the song of her voice. What this dirt would have yielded to us, if only she had again given the sun leave to shine.
And in this room: a silver bowl full of her tomatoes, one taste of which revealed the tang of their song-stuff, their lack of right reality, despite skin, despite juice and seeds.
And in this room: all the faces of the fish I had taken from the lake, piled into a single mash of eyes and gills, teeth and scales. How surprised I was to see them, and how easy it was to forget how many lives I took just to keep myself alive, to feed my wife and the foundling. All these bodies, knifed open so we might continue another day.
And in this room: The death of a badger, cradled in steel, rehashed. The static of an action worn down by repetition, this series of moments brought to completion only to begin again, reduced, semi-badgers torn and tortured into some novel shape.
And in this room: an empty space in which, if I had watched long enough, the badger might eventually have been made separate from the trap, freed from its circumstance, if not the damage done.
And in this room: a floor of hides, stitched from the skins of what I had trapped, where I could not stop myself from kneeling upon the floor, from digging the hooks of my fingers into its stitching. I pulled and pulled and undid some of its ties, and from beneath I revealed only more flooring, more skins sewn to skins, and soon there was around me a pit of flesh, a hollow stinking of its taxidermy, and below that only more skin, only more fur.
And in this room: the buzzing of bees and then, elsewhere, another room, full of bees. Two separate rooms, one with the bees themselves, silent, and the other filled only with their sound. How many more rooms I knew there must be if that continued. How much more house it took to keep things separate, to break them down.
And in this room: the smell of decomposing onion and beet, potato and rutabaga—all that vegetal rot.
And in this room: The last sunflowers of my wife’s garden, the first that stretched their petals toward her red moon instead of the sun that barely again rose over the dirt; and if the light of the moon was mere reflection, and the light of two moons doubly so, why then their different hues, against the vast black of the sky?
And in this room: a fistful of black seeds.
In the next room, the shell of the bear: her proud bones stuck through her skin, her bristled fur fallen like pine needles. Her claws pulled from their moorings, her teeth loose in her jaws, her breath rotten as fallen bark, worm-struck as the earth beneath her woods, stinking of meat eaten long past its date, dug up.
And in this room: my wife’s favorite dress, worn the first time she danced with me. How when I held the fabric to my face I smelled nothing, because the smell of her sweat was in another room.
And in this room: a well-scrubbed floor, and on it a well-scoured pot, scratched by the removal of meals we shared, of meals we ate apart.
And in this room: a bowl made of mirrors, so that as I drank of it, it drank of me.
And in this room: the song of the stars, never heard after it was silenced above the dirt, and before that never this clearly. How I had forgotten even what I had forgotten, this series of notes that made a song that made a story, all so hard to retell without their sharp light present, hard to hear or hum even when the stars yet hung from the sky, and impossible now that their shapes had been extinguished. And again my wife had remembered, as I had not.
And in this room: lightning. And in this room: thunder. And in this room: how long it had been since it rained.
And in this room: the smell of a mother’s sadness, but not my wife’s. Hers I would have recognized easily, but this one took some longer effort, for what man could know the tears of a bear, the way her sorrow-sweat stinks, soaked through fur and hide?
How now I could, because the bear had filled my skin with her breath, and if some part of me was the fingerling, so perhaps some other portion was the bear.
And in this room: How my wife made the bear weak. How she lay flat upon the dirt, upon the dirt floor of our cellar, and put her cheek upon the ground. How she whispered songs into the earth, how with those songs’ reverberations she lulled the bear to sleep even as she kept her sleep restless, to delay her rival’s tracking, her waking attempts to move upon the dirt. How the wounds my wife had given the bear worsened, how the bone snapped free of the rib meat, of the fleshy parts of the neck.
AND IN THIS ROOM, THIS new series of rooms that followed: My wife walking out of the house and across the dirt.
My wife lifting the hem of her skirt above the brambles at the tree line, choosing her steps carefully as she navigated the trapped woods.
My wife slowing to look at deer and elk, muskrat and wood-chuck, rabbit and squirrel, all still whole and hearty, sure sign this memory preceded the foundling, our finished family.
My wife stopping to smile from within a pillar of sunlight, such shafts already rare and soon to be rarer still.
My wife not carefree in that dappling, but preparing, gathering strength.
And in this room: the entrance to the cave at the center of the woods, marked only by her footprints in the muck, headed in.
And in this room: my wife traversing the many chambers of the bear’s cave, all descended from the one in which we so briefly lived when first we came to the dirt.
And in this room: my wife gathering the yawning cub below into her arms, then putting some few furs to rest in its place.
And in this room: the bear half lidded, locking its gaze with my wife’s, parent-that-was to parent-to-be. How angry the bear’s yellow eyes were, and how sad my wife’s.
And in this room: the song with which she beat and battered the bear.
Then another room, with the bear’s own song, its curdling attempt to fight in the manner of my wife.
And then another, with the secret of my wife’s ears, stopped up safe with wax and tiny balls of feathers.
And in this room: My wife holding the bear down with her son
g, then lulling that giant back to sleep. Then leaning in close, putting her lips inside the tickle of the bear’s ear, and there whisper-singing a lie, a vision to replace the truth: to make the bear believe she had awoken already and in her hunger devoured her cub, so that it might live no more, so that it might be back inside her, a jumble of leg and paw, face and fur, all feeding the one who fed it.
And in this room: How my wife was not sure she had succeeded until months later, when the bear awoke from her long hibernation to howl her shamed horror into the earth, to fill her cave with worse sound, to shake the earth and also the trees above, frightening the birds to flight, the beasts to quivering in their burrows and their beds, and afterward the woods seemed emptier, occupied only with what ruined fauna the bear and I would make together.
And in this room: A single moment, captured during the long lonely climb out of the cave, the sleeping cub cradled to her breast. A single note of the song she sung as she climbed, that secret song I knew so well, which she had practiced upon the dirt while I slept locked inside our bedchambers.
A single note, and yet how I knew what it could do, and what other notes would follow, and how I knew that even before she emerged into the air of the woods the cub was no cub at all.
How I knew all this at that first note, knew it even before I found the other rooms containing some other single sound of that transformation from bear cub to foundling, finished even before she arrived at our front door, the entrance to a house at last filled with family.
And in this room: again a ball of furs, same as I carried in my satchel, but memory made, song grown.
How I removed the true fur, bear given, and how I held it in one hand, then this song-made copy in the other.
How when I picked the two furs up again, I could not remember which was which, and so took them both.
And in this room, in these rooms, a vision: mine or my wife’s, of all the stars that had fallen out of the sky and into the lake; of those stars falling still, descending sputtering through the deepest water, then past into some other darkness, where for a time they might light the wide hollows below.
AND IN THIS ROOM: THE love letters we wrote to each other in the months of our courtship, aflame. This then the last seconds of their existence, when we burned them on the eve of our wedding, when my wife said that the words inked by my hand and by hers were the words of lovers but not spouses and that after we were joined we would need new letters with which to profess new promises.
But never again did we write each other, because afterward we always had each other so close.
What I would have given to be able to stand the heat of those old immolations, to have been brave enough to thrust my hand into their flaming shapes so as to read whom it was my wife had loved, so as to again become that person.
And in this room: the moment of our first lovemaking, which did not occur in the house but in that other country where we lived when we were first married, its cities once reachable by the road that led around the lake that, until we lost the head of its trail, could have taken us back home.
And in this room: a moment even earlier, the first time my wife raised her dress to me, exposing her battered shins. And then in another the first time I saw the bruises that blacked her knees and tendered the skin of her thighs.
And then, in another, the first time, long after those first times, when I realized she’d done this to herself.
And in this room: a memory of my parents, a story I had told my wife.
My parents, who should have taught me how to be a parent myself.
Who tried but perhaps could not succeed, for what did they know of families on this side of the lake, the mountains?
In their own country, children lived and lived and lived, and so many of our structures were unnecessary there, would be bright madness if erected in their shining world.
And in this room: the blanched face of the father of my wife in the moment I asked for his daughter. How it was my wife’s permission I needed, and yet I did not seek it until others had promised her hand.
And in this room: my father’s voice, telling me the purpose of a marriage was the improvement of a man and a woman, each meant to make the other better.
It is enough, he said, and also, You cannot expect to make the world better, not by any love.
He said it was only to my wife that I was responsible for my actions, and only to me that she could be held to the same standards. And as he said this I knew he believed it, that he did not know he was wrong, and that in his wrongness it was his duty to me he had not considered.
And in this room: the smile on his face as he said those words, which at the time I mistook for friendship, a bond we had not previously enjoyed.
And in this room: My younger father, years earlier, telling me what it means to be a man. My ungrayed mother, telling me what it means to be a husband. These two talks, which did not take place at the same time, joined here as they never were, so that I would be reminded that their advice was anything but the same thing—and also I wondered how my wife knew, how she knew these parts of me to take, to put into her own deep house as if they were hers—and it was the fingerling who provided the answer, who reminded me of what flesh she took to make her moon.
And in this room, in this series of rooms: Why we moved to the dirt between the lake and the woods, the reason different than what always I had believed before. And how this was something she never told me, even though we were husband and wife. And in each room of that floor one action of a sequence was made distinct from the last, so that the crush of her father’s body atop her mother’s was separated from how his knees punched into her thighs, pinning them to their mattress. Then the blows she struck across the meat of his forearms as they moved his hands to her throat. Then how her father choked her mother. Then how he lifted her head by the throat, then how he struck the headboard with her skull until he had broken both.
And in this room: another reason my wife had not at first wanted children of her own, even as I wanted them more than anything else. The genes of a killer, the genes of someone killed; half of what her parents had, but which half?
And in this room, another space, filled by the fingerling saying, THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. THAT IS HOW YOU SHOULD MAKE IT TO BE.
And in this room: How my wife had known what her father was, how he had hurt her too, and how she had lived with the hurt because it meant that her mother received less.
How after my wife left his house for mine, then her mother had no one left to protect her.
How my wife blamed herself for this, and how she also blamed me, for taking her away.
And in this room: The sound of my wife singing herself to sleep. The sound of her voice keeping her company. The sound of a song that made temporary ghosts to appear and then to sing her songs along. How she punished herself for her loss. How she promised that her own children would be born into a world without sadness, without tragedy, without death, or at least without the death of parents. How she determined to make that world and only then to give me the children I claimed to want, and how she planned to keep those children safe.
How if she could not keep this promise, she would rather not have any children at all, no matter how I begged.
And what bruises accompanied these words.
What burns and shallow cuts.
What years those wounds lasted, scabbed over, healed, replaced, scarred white.
Those pale textures, all previously hidden in places I would never look, or where I had stopped looking, or else in plain sight where again I failed to see or understand.
And in this room: how I told my wife that by taking her away I would keep her safe.
On some new dirt, I told her, she would no longer hurt herself, no longer visit upon her body what frustrations she gathered from the busy world around her, its tall buildings, its crammed streets.
Our new world, it would be quieter, simpler.
Our new world, it would be just her, would be
just me, just us and the babies I then hoped—that I hoped we both hoped—would become our family.
As if to prove my love I should remove her from all that she knew. As if to keep her mine, I had to share her with no one.
And in this room: my wife saying she does not want children, that she has never wanted children.
And in this room: my wife saying that she is tired, that her body aches, that her breasts are sore from years of unpurposed lactation, and that she does not want to live this way.
And in this room: my wife saying Please, saying Please stop.
And in this room: My wife pleading that a husband and a wife are still a family. That two are enough.
And then, in another room down the hall, my voice replying, my voice saying, No.
And in this room: all the arguments by which I hoped to leverage her first to try and then to keep trying, even as in the aftermath she hurt her body, then the house and the dirt and the sky.