by Matt Bell
Even with the house’s slivered walls punched full of holes it was still warmer inside than out, and so I lay on the floor beside our bed, that better shape broken by the bear’s frustrated blows or else some collapsing portion of our house’s roof, and there I made myself a nest of old furs, all stale smelling but no worse off than I had left them, with no moths or rats living upon the barrenness of the dirt to chew their hides. Through the gaping roof I watched the two moons, and the rooms of the house flickered with the weird days and the long nights and their heavy glow, their differing shafts of damp light filtered by the splinters of our struts and beams.
The sky was so close then, and without stars or clouds I could see how far it had bent, at how sharp an angle it now rested, encumbered by the extra bulk of my wife’s barely aloft construction. The dirt and the house were silent, except for the wind bearing the creaking sounds of the strained curvature above, and I wondered how long we would be safe there and also if, when her moon fell, my wife and the foundling would be saved beneath the dirt, or the bear within her cave.
And then one night there came another creak.
And then on another night, another.
And then some other night when the fingerling said, IT IS TIME TO FLEE THE DIRT, TO RETURN TO WHERE YOU ONCE CAME FROM.
IT IS TIME TO TAKE ME TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LAKE, AND OVER THE MOUNTAINS BEYOND, WHERE YOU WILL CEASE, WHERE YOU WILL RELEASE ME, WHERE I WILL LIVE AND LIVE AND LIVE IN YOUR STEAD. AND SO AT LEAST SOME PART OF YOU WILL GO ON.
And that night I sat heavy with his words, and sometime later the buzzing sky begin to crack from its burden, forked everywhere with lightning that flashed across its surface but then did not disappear, instead remaining through the accompanying thunder and then beyond, and as I wondered at the lightning’s indelible persistence the fingerling spoke again.
WIFE AND FOUNDLING AND BEAR, he said, AND YOU UNABLE TO SAVE EVEN A SINGLE ONE.
And still I held my stubborn position, as always I had meant to hold it.
THE SMOKE FROM THE DEEP house stopped, and afterward everything turned to ice, all the world except the lake, its salted surface, and how long my life might have persisted like that, with me waiting white bearded and bent of body, if not for an injury worse than any other I had suffered: Cutting my way through the new and thicker brush of the woods, I stupidly put my foot into one of my own traps, its mechanism concealed beneath the undergrowth, and then I was caught by that forgotten device, some snare that the fingerling had failed to warn me away from, as he had warned me from so many others.
The snapping clasp of the trap’s mechanical jaws caught me by the ankle, breaking the skin and cutting muscle and tendon, and as the pain burned through my stuck leg I howled as so many other beasts had howled, screamed my accusations, screamed out my anger at the fingerling. At last he hoped to be proved stronger than me, and how I feared he was, all his smirking shapes together perhaps at last a better ghost than I was a man.
To plan the sawing of knife through bone, but again to fail to commit. To wail and drag at my broken, bloody leg, hauling the chained trap behind me in some limited circle, but to hear no response except the same silence that had already filled that frozen wood.
To despair, but to keep my feet, because to sit down upon the ice-strewn ground would be the first step toward giving up, toward accepting the death the fingerling had led me into, or else the begging for my life he hoped would win him his desires.
To sit down anyway, because eventually there was no strength left for the standing.
To feel my breathing shallow, my pulse slow. To close my eyes, and see nothing except the fingerling’s clumping movements inside my head, behind my eyes, his dark sparks and darker flashes.
To hear nothing, and then after the nothing at last something new, and then the fingerling’s agitated voice, saying NO, saying NO, saying NOT HIM.
To open my eyes to spy the approaching foundling, that boy who had never before been brave enough to cross the tree line, who had so rarely wandered even that far without my wife making soft tracks behind him, now trudging toward me through the bracken and the bramble, at last unafraid of the woods or else made the master of his fear.
I struggled, staggered to what remained of my feet, and then I called out to the foundling, said, We do not have much time.
I said, You should not be here, in these woods.
I said, Get out, and then I said it again and then again, and with each repetition of my warning the foundling recoiled but did not retreat, and also the fingerling raged furious, hardened his grip around my already-pressed organs, and still I tried to speak, croaking each breathless word, each syllable tasting of bile, of rotten teeth and ghosted flesh.
Help me, I said.
I said, Help me, but hurry.
The foundling I’d known was merely a child and might not have had the strength to open the jaws of the trap. This foundling was not so differently shaped, still small despite the decades passed between us, but he had little trouble yanking loose my injured leg, and if he was not careful he was at least quick, and if he hurt me worse at least I was cleared of what steel had caught me.
My ankle looked no better once freed, its bones and muscles and flesh sorely wrecked, but whatever pains the foundling caused were far less than how the fingerling would have seen me hurt, and also shamed and broken, and when the foundling stepped underneath my armpit I flinched so abruptly I nearly fell again—because what would the fingerling do now—and also how long had it been since anyone had touched me, since any other had tried to help?
With the foundling’s body supporting me—he was hard and wiry then, muscled like a man despite his prepubescent shape—we stumbled slow through the brambles, then out the woods, across the tree line, toward the house. As we crossed the dirt, I saw that the foundling’s once-burned face was somehow again unmarked, but also that he remained not quite well, and so he was joined to our family in this other way, how in each of us there dwelled some sickness, some scarred tissue or flustered potential, turned bone, twisted muscle: For the foundling, there was some fever found in the deepest reaches of the house, wet lands I had not seen. Or maybe it was the fire itself, caught in his flesh as it was so recently caught in the rooms of the deep house, the palace my wife had made, the ruins to which I’d had those rooms reduced.
Inside the house, I wrapped my already-swollen, bruised ankle in torn furs, the only bandages I could make. The inner hides filled fast with pooling blood, but I did not change them immediately, as first I thought to deal with the foundling, whose own illness seemed more pressing. There was no proper bed big enough to lay him upon, but there was my nest of blankets beside the broken one my wife and I had shared, and so I took him into the bedchamber, where I stripped off his sodden clothes, then wiped his body dry with the cleanest of our rough cloths. It took me aback to see how little he had changed against how old I had become, how heavy the decades lay upon my bones, and then I was startled again, at how passive his face remained while I toweled him, the foundling standing dispassionate, a child waiting beside the washtub for someone else to dress him.
In the absence of clocks I did not know how long it had been since the day the foundling’s mother took him away, but however many decades it had been his shape had aged only unto the cusp of adolescence: His shoulders and chest were still those of a boy, and there was no hair upon his lips or cheeks, nor under his arms or between his legs. Even the long, uncut hair upon his head was thin, thinner than I remembered, and as I stroked it off his hot face the fingerling made another heat inside my hands, a prickling numbness that took with it some portion of my senses there, so that I could not feel anymore the texture of the boy’s skin—and yet what little I felt I clung to, and did not forget: the foundling, a boy preserved by the devices of my wife, by her voice, her voice’s song.
Despite his fever, I covered the foundling in what other blankets I had, then took my bucket down to the lake, hobbling all the way, and fet
ched it full of the lake’s freezing water. Back in the bedroom, I found the boy asleep, his face senseless, his tossing body turning the sheets as I tried to quiet his movements with one hand so I could apply cool cloths with the other. Soon the room smelled wetly of sickness and salt, and despite the deep pain in my other joints I thanked the fingerling for my numb fingers, which could not feel the near ice of the lake water dripping from their age-spotted joints, and all the while that other son churned in my gut, overflowed my stomach with his bile, flooded my intestines with barely held diarrhea, filled my eyes with cruddy tears—and how I ached as he pushed his shapes outward, bulged my skin to make more room for his rage, his accusations, his righteous claims of dominion.
How I fought him then as I had not since the burning of the deep house.
How I fought him limb by limb, digit by digit, so that he might not bring harm to the foundling, but to do so not yet for the foundling’s sake, or not his sake alone.
Soon old hurts began to throb, and also there was my shattered ankle, which I unwrapped and studied by the light of the moons. I spent what water remained washing the wound somewhere out back of the house, where thick clots and then new blood puddled the frozen earth. What remained beneath was almost too wrecked to call an ankle, and never again did I walk straight or stand perfectly upright, but when my ankle was as clean as it could be, I wrapped it in fresh fur, making myself a boot as I had once made an armor.
Afterward I returned to the house, to the bedroom inside the house where the foundling slept, where he would sleep for some long period, during which I would keep some close vigil, during which I would leave him only twice: once to remove him something to eat from the woods, and once more to return to where the foundling had found me, so that I might drag some branches behind me, obscuring the smaller footprints he left in the blood-thawed earth nearby, so that if the bear did still live I might believe she would not so easily find his sign.
The foundling was awake again when I returned to the house the second time, sweating and shaking but able to stand and speak, his voice as high and lilting as ever. He complained of his long hunger and of the dirt’s cold air, and when I pressed him to speak of his mother instead or at least first, he only repeated his complaints. In response I dressed him in my old clothes, and where those fit wrong I modified them with my knife, holding the cloth away from his body so I might slice some strips from the bottom of his shirt, from the low hem of his trousers. Afterward I sat him down at the table, and there I opened him a hairless rabbit to eat, warmed it as best I could.
While he ate I watched his face for the fear I had expected to see, but now he seemed unafraid of this room in which his features had been undone, perhaps because his face was no longer exactly that same face, not that of the son my wife had masqueraded before me, no longer a blend of my features and hers. Now I was removed altogether, by the same method by which my wife had smoothed his scars, by the way long before that she had removed the many aspects of the bear.
After he was finished, the foundling got down from his seat, came over to stand before mine, and as he placed his hand into the wiry nest of my beard, all my body quivered toward his touch. I opened my arms with more hesitance than I wished, but he did not hesitate, only climbed into my lap, curled against my chest. He was too big to hold like this, but it was what I wanted, and anyway he was asleep before I could push him away, and as I held him, daring not to move, again and always the fingerling howled, accused, called me traitor. And did I bother to answer?
No, I did not, for what other answer was there that he would accept?
WHEN THE FOUNDLING NEXT AWOKE, I fed him the rest of his rabbit, then worked the warped iron of our stove to heat him some water, found him soap to bathe away the last of his fever smell.
I waited while he scrubbed and dried and dressed, and then I begged him to speak, to tell me of his mother, of my wife.
I said, Tell me it all, and do not stop, no matter what you see upon my face or what I do with my hands.
I said, I am not always in control of who I am, but I do not want you to be afraid of me, not anymore.
The foundling nodded, and then he said he knew, that he had long known.
He said, My mother showed me the man you used to be. She made many rooms to show me, and also to show you, so that when next we were together you would be yourself again, your right self, and we would not have to be afraid.
He said, She made a house for you, put all of herself inside it for you to recognize, but even after you saw what she wanted to say still you never came to where we were, although often we thought that you would.
He said—and here I heard his adult voice most, a deepness hidden within his child-shape—he said, Do you know how sad it made her to have you refuse her forgiveness? Do you know how sad it made me, to find you out in the woods, playing with your stupid traps?
The foundling and his mother had listened for my footsteps, and then my longer periods of stopping, resting or else slow consideration. He said that sometimes his mother said she heard me running, that I was moving faster now, that at last I was coming and that soon we would all be reunited.
Other times, he said, I would pause so long that they wept for fear of my death, for his mother said only the collapse of my bones could have stopped my advance, could have kept me away.
The foundling said he’d watched his mother waste herself to make the deep house, singing her bones inside out, making of her sweat salty rivers in which to cool my face and of her flesh banquet rooms in which to feast my hunger—but I remembered no such meals, and told the foundling so.
Certainly there were rooms of flies and rooms of maggots and rooms of garbage, I said. Certainly there were poison-rimmed goblets, plates powdered with pressed privet, tetanus-stilled beasts caught in rusty traps.
The foundling shook his too-small head, stopped the advance of his story.
Mother said you’d say that, he said.
He said, She said you were afraid of her, and also of me. That something had put a fear in you, and that now you were wary. And still she said we should wait for you to arrive, still she said you would arrive transformed.
What if deep house was not all there was beneath the earth? What if there was deep dirt? What if there was deep woods and deep lake? What if my wife was then making some new world beneath the dirt, and only my cowardice atop the great stairs had kept me from reaching it, from taking part in its reconfigured elements?
What if I could become deep father and she deep mother and the foundling or the fingerling our deep child, and what if the whole world I had known—all that lake and dirt and house and woods and bear and what was not a bear, all that father and mother and child and ghost-child and moon and moons—what if all that was failed forever, doomed by our years of childlessness, our despair over those long years?
What if my wife had known how to leave it all behind? What if she had tried to tell me, and what if I had not listened?
EXHAUSTED OF HIS STORY, THE foundling slept in my lap, and as he slept I stroked his hair as I had stroked my wife’s, as I had once hoped to stroke the fingerling’s, when I still imagined he might be a boy.
And how the fingerling hated this substitution, the equivalency it suggested, and how he wished me to stop.
How he knew what I was doing, what I planned to do next, and as warning he filled me with his black feelings, attempted to rob me of my enjoyment, my small joy at this first night of new fatherhood, and with his movements he kept me even from sleep, from indulging in my exhaustion to take some simple slumber of father and son. I held the foundling, and the fingerling moved agitated within me, and soon I began to feel some dull pain in my shoulders, then my arms and hands.
A prickling, then a numbness, then the prickling again.
Soon my jaw ached, and I shifted the foundling so that I could free one hand to rub at its joint, then to clear the sweat from my forehead.
I had barely eaten since the arrival of the foundlin
g, but now I felt like I had eaten too much, and if I could not still my stomach then I thought I would have to wake the foundling, send him to sleep somewhere else.
Last I felt the squeezing in my chest, like a fist wrapped around my heart, its grip bearing down, then letting up, then bearing down, a kind of contraction I had never before known, and at this touch I knew the fingerling’s intent, recognized his goal even if he kept silent as he worked. In the years of our long cohabitation he had found his way into every part of my shape except my head and my heart, but now he moved to enter fully my centermost chamber, and I felt him move to block that pulsing organ, shaping his many bodies into some plug or plugs with which to stop me where I sat, and when his work was complete I seized in my chair, the jerking of my body so violent it bucked the foundling from my embrace.
I grappled dumbly at my chest, pounded the skin and sternum that separated my hands from my heart, and as I floundered the awakened foundling dragged me gasping from my seat and onto the rough-boarded floor of our house. I spasmed upon the boards, and soon I could not feel my pulse or my breathing, but still I sensed the fingerling everywhere now, every part of him on the move, and against him I sensed the foundling working from without, setting his hands upon my chest, his lips on my lips. And when that failed he began to speak, and then his speech turned to song, made a new music that even in my dying I knew I had never heard before.
The song the foundling sang was not just sound but also smell and sight, also touch and taste, and also light, also not-black—and with it the foundling drove his brother out of my center, back to my stomach, to my thigh, those first hiding places now again made far from what remained of me—and when the fingerling was secured, my body jerked upon the floor, all of me weakened and sweat soaked and in terrible pain.