Mother Box and Other Tales

by Blackman, Sarah

  It was him, tapping at a hatch that had once served some arcane purpose (coal cellar, root shoot) but now connected their rooms. What a detail! How remiss of her never to consider it before, though she had spent hours in a delirium of half-sleep, her bones aching, pressing her febrile cheek to the cool floorboards and listening to him beneath as he paced. He rapped again, this time sounding more like a question, and she threw back the rug, strained to lift the heavy trap door by its iron ring. He helped, pushing from beneath—she sensed his strain through the boards, his arms corded above his head like an Atlas heaving aside the globe—and when together they flung the hatch open he looked up to her, his lantern jaw thrust eagerly forward as if he were about to speak. What would he have said? A greeting? A declaration? His eyes were sunken, dim. He blinked.

  At another time in her life she might have seen herself as he did. Or she might at least have tried, glancing in the mirror which gaped a shocked oval directly across from her, and she might have been ashamed of herself. Certainly her mother would have been ashamed of her, her childhood friends, her former lovers. Her father would have been horrified, pushed past speech. He might again have died to see her there in her extremity, her wildness. But this was the very end of her life, its final months, and though she knew almost nothing of the world, she was still animal enough not to waste her time. She pounced.

  In the end, sad to say, she was quite violent with them both. She spidered over him, a fury of limbs, and her skin so pale that where he gripped her, pried her, pressed her to the bed, his hands left no mark, only a slight compression as if he had gripped a length of cold wax. She scoured him. She used her nails, her teeth. Where she could not find purchase, she dug in under his shy pads of fat. All over his body she left great welts, thready scratches beading with blood as if he had come through a forest of nettles. She did more besides. More and more as her little dark room filled with that compressed silence (a silence that somehow swallowed their breathing, his moans, her sharp fox cries) and outside the garden roared and trembled, trumpeted, disclaimed.

  The garden mustered all of its dense, bushy conglomeration, from the dormant border mums to the fetid corners of moss, from the thickets of wandering Jew and bell-sprung hosta to the cyclamen beating its mewling blooms against the panes of her glass. It mustered its whole self to a hysterical frenzy, a shrill, mouthless clamor so total and extreme that her next door neighbor, smoking a cigarette on his porch and watching the streaming branches of the catalpa toss against the moon, wondered what it was that could have snuck through her fence. Something large, he thought, or several things, cats perhaps taking advantage of the clear night to mate. ‘Time to make more cats,’ he remembered, some distant line of poetry, and smiled, pleased with himself and this beautiful night. How still it was. How mild.

  Their affair continued in much the same way for many weeks. Some nights, he would come to the hatch in her floor and scratch there. Some nights, she would fling it open and call down into the darkness. All throughout he continued to make his garden rounds and she continued to stand for him, a beacon in the window but lighting nothing, guiding nothing, noticeable only because behind her was a darkness so black it seemed a living thing, pressing its furred weight into all the crannies of the room, folding around her like a cloak or a curtain. What did she see during this time? Often it seemed as if she were blind. And what did she hear? She heard a dense roaring, a hum approaching and receding, sometimes a twang as if of a wire snapping beneath an unbearable strain. She did not eat. Her spine now looked like a watch chain and her ribcage a pocket watch left carelessly open, slung over the back of some chair. It was all new, strange, howling, but sometimes it felt as if there was something—a resonant ache, a stretching—that she had always felt, that she had only forgotten for some little time after she had been born. When they were finished, she would take him limp into her mouth and taste all that was there. The salt and the pearl-seed musk, the copper tang (hers? his?) and under it the bitter yellow smear of pollens. The sex of the lily, the poppy, the rose.

  One day, a departure, she opened the hatch herself and descended the ladder into his rooms. For some time now she had been aware of herself in a different way. She felt a fullness, an uneasy shift. That morning, she had woken to the sunlight climbing in tentative inches up her quilt, motes of dust distinctly glimmering against the eggshell walls, and thought, “Ah ha.” She had gripped the hasp of her pelvis and shaken it as if in confirmation.

  The ladder seemed very long, or maybe her body was shorter than she was accustomed to, curled in on itself. Her dressing gown, which she had thrown on for some reason over her shorts and her yellow Pearl Harbor tee-shirt, flapped about her ankles and threatened to slip beneath her feet, tripping her. Her hands ached, her arms ached, and when she stopped to catch her breath and wipe the sweat out of her eyes, she saw the wall before her had gone from brick and mortar to raw, clay earth, packed and smooth as if shined by the pressure of long use. She braced herself on the ladder with one arm and picked at the dirt, digging a little hole with her forefinger, but all she discovered was more of the same. The passageway seemed much tighter than it should be as well, but she didn't trust her balance enough to turn around. A warm breeze came up the tunnel and fluttered her dressing gown, soothed the backs of her thighs, flirted up the leg of her shorts and out the baggy gap of their waistband.

  She found him in his kitchen frying an egg. He was fully dressed, which was something of a shock to her having never seen him in clothes, and seemed pleased to see her, though clearly quite surprised. He fussed over her, settling her in a chair, turning up the flame on an oil lamp he kept in the center of the table. His house was very dark, though all through its rooms breezes of varying temperatures floated and crossed as if about them were countless invisible passages out into the open air. Shadows, too many it seemed to her, shifted on the prettily wallpapered walls of his kitchen and she tried to remember if this was a paper she had chosen herself or something he had added. And this room, hadn't it once had a window? A window obstructed by the tangle of a forsythia bush which her first tenant, that miserable girl, was always threatening to raze? On the far side of the room something massed in a way that might suggest branches, but then it didn't seem to matter anymore. Then, she didn't care.

  Would she like an egg? She would not. Did she mind if he ate? She did not. He poured some tea for them both out of a steaming kettle and sat across from her, merry, his jaw thrusting after his eggs and toast in a ruminative fashion as he watched her drink. His clothes were very simple—blue jeans, a black tee-shirt that flattered his shoulders—but they unnerved her. They made him seem like someone else entirely, someone with a name she should, by now, know. He sopped the last of the yolk off his plate with his last bite of toast. She sipped the tea, a bitter musty tea, and shuddered as a breeze flipped suddenly up the back of her neck.

  She said, “I'm pregnant.”

  He froze. His mouth fell open, revealing a yellow smear of yolk in a way that she found very comical and she snorted with laughter. Then he reached for her across the table. His hands cast great winged shadows on the wall and the light of the oil lamp skewed the proportions of his face, making his eyes seem huge and dark, his mouth a wet hole. Oh, but he was delighted! She had never seen him happy like this. He laughed. He came around the table and knelt at her feet, reached for her stomach with one hand, gripped her thigh with the other. Laughing, his mouth was wetter, his eyes hidden. She looked down at the top of his head, his face buried now in her lap where she could feel the hot gusts of his laughter. His body seemed to hulk in its skins, in his clothing she reminded herself, and it shook and quivered, his hand pinching up her thigh, his mouth wet against her stomach, kissing her kissing her, hot and wet. A baby! A baby! A baby!

  “I will not have it,” she shouts. She stands, shakes him off. The room seems to contract around her, a ring of muscle tensing. It is dark and hot. She cannot see; she cannot. “I'm getting rid of it. I will not have it.�
�� Because who is he, after all, to be so pleased at what she has done and what she will do next? She presses the top of her skull with her fingers and imagines her belly the same shape, with the same tensile glow. She imagines her body going on and on without her, building something, massing itself to a terrible effort and she left alone in her dark room, incidental. She drops the teacup and it breaks in half on the floor like the two sides of an egg. Scalding tea leaps up against her leg and around her in the whickering shadows something moves very fast. Inside herself, she feels a deep, irrevocable tearing.

  All that follows next happens in darkness. She wakes in his bed and he is kneeling beside her, a washcloth in his hand. She wakes on her hands and knees in a tilted hallway (her hallway? behind that distant door, her bath? her mirror? her robes?) and feels a wetness between her thighs. When she puts her hand there it seems to come away sticky and green. She wakes to his face, concerned. His face, alarmed. His wet eyes, his strange expressions. What is the sound of his voice? She wakes to a pressing pulse, on all sides a tightness as if all the space in her is being squeezed out. The light is red, pounding. She wakes and she is alone, out in the garden. It is night and very still. High above, the moon is a sliver, so white it is almost translucent, almost not there at all. Her body feels wrung, each muscle stretched and sore as if she has gone through a tremendous struggle, but when she tries she finds she cannot lift her head, and when she concentrates she realizes she cannot feel her arms and legs. At the center of her is a great hollowness. A wind comes up and from the corner of her vision she sees the spiteful poppies toss their heads.

  “I have been stepped on,” she thinks. “A boot has come down.”

  Already the insects have found her. Next to her, something dark and shapeless unfurls and begins to cry.

  Many Things, Including This

  When she stopped looking around so much, everything got a little better for her. For example, previously on her short drive to work in the mornings she would look to one side and see the ambulance men parked in the drive-through eating their egg sandwiches. To the other side, she would look and see a group of school children all wearing unseasonably heavy coats with oversized fur-trimmed hoods. With the hoods pulled up the children looked like ecumenical bears, gathered together to consider questions of portent and consequence. Hoods down they look skinned, raw. Perhaps they were waiting for a bus? Every day she drove past too quickly and was concerned for their safety, then hers.

  A little further on, still looking around, she might see a hawk perched severely on the Baptist church steeple; a Giant Sale banner snapping loose of its eyelet and rippling on the wind; a waft of plastic flowers blown from the cemetery to the bustling gas station across the street; a woman in a pink skirt taking very long steps.

  Previously, when she went out at night, she would continue this behavior, looking at the bartender and the booths, at the people in the booths, the shadows behind the people, looking at the corners, back and forth from corner to corner until she was no longer sure which way she had come in. She had headaches and body aches. She had mind confusion and confusion over the ordinary things outside of her mind like house keys and terra-cotta pots. She was capable of looking back and forth between a green shoe and a stand lamp, a chicken breast and a tea pot, a cassette tape and a thick, blue pen, a loop of wires and a bundle of lilies for hours and hours. Clearly, something had to change.

  At first, she did not look around simply by not moving her neck. There remained the question of her eyes, but in less time than you'd think she had conquered them too and stared only straight ahead. She had always been told she had beautiful eyes. They were an uncomplicated color, demanded very little from their audience. If one were lost in her eyes it would only be for the afternoon. Nothing to panic about, nothing to report back on. With her new way of holding her neck and her straight-ahead eyes, people seemed to find her disconcerting. They looked at her eyes and looked away, looked and away, looked and away, each time a little more startled, more angry. Under her gaze, people developed a tendency toward extreme agitation. They would fidget and pluck at their clothes. Soon they were hopping from foot to foot like apes. They hunched their backs and threw their arms up into the air exactly like apes, but of course she did not know this because she did not look. For awhile this was the perfect solution and many things fell into place in both her emotional life and in her career.

  Then, her boyfriend, a recent acquisition, began to complain that there was something different about her.

  “What is it?” she asked. They had gone out to dinner and she was eating a plateful of mussels. She could hear the ligaments creak as she pressed the shells flat and she held each mussel up before her eyes and studied its saffron sheen. She was a little worried about eating a bad mussel—this was not the best restaurant and they were far from water—but each one slid into her stomach and settled there in a wholesome, briny, companionable way.

  “I don't know,” her boyfriend said. “Maybe it's like you're thinking about something really awful. Something that if I knew about it would make me uncomfortable and ashamed. Maybe it's like you're doing it on purpose. I don't know.” Her boyfriend looked down into his soup. Across the restaurant, a band was setting up on a little raised stage and they crossed back and forth through her vision carrying cables and amplifiers, guitars and drum-sets, accordions and a kazoo.

  “I'm not thinking of anything,” she said. “I'm thinking about mussels.”

  But her boyfriend said, “I wonder what kind of music this is going to be,” and turned in his chair so all she could see was the back of his head.

  Later, they decided to go ahead and have sex anyway. It turned out the band had a large local following and the restaurant quickly filled up with people who passed drinks over her head and dipped the edges of long, embroidered scarves into her boyfriend's soup. The mussels were not off, but still she felt like something had happened. She had just a bit of fogginess around the edges of her mind and didn't feel up to trying the thing her boyfriend wanted to try, not right then, not without some time to think through the logistics.

  “It's okay,” her boyfriend said, “just get on top.” But then the bed began to make an unpleasant noise and, because she was looking at the wall directly above the headboard, she noticed they had chipped the paint a little there and after all this was a rented house.

  “Okay,” her boyfriend said, “I'll be on top.” The situation became awkward. The bed continued to make its noise and one of the pillows had been carelessly arranged so that it kept falling down over her eyes. Her boyfriend went on for a while, much longer than usual, and when she pushed the pillow back so she could see the place on his neck which she liked, she noticed the vein that usually beat there so steadily was swollen and erratic in a way which was clearly indicative of stress.

  Finally, her boyfriend rolled over and lay next to her. Together, they looked at the ceiling.

  “I wish you would just stop thinking about it,” he said.

  “Thinking about what?” she said, but he pretended to be asleep.

  The next morning, she got up while her boyfriend was still sleeping and got ready to go to work. She brushed her teeth and looked at her eyes in the mirror. She chose her shoes by touch and ended up with alligator pumps, which would do just fine, and left very quietly, locking the door behind her to keep her boyfriend safe.

  On the way to work she looked only ahead. She saw the road which had recently been repaved and glistened a little. It was an unusually foggy day and the sky pressed against the road in a way that made its newness more noticeable and the particular oldness of the sky, by comparison, a cliché. The road had been repaved so recently—it occurred to her it must have been in the night while she slept—that the road crews had not yet painted the abrupt yellow dashes and strict yellow lines which would normally tell her how to go, so she centered herself in the middle of the street. Straight ahead the street was like a lavish, glistening tongue—unhealthy, too full of itself—an
d the sky was the low vault of a pallet afflicted with some kind of cottony disease. She decided to take a break, though she was almost to work, and pulled into the gas station for some gas and maybe a Danish to eat after lunch.

  When she got out of her car her alligator pumps made echoing taps against the ground. The fog here was much thicker and she concluded the gas station must be situated in a natural depression. She could see only the roof of her car and then, when she turned, the pump directly in front of her. Even the trash can and windshield cleanser stand had been reduced to vague outlines and the gas station itself was invisible except for a neon sign advertising a brand of gum which glowed red through the fog. CHEW SNAP said the sign and suddenly she realized she wasn't alone.

  Looking straight ahead, she couldn't see who had joined her. She sensed there were many bodies and assumed a kind of density and compactness to the bodies that was confirmed when something padded jostled her arm.