My mind wonders what will happen next.
I’m expecting a monster.
2. Every evening the moon comments
on what I should have done.
Memory is reasonable, explaining
what there was to escape from.
The monster was what was left behind.
3. Stretch skin. Rearrange eyes. Wiggle
ears. Protect the brain. Arms are easily
removed. A monster on a country road.
A monster rising from a dark city alley.
A monster in the sky. Look. Look away.
Part IV
Mara F.
Chapter Thirteen
The bus didn’t stop too far from our house. It took me a long time to hobble there. I held in my entrails as best I could. Leaning on the crutch pushed my weaker organs around so I had to press my viscera back into place. Father opened the door a crack when I knocked, using my two remaining knuckles. Father stared, evaluating what he could see of me. I was plagued by flies since leaving the bus. They clustered around my body, landing on parts I couldn’t reach. He threw the door open, shooed the flies away.
“My Mara, my darling daughter, you’re in terrible shape. Come in, come in. You know that the various anatomical parts of you degenerate differently, depending on the age, lifestyle, and genetics of the person you received them from as well as the date the part was attached.” He looked into my fading eyes, “How do you feel, sweetheart?”
I dragged myself and my crutch inside the house, noticing that nothing had dramatically changed. “Lackadaisical.”
He roared with laughter as I sat on the sofa. “Thank you for the word,” he said. “You haven’t changed much. Except, well, let’s see under all that wrapping. You’re like some kind of a present under all that material.” He leaned my crutch against the maroon sofa. “Would you like something to eat or drink? Are you hungry, sweetheart?”
I shook my head. “How are you, Father? I’ve thought of you often.” He was unwinding the scarf, which caused me some pain.
“I am predictable.” He looked at me clinically. Not horrified like the other people but not compassionately like Theresa, or even Misty in her own way. “I’m back doing research. I go on. What about you, Mara? You must tell me what you have been doing and why you were compelled to leave.” His eyebrows crawled toward his forehead, and his glasses, the same, familiar eyeglasses, slipped further down his nose, his bone-colored hair kicked out in every direction. “You know that you could never fail me. I never thought you would. I wondered what had happened to you, even with the note.”
“I did something horrible.”
“What?” His eyebrows twined together.
“I killed someone.”
Father roared with laughter again. “People die every day for no good reason.”
“I was in the country and then the city.”
“Oh,” Father said. “Did you tell anyone about me and you, about us or our research?”
“No.”
He smiled. “Good girl. Which place did you like better?”
I handed him my notebook. “This explains everything.”
“I will treasure this.” He placed the notebook on a table and touched my nose, jaw, ears, cheeks.
I winced. “I’m falling apart.”
“We all are, darling daughter, some of us faster and some slower.” He lifted one of my arms, let it drop. “Hmm, the deltoid flap is compromised. Are you in much pain?”
I nodded.
“Some of the older parts are separating from the newer ones. But the tissue and skin are degenerating too. I could do more tests and determine how widespread it is. Whether it has reached the bones, the organs, or the brain.”
But we both already knew. I heard soft footsteps in the kitchen. “Is this what happened to the other Maras?”
Father nodded, his head shaking all those strands of white hair into fragments. “But it happened much more slowly since I was there to replace the exhausted or nonfunctioning areas.”
“Why do I remember or imagine so many of their deaths?”
“Probably because that was the most recent emotionally evocative moment in their lives and it permeates every cell. So memory can be retained in the parts too.”
“Are there any others out there like me, like the Maras?”
Father shook his head. “None that I know of.”
I didn’t want to consider the alternative ways he obtained body parts. I’d had enough. The soft footsteps grew closer.
“Gloves, get out of here. We’re busy. Go,” Father exclaimed to a black and white cat with an indentation where a collar had been.
I didn’t have the energy to ask about the cat. I sighed. My legs were swollen. I had terrible indigestion although I had hardly eaten anything in the last few days. Every piece of me that Father had assembled hurt. I looked at the cat. It was starting all over again. “Come here, Gloves.”
The cat looked at me with its yellow eyes as if asking a question. Then, without any hesitation, it jumped into my pathetic lap. It was wonderful, soft fur and the rhythmic purring, although its weight bothered my legs. She didn’t care how I looked. I was growing thinner than air.
“I don’t have the strength I used to have.” I thought briefly about breaking her neck to save her from pain, like the previous Gloves, but I was too weak.
Father said, “I’ll carry you down to the lab.” He shooed the cat away.
My bones shifted uncomfortably in his arms as he easily lifted me.
“Imponderable,” he gave me.
He placed me on the dreaded operating table, brushing my sad clumps of hair out of my face. He shined a pinpoint of light from a tiny flashlight into my poor eyes and moved it around. “Try and follow the light with your eyes.” The Photographs consoled me, Mother and Daughter, even the Scientist. At least now I understood their meaning, the context of their surroundings, their lives. He strapped me down.
“Use me.” It was what I wanted. It was my fate.
“My little apomixis,” my father murmured in one of my ears.
“Yes, Father,” I whispered, knowing I wasn’t born from fertilization but created from body parts.
“I thought you were the one,” he shook his head, his wild hair flying. “My Mara, I love you. I have always loved you and I always will.”
“I love you too, Father.”
Then he moved to a corner of the room and spoke into a tiny microphone attached to a recording device. “Mara Five has returned. I’ll remove her brain for use in Mara Six. It seems to be the one resilient transplanted organ that has survived. My special adhesive compound has its advantages and disadvantages. I’m very, very close. . . .”
I thought I could hear someone moaning and kicking furniture in a room in the house although the anesthesia mask was approaching my ravaged face. A girl. I couldn’t tell if it was upstairs or inside of me. Was it a Mara or someone else? I had finally created my own memories.
I remembered Father, with tangled dark hair, his eyeglasses slipping, kissing my fat baby arms, tickling my stomach and underarms; a mobile with shiny, colored shapes dangled just out of my reach; I was crawling toward the maroon sofa; my first bicycle ride, Father and Mother’s dark heads trailing; my first day at school; Mother’s lovely back at the kitchen making breakfast; my bedroom window broken by a baseball; Father wiping tears from my eyes with a handkerchief; Father teaching me letters, then words, then sentences. I was reading. We began to toss words back and forth, describing one another and everything around us, including the fascinating and beautiful world.
“Transgression” was the first word I gave him.
The Author
Laurie Blauner is the author of three previous novels, Infinite Kindness, Somebody, and The Bohemians, all from Black Heron Press, as
well as seven books of poetry. A novella called Instructions for Living was published in 2011 from Main Street Rag. Her most recent book of poetry, It Looks Worse than I Am, was published in 2014 as the first Open Reading Period selection from What Books Press. A poetry chapbook was published in 2013 from dancing girl press. She has received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship as well as Seattle Arts Commission, King County Arts Commission, 4Culture, and Artist Trust grants and awards. She was a resident at Centrum in Washington state and was in the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2007. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Field, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, The Collagist, and many other magazines. She lives in Seattle, Washington. Her web site is www.laurieblauner.com.
The Solace of Monsters Page 17