“Is everything ok?” asked Nana Pine toward Red Mothers, who sat in a giant chair on the side of the chancel at the front of the sanctuary. Red was the only child of Mothers II. Everyone called him Red on account of his coloring. He always had bright red hair and red eyes. Even his skin, in the glass light of the church, had a tint of red upon it, like a terrible and constant sunburn. His father, Mothers II, on the other hand, looked like a yellow and brown donkey, with gigantic brown eyebrows and big yellow ears. No one, including his father, could remember what Red’s actual name was. Like his father before him, and his father before him, he was chaste.
Red Mothers was too old to be anyone’s son. Many people even hypothesized that he was older than his own father, who was now unacceptably late to mass.
Nana Pine’s question led to more questions from everyone else. Red kept his head down, as if he was praying.
“Is Mothers asleep? Should someone go and wake him?” asked The Builder.
“Mothers wouldn’t oversleep on a Sunday,” said The Baker.
June Good stood up and asked, “How much longer do we wait?”
“Sit down, June.” The Foreman grabbed the back of her dress and pulled her back.
“Don’t tell her to sit down,” said Vera Good. She leaned over The Foreman and asked June if she was ok.
The Foreman put his head in his hands.
Inez stood up, still rocking Baby Zuzu in her arms, and yelled, “Why is my husband dead? Why does he have a hole in his chest?”
Red looked behind some curtains. It was important that he at least seem as though he was searching for his father. He didn’t know how to field this barrage of questions, which were increasing in intensity.
After Inez’s question, there was a gasp, then everyone agreed.
“Yes, why are we dying?” said The Banker.
“The Postman, and now The Barber...”
“Why do they have holes?”
“It’s God’s Finger!” yelled The Butcher. “We have to...”
“I think God’s touching us! But he’s just touching too hard!” yelled The Baker. “He loves us too much.”
“Yes! He’s just trying to bless us, but he doesn’t know his own strength,” added The Foreman to the frenzy.
Red rose from his seat and walked up to his father’s pulpit to reluctantly address the gathering. He didn’t know where his father was, and he didn’t know what to say. Ever since he was a small boy, he had dreamed of standing at the pulpit and delivering homilies, but he had spent his long life only watching, never doing. When he imagined it, he imagined himself yelling and gesturing wildly, saying things like you are all bad and you have to be good. Even though he had never spoken in front of the church before, especially on this Sunday that was more crowded than any other Sunday, he knew enough to know that now was no time for harsh lectures.
The first words of Father Mothers III’s reign were rather sheepish. “I don’t know where my father is,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He threw up his hands to shrug, and he knocked over a candle. In a panic, he stomped the flame out with his snakeskin shoes. “It’s out, it’s out,” he announced. And his second of many announcements became, “Be calm. The church is not going to burn down.”
The crowd sighed collectively, and some of them began to put on their jackets to leave.
Mary and Mimi were two of the first to exit. They walked around to the back of the church to smoke a couple stolen Pie Time cigarettes away from the dispersing crowd. As Mary lit Mimi’s cigarette, a routine they had practiced many times, she heard the sound of Mothers II’s sermon floating in the distance. The flames on their cigarettes died.
“Is it coming from the trees?”
“No. It’s on the roof.”
They dropped their cigarettes, and Mary helped Mimi onto her back. Mimi’s arm wrapped around Mary’s neck, they climbed the ladder that was left leaning against the back wall of the church. Together, they climbed like a snail.
More and more people were leaving the church now, confused.
Once Mary and Mimi were at the top of the ladder, they peeked up above the roofline to find Mothers II hanging on his cross, the bright morning sun framing his limp body, and the sound of his sermon louder than before. Without speaking to each other, Mary climbed onto the roof and straddled its apex, while Mimi situated herself on the top rung of the ladder. Mary scooted closer to the dead body while Mimi held her breath.
Mary scooted her body so close to his body that her shoulder knocked his foot. Mothers II swung. When she looked up, she saw his dead and purple face. His eyes were open, and he had a half smile as if here were still alive. His clothes were wet from the previous day’s rain. She could hear now that the sermon she was listening to was not coming from Mothers II, did not belong to him, but was the sermon of some other priest, maybe in some other town.
“What is it?!” Mimi asked from the ladder.
“It’s Mothers.”
“Is he alive?”
“No! Does it look like he’s alive? He’s swinging from the cross.”
“Well, I don’t know! I can’t see from here.” Mimi was losing her grip on the rung, and she adjusted her legs so she could sit more comfortably on the rung below. But from there she had an even more obstructed view. “Why is he talking?”
“It’s not him.”
“What do you mean it’s not him? Who is it?”
“I mean, it’s him, but it’s not him talking. It’s a radio or something.”
“I don’t see a radio.”
Mary looked around the body, and saw nothing on the flat part of the strangely constructed roof except two heavy planks of wormy wood, a hammer, and some scattered nails. From the roof, she could see people walking away from the church in different directions. “Yeah, me neither.”
Very carefully, Mary balanced on the roof, and pulled herself up the cross with her hands. She felt Mothers’ body for the source of the sermon’s sound. She felt his legs, which just felt like hard legs. Then she stood up further and felt his thighs, which just felt like hard thighs. Then she felt his stomach, which also felt hard.
“Why are you touching him like that?” cried Mimi. “We should tell somebody.”
“No, don’t! Just hold on.” Mary felt Mothers’ chest. It felt hollow beneath his shirt. She looked into his swollen and bulging eyes, and silently, with only her mouth, she apologized to him. Then, with her left hand, she slowly unbuttoned his shirt. There was a big hole in his chest that went all the way through, and a little red radio inside of it.
“Your hearts are too small,” said the voice inside the radio inside the hole.
8.
With his new glasses, Mano could see all the smallest things through the window. He saw the dust of hair on the aprons, which hung on a rack in the back of the room. Combs were floating in a jar of bright blue liquid on the counter in front of the mirror, and the scissors were hanging in their place along the wall. He saw the razors, too. Then he thought he saw a man standing in the shadows in the back, but it was his own reflection in another mirror as he peered through the window. The emptiness of the barbershop, to Inez, surely looked much different than it now looked to Mano. For her, empty rooms meant the world was ending, but for Mano empty rooms like this one made the world feel like it was on its first page. Mano knew love now. It was just hope made visible. Now, the world seemed a touch bigger in the best ways, big enough to walk all the way in. The barbershop looked ready for a customer.
Suddenly, a little black poodle licked Mano’s ankles where there was still some dried blood from the punishment doled out earlier by The Foreman. The poodle’s cold wet tongue startled him.
“It’s ok, you don’t have to do that.” Mano stood still, even though it tickled. The poodle wanted to clean him, and Mano wanted to let it. He pet the poodle’s fluffy black hair, then he picked it up to say thank you into its eyes.
“Are you the poodle that came out of the hole in The Postman?” The poodle wiggled
in Mano’s grip. It didn’t have any tags. It didn’t even have a collar. “What’s your name?” It didn’t have a name.
Soon after setting the poodle back down on the ground, it knocked over the trashcan to sniff and lick whatever was inside of it. “Hey, how did you get inside?” Mano asked the poodle.
The door that Mano assumed was locked was now ajar. Mano walked inside, and turned the lamp on. He turned over the Closed sign on the front door to the Open sign. He set the trashcan upright, then picked up a few of the papers the spilled out and put them back in. With his long hair tucked into his collar, Mano sat in the barber’s chair and waited for his first customer. He waited and waited and no one came. No one even walked by the front window. He found yesterday’s newspaper on the newspaper stand by the door. He had watched The Barber read the newspaper in the chair while waiting for a customer, so he thought to keep up the tradition. It seemed right. It was the least he could do.
The newspaper had officially christened Pie Time’s plague, God’s Finger. According to the article, three people from Pie Time were dead. They each had holes in their chests, and each had something come out of their holes upon their death. No one knew where the holes were coming from, or why. Some suggested they were caused by a contagious nightmare, since each death occurred while its victim slept. Most suggested that it was God poking his finger very hard into the chests of sinners to punish them for their sins. Others suggested it was God trying to bless the living with his finger for doing good things, but blessing them too hard. What Pepe had said about The Postman was true. It was right there in the paper. Beulah Minx was interviewed. “A poodle came out,” is all she said.
“How did you get inside The Postman?” Mano asked the poodle, who was now sitting in the sun in the window. That didn’t seem like the right question. “How did you come from The Postman?” No question was the right question, and it was clear that the poodle didn’t understand where it had come from. “What is happening with the world?” As Mano said that, he felt more like The Barber. That would be something a barber would say. “What is wrong with the world today?”
“Up, up,” Mano said to the poodle as he patted the back of the barber’s chair with his hand. “C’mon.” Mano decided he would need to practice with the apron, the scissors, the combs, the razors, and the shampoos, before his customers arrived. This time was precious.
The poodle stared at him.
“You’re my guinea pig.”
With his new glasses on, Mano could see perfectly the contours of the poodle’s body, how the tiniest hairs jutted out of the crooks, and he could see the moles in the folds enough not to shave them off. He cut and shaved, lathered and preened. The poodle looked smaller, like an entirely new kind of animal, maybe something in the Family Rodentia. But it smelled clean. You could see its eyes now, and they shined in the sunlight. For never having cut hair before, Mano’s first haircut was remarkable.
If Mano was going to be The Barber, he’d need his second haircut ever to be his own. No one would want their hair cut by a barber with long hair. He sat himself in the chair, and faced the mirror. He tightened the white paper collar around his neck before wrapping the apron around his shoulders.
“You look like a priest,” he said to himself. “You look like Mothers with long hair.” This made him laugh. “Ok, this is going to hurt.” He made himself laugh again, then he held his long hair above his head and cut it with the scissors. His short hair fell to his ears while his long hair remained in his fist above his head like a bouquet of flowers. He stayed like that for a moment, staring as his face. He looked like a stranger, and for the first time his body was not his own. He felt like he was inside the body of a beautiful young man. He felt the sting that remained in the back of his legs, and that sting felt like someone else’s, too. Nothing was his. Only the poodle which was now on his lap. Only the glasses. Those things felt like his because he held these things. And because he held these things, he was becoming larger.
“Hello?” he said into the mirror. He got up to look more closely into his own eyes. Standing there, he cut his hair even shorter, more madly now, wildly, like cutting the hedges, until he could see his scalp. He had never seen his scalp before. He could see the shape of his skull, and he could see what he would look like as a skeleton. “Hello, skeleton.” With the razor, he shaved the sides of his head, and with the comb he parted what little was left on the top of his head.
He leaned even further over the counter into the mirror until his breath fogged up the man’s face in the reflection. “What’s your name,” he whispered. “Tell me your name.” His open mouth pressed against the breath on the mirror, and it moved in the hot fog against his reflection’s mouth. His tongue slipped out along the edges, and it licked his own tongue.
The barbershop was tiny with only enough room for one barber’s chair, but there was a door in the back of the shop that led to two even tinier rooms. The room on the left was the bathroom, and the room on the right was something else entirely. The walls were white and there were no windows. The only thing in the room was a black square. It was like nothing else—not like darkness or light, or joy or sadness, or air or a lack of air. It was something, but it was also nothing. It felt like a thing, of course, but it felt like a thing that was missing. If it was like anything, maybe it was like the past. The air in the room felt incredibly personal, like it could only exist for one person. And when Mano stood in the center of the room, he felt like he was the exact specific person that the room was for.
Mano took a few steps into the room so he could touch the black square. He thought he would know what it was if he touched it. Instead of touching anything, he watched his finger go into it, and then back out. It went in so far, almost all the way to the knuckle. Then he put his whole hand inside of it, and felt a pull—not like another hand pulling him, but like sideways gravity. He reached all the way in to his elbow. It felt so good to be inside of the black square like that.
“Tell me if someone comes in, ok?”
The poodle looked like a mouse in the doorway of the back room.
Mano hesitated a few times, but then couldn’t help but give in to the black square’s pull on his whole body. When the air was at its most quiet in the back room, and he could be sure no one was coming, Mano stepped up into the black square. He put his entire body inside it.
Once inside the black square, Mano could see he was underwater, sitting in cold mud at the bottom of a murky pond. Above him, on the surface, two people were treading water with their clothes on. They were not thrashing the water in a panic, but just floating there, moving their legs slowly, like they were just walking about. Their legs were lit up in the watery light. The long skirt of the woman was slowly swooshing up and down like a jellyfish, and as her skirt floated upward, he could see her legs, and the top of her garters. The man was wearing pants, and wingtip shoes, his black socks peeking out in the light. Mano was turned on from looking at the space between the end of the man’s pants and the rims on the top of his shoes, where the thin socks slid down, and the space between the hemmed lining of the woman’s skirt, and the top rim of her shoes, how the skin squeezed in impossibly. Both the man’s and the woman’s legs were moving like frogs’ legs.
The man fell a little beneath the surface to unbuckle his belt, and the woman fell just beneath the surface to pull off her skirt. Mano had never seen so much skin before, like streaks in the watery silence, blurry and spinning, smearing into the movements they were making, or the ones they had just made. The pants and the skirt, and both pairs of shoes, a belt and some socks floated slowly down from the surface.
From beneath the pair in the cold mud, Mano searched for his mother. As he called for her, the word rose above his lips to the surface and made a shadow on his face there: Ma’am? Mother? The words were everything anyone could ever want in words. Three beautiful syllables: ma’am, and moth, and errr, pushed together in the light until they lit up in the light, making one brightly lit word on
his face. Mano’s mouth was moving on its own now, Ma’am, Mother, in front of him, and he followed it. But he realized for the first time that what he was looking for was not a sound, but the feeling of a sound. And then it came, as easily from the darkness, or from the woman or the man, as from the leafy murk that felt like it was swaying directly across from him in the dark airlessness of the pond bottom. This sound of swaying he heard was coming from the now naked swimmers above him. It was the blood pumping inside his own heart.
The swimmers now looked as if they were dividing into parts, their arms and legs separating from their bodies and floating along the surface of the pond. To Mano, it looked like the bottoms of many boats. More and more shapes were floating on the surface, and they started to block out the light that was cutting down through the water. Eventually, the pair of swimmers could no longer be seen at all, and instead there were so many shapes floating above Mano, that Mano was left completely in the dark.
Pepe’s face was clear and bright as it emerged from the middle of the darkness, and quickly toward Mano. Something felt like it was about to begin, or had just ended. And then there was no murk. And then there was no pond.
9.
“What happened to your hair?” asked Sisi.
Mano leaned forward on the toilet. He had forgotten about his hair. He touched the back of his neck, and felt all the air there. Very quietly, polka played on the radio.
“I’m The Barber now.”
“Is that right?” Sisi acted impressed. “You’re The Barber now? Does The Foreman mind that you’re The Barber now? I doubt you can be too productive rolling cigarettes when you’re cutting and sweeping in your barbershop all day.”
Mano gritted his teeth. “I don’t work at the factory anymore.” He worried that his mother was going to ask why. He started thinking of reasons for leaving the factory that weren’t as humiliating as the truth.
“Well, the factory would certainly not be the right place for The Barber to work, I’d say.” Sisi smiled to her son knowingly.
Mammother Page 4