Mammother

by Zachary Schomburg

  “What is this?” she asked, looking for a seat other than the seat that was placed directly in front of the screen.

  “It’s the new booth. Do you like it?”

  Vera didn’t answer. She set her veil on the hook on the back of the door. She saw another room to the side, behind a curtain, and took a step toward it. “There’s another room? What’s in there?”

  “That’s the changing room.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “I’m going to need you to take off your clothes before you confess, Vera. Truth can only come from the nude. There are hooks in there for you to hang up your clothes so they don’t get dirty on the floor.”

  “But...” Vera considered objecting, but she didn’t quite know where to start.

  “...and there is a mirror in there, too, and a light. Oh, and a sink. Take your time.”

  Distraught and bewildered, Vera entered the changing room of the confession booth as if she were entering a new room of a dream. She took off June’s fur coat and pearls and hung them on a hook, and she took off June’s long black dress and hung that on another hook. June’s bra, June’s tights, and June’s panties were hung on the third hook. Vera stood naked in front of all those hanging clothes and cried.

  “Vera, are you ok in there?” asked Mothers.

  Vera didn’t answer. She turned to look at her naked body in the mirror, but could only see June’s naked body there. She could see June’s long arms and June’s long neck. She wanted to touch it, but there was nothing left of June to touch. She touched the cold steel faucet of the sink instead. She splashed cold water on her face. Then she pulled back the curtains and walked back into the main room of the confession booth completely naked, and faced the screen. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “I loved June Good. And June Good loved me.” Just as Vera confessed, a bright hot flash of what seemed like lightning lit up the room. Vera fell violently backward against the door. “What was that?!” The wood felt cold and hard on her bare shoulders.

  “Oh no, no. It was nothing,” Mothers explained. “It’s ok. I took your photograph just as you confessed.”

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” Vera said defeatedly, her back against the door. She retreated to the changing room, and put June’s clothes back on. It felt good to put her arms and legs back inside the fabric of the person that she loved the most.

  Mothers remained behind the screen. “Come back out, Vera. I have to give you your penance now.”

  “Just tell me.” Vera put the veil back over her face, and looked at herself through it in the mirror. “I can hear you fine from in here.”

  “50 Our Fathers.”

  “50?” complained Vera.

  “Yes, 50. We just can’t be too careful these days. It’s your love that may have killed her.”

  19.

  There was so much hair on the floor of the barbershop later that afternoon that for a moment, Mano thought he might have lost the black poodle. He called for it, but it never barked. The poodle never made any sounds. So Mano swept all the brown, grey, black, and red hair of the men of Pie Time into a mountain range of hair, and through that valley appeared the black poodle.

  “Let’s go say goodbye to Pepe,” Mano said to the poodle and to the birds on his head. Mano turned the open sign of the barbershop into a closed sign, and closed the door behind him. Last Street was busier than normal. There were already customers in the windows of The Bartender’s bar and at The Chef’s restaurant. Mano didn’t recognize any of them. With his pockets full of coins from a full day’s worth of haircuts, he walked to The Florist’s flower shop to buy a handful of yellow ranunculus.

  “One bouquet of yellow ranunculus, please.”

  The Florist picked a few yellow ranunculus and snipped the ends, and handed them to Mano. “One bouquet of yellow ranunculus for the man with things on his head. Where are you going to hold these?” The Florist rarely spoke, on account of his embarrassment of his thick accent.

  Mano pushed up his glasses with his finger, and shuffled his accordion, radio, and hot water bottle around in order to reach out a hand.

  “These things, what are they? These things, where do they come from?” asked The Florist.

  Mano tucked the bouquet between the buttons of his shirt, and they stayed there. “I don’t understand.”

  “These things...” The Florist pointed to the birds on Mano’s head, and to the accordion on his back, “...are they...”

  Mano finished his sentence for him, “...these things I love. These things, they are these things I love.”

  “So, you...”

  “...they are these things, these things I love.”

  The Florist became frustrated and tried a different line of questioning. “Who are these beautiful flowers for? They are so beautiful. These flowers, they must be for someone beautiful.”

  “These flowers are for the beautiful, yes,” Mano answered, trying not to pick up The Florist’s accent. “And these flowers are so beautiful because these flowers are dying.”

  “Yes!” The Florist felt as though Mano understood him. “I am in the business of making beauty from death.”

  “We both are,” Mano added.

  The Florist agreed. “These flowers, they are for your poor Pepe?”

  Mano felt relieved of what he had been hiding inside. “Yes, these flowers are for Pepe. How did...”

  “I watch him come to your barbershop. I watch you two in there. He is beautiful. And he’s even more beautiful now. We should not be so afraid of God’s Finger.” The Florist was the only person who recognized this love inside of Mano. The Florist threw up his hands. “To death!”

  “Yes, to death!” Mano playfully agreed. He threw up one of his hands.

  “Are you going to the river for Pepe now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Here, take another bouquet with you.” The Florist snipped more ranunculus, arranged them quickly, and handed another bouquet to Mano. Without Mano reaching out his hand, The Florist poked them through the button of Mano’s shirt just below the first bouquet. “Take these flowers to the river for me. And send them to their death.”

  “And in whose name am I sending them to their beautiful death?” Mano asked.

  “Roberto.”

  “Roberto,” Mano repeated to show The Florist that he would be memorizing the name. “Roberto’s a beautiful name.”

  “He made me laugh when we were boys.”

  “He sounds funny.”

  “He was, very.”

  The Florist and Mano said their goodbyes like new friends.

  It started to rain on the footbridge of The Cure. Mano sat on the edge in the center of the bridge, readying himself to send flowers to their deaths in the name of both Roberto and Pepe. His feet dangled above the loud stream. He didn’t mind getting wet. He thought about the last time he had cleaned his body. Usually, he washed himself while standing up in the large kitchen sink in the home he would never return to. But the days of that kind of cleaning were over. He wondered what it would feel like to just slide into The Cure with these flowers and finally get all the way clean, once and for all, tumbling and drowning into death. He watched the water rush from under the bridge, under his feet—it knew exactly where it was going.

  “For Roberto.” Mano held up the first bouquet of yellow ranunculus above his head, an offering to the rain to ready it for the river. Each blossom bloomed wide just before he dropped them between his knees into The Cure. “You were loved!” The bouquet tumbled and dipped below the surface, then came back up and got stuck on a rock. A few seconds later, it freed itself and disappeared downstream.

  Mano swung the broken accordion from his back to his chest and he played its three dirges over the sound of the rushing water. The trees leaned in, and the bushes, too. The clouds opened up, and the rain stopped. Mano swung the accordion back onto his back, satisfied with the world’s attention to his goodbye. He to
ok the second bouquet from the lower button of his shirt, and held it out in front of him. He said nothing. He only closed his eyes. Behind his eyes was an image of Pepe, hair parted to the side, cutting an apple in half for the two of them to share. He held the bouquet in front of him for as long as the muscles in his arms could stand it. “For Pepe,” he said. Then he dropped it between his knees into The Cure.

  At the precise moment that Mano opened his eyes to watch the bouquet fall into the river, Pepe’s dead body, on its back on a grave-raft made of logs, floated from beneath the footbridge. The bouquet Mano bought for him landed on top of another identical bouquet of yellow ranunculus that Pepe’s hands were positioned to clutch. Pepe was wearing a suit and tie, and his hair parted just how Mano was imagining it a moment earlier. Two identical bouquets on this corpse chest.

  “Oh, dear Pepe!” Mano yelled.

  “Pepe!” yelled The Butcher in the distance upstream.

  Mano turned around on the bridge to see The Butcher and Mitzi Let upstream behind him on the banks. He failed to see them there earlier. Their arms were moving above their heads.

  “You let go too soon!” The Butcher yelled back at Mitzi.

  “You let go, not me!” Mitzi yelled at The Butcher.

  “I thought you were going to set the blaze?”

  “You said you were.”

  “I wasn’t ready! He wasn’t ready!” cried The Butcher. Just then, he threw his body into the center of the stream, while yelling for his son each time his head could come up out of the rushing water for a breath. Mitzi was left alone on the banks of the river, with her hands on her head, and her face frozen in fright.

  The Butcher was approaching the bridge too quickly for Mano to know what to do to save him. Mano laid on his stomach on the footbridge, and reached his hand as far below him from the bridge as he could, and spread his legs to steady himself for the weight and pull of The Butcher’s potential grasp. But by the time Mano had positioned himself, The Butcher had already floated beneath the bridge. For a moment, The Butcher’s body got stuck on the same rock as Roberto’s flowers, and in that moment he looked right at Mano as if he knew him. The Butcher reached his arm out for Mano just before the river freed him from the rock, and sent him tumbling downstream.

  Then came Mitzi Let beneath the river. She didn’t even yell. She didn’t even reach. She just bounced off of every rock in her path, following her husband and son to the sea.

  20.

  Nana Pine had four full baskets of strawberries when she died standing up in the strawberry patch. Enid had two. It was an especially good harvest. Nana had been standing still for some time. Enid thought Nana was thinking, or maybe counting. Whatever she was doing, she was letting Enid catch up. The two of them always played the same game in the strawberry patch. Enid won the game if she picked at least half as many baskets as Nana. It was unusual for Nana to let so much time go by without picking any new strawberries. It was unusual for her to allow Enid to catch up.

  “Nana, I’m starting my third basket!”

  The sun was falling, and Nana’s shadow was getting longer. It almost reached Enid. Nana always picked strawberries wearing the same dress, a white gunnysack with a pattern of tiny red strawberries. It waved in the late evening breeze, but her body did not.

  “What basket are you on?” Enid knew the answer to this question because she could see. She threw a ripe strawberry at the back of Nana’s head, and it bounced off onto a bush. “Nana? Oh no.”

  She pushed her way through the scratchy strawberry bushes to stand in front of Nana’s body. Nana’s eyes were looking directly into the sun, and she was holding a single strawberry with both hands out in front of her, as if she were offering it. More than a corpse, she looked like a statue.

  “No, no, no, no!” Enid took the strawberry that Nana was offering, and threw it at Nana’s dead face, partly to wake her up, and partly to punish her for being dead at a time like this.

  Nana didn’t wake up.

  Enid wasn’t ready to be on her own. She thought of all the days in her near future with no mother, and no father, no brothers or sisters. Only the factory, and only Mary and Mimi, whom she had recently grown to hate. She looked around at the field of strawberry patches with new eyes—no longer a game she played with her mother, but a burden of growing, picking, and selling.

  Like the others, in Nana’s chest was a deep hole. It was God’s Finger, though Enid didn’t quite believe in such a thing. In Nana’s death hole was a black telephone. Enid had never seen a telephone in person before, but she knew about them. She knew how to use one instinctively.

  Enid caught her breath, and she pushed Nana’s arms down to her side. They were rigid. They moved like a plastic doll’s arms. Enid picked up the receiver of the black telephone, and listened for a voice. She knew to do that much.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said the voice inside the shiny black receiver. Enid dropped the receiver and its spirally cord hung from Nana’s torso like a spilled black intestine.

  She quickly picked it up again to listen to what else the voice had to say. “We’re sorry for the loss of your grandmother. We’ll be there to help soon.”

  “She’s my mother,” clarified Enid into the phone.

  “We’ll be there shortly.”

  When The Humanitarians arrived in the strawberry field, Enid was still standing in the same position, and so, of course, was Nana. She was still holding the phone to her ear, maybe to wait for further instructions, but also because she couldn’t imagine one single other thing to do. She longed for instruction so much that she would spend many of the rest of her days being quiet so that she could listen for it.

  The Humanitarians were new to Pie Time. At first, they rented a room at The Innkeeper’s inn. They were always together as a pair. They both wore clean light blue jumpsuits with a white oval patch on the breast pocket. In the oval patch was stitched a red XO. The Humanitarians appeared to have a very clear and kind mission. Their work was done cleanly and efficiently, and they were highly practiced in their methods. Their interactions with the grieving public were respectful and professional.

  One of The Humanitarians approached Enid with two folding chairs. She unfolded one for Enid, and asked her to have a seat. “Your grandmother was very special,” she said.

  Enid sat down in the chair in the middle of the field of strawberry patches. “But she was my mother.”

  One of The Humanitarians unfolded her own chair and sat down on it. She checked her notes. “Either way, she was very special. Everyone enjoyed her strawberries. And she loved you very much, even if it seemed like she was especially strict at times.”

  “Who are you?” asked Enid.

  “I’m a Humanitarian.”

  The other Humanitarian began the process of disposing of Nana’s body. He tipped her stiff body backward onto one of the strawberry patches, then drug it next to a long wooden box. He tipped the box toward Nana’s body, and rolled her body in. He returned the box to an upright position, then closed the lid. On the lid was a large red XO.

  “What are you doing with her?” asked Enid.

  “We’re taking your grandmother to a beautiful meadow with other grandmothers. She’ll make friends there. There’ll be deer and butterflies.”

  “She’s my mother.”

  “Your mother, I mean.”

  “And she hates deer. Deer eat the strawberries.”

  “There doesn’t have to be deer there.”

  “She’s dead,” said Enid. “I think we should take her to the river. Maybe you can help me take her to the river?”

  “You don’t have to worry about her ever again. We’ll take care of everything.” The Humanitarian tried to give Enid a hug, and Enid obliged for The Humanitarian’s sake.

  A few days later, the new postman, who was also new to Pie Time, delivered a bill for services addressed to Enid Pine with a large red XO on the envelope. In handwriting at the bottom of the bill, it read: Sorry about the loss o
f your grandmother. XO, The Humanitarians.

  21.

  “I’ll take two legs,” said The Florist.

  Mano was happy to see The Florist again, but very nervous about using the cleaver in front of him, about maneuvering the dead sheep’s rump on the chopping block.

  “Two legs. You got it.”

  “How did it go, with the flowers for Roberto, and for Pepe?”

  Mano nervously dropped the cleaver on the floor. It was heavier than he thought it would be. He maneuvered the accordion on his back, and the radio deeper into the pit of his arm, then bent over to pick up the cleaver. He washed it off in the enormous sink, and then started cutting off a sheep’s leg. “It went fine, very fine. Roberto told me to tell you he wanted daisies, not ranunculus.” Mano winked.

  The Florist laughed. “Well, Roberto was always very particular.”

  Mano gave up on cleanly cutting the first leg, and started instead on the second.

  “You’re doing it all wrong, son,” said The Florist. “Here, let me show you.” He walked behind the counter and stood next to Mano next to the chopping block. He took Mano’s wrist in his grip, and showed him the proper motion of a chop.

  “First off, you’re holding too many things,” said The Florist.

  “I have my hands free,” explained Mano.

  “Ok, yes, well then you got to chop it right here, at the joint, hard and fast. Think of it like it’s hair, or a flower stem. That’s all it is. Death. It’s already dead, just like everything else.”

  Mano thanked him, then took a whack at the second leg. The dead sheep’s leg fell clean off with a single whack.

  “Perfect!” The Florist picked the leg up and started to wrap it in brown butcher paper. That’s how Mano figured out where The Butcher’s butcher paper was.

  Mano thanked The Florist, then made an appropriate excuse for himself. “First day.”

  “Well, tomorrow will be your second,” said The Florist.

  “Very true.”