Mammother

by Zachary Schomburg

  After The Shoveler and his sons dug the holes, Vera Good was the first in Pie Time to bury her dead in The Shoveler’s new graveyard. In the month following June Good’s death underneath the table at the factory, Vera hadn’t quite been ready to say goodbye. Her public grieving was particularly disturbing to the productivity at the factory and to The Foreman. She wore a black dress and black veil every day for that month, and sobbed endlessly into the announcement microphone. Normally, when the girls at the factory heard the announcement microphone click on, they expected to be told it was time for a smoke break, or a lunch break, or that they were rolling their cigarettes too slowly to meet the daily quota. But after Mrs. Good’s death, every time the announcement microphone clicked on, the girls only heard the deep sobs of Ms. Good.

  All the while, June’s body was kept in a deep freezer in the basement of the factory where the overstocked Pie Time cigarettes were typically stored. June’s body just rested there for the month, frozen on top of hundreds of cigarette boxes with June’s face on the front. It’s High Time for a Pie Time. The Foreman was so annoyed by his sister’s grief—grief that was supposed to be his own—that he avoided talking about it at all costs. Productivity was down, despite the fact that demand for Pie Times was up. And morale, because of his sister’s mourning, was down even lower. So, The Foreman was careful never to suggest to his sister that it was time for June’s body to be taken to The Cure to be sent to sea. He figured it wouldn’t hurt anyone for her body to stay in the freezer until the moment Vera was ready to say goodbye to it.

  So, when Vera heard about The Shoveler’s graveyard, an open stump-field in which to bury the dead without having to really say goodbye to them, to let them flower up from the surface of the earth, and to be able to visit the flowers they became, her challenges of grief felt resolved.

  Vera picked out the most private hole in the very back of the new graveyard, and chose to have a very private ceremony which only included herself, the deceased, The Shoveler, and his two sons. Without The Foreman’s knowledge or permission, Vera paid The Shoveler and his sons to help her remove June’s body from the factory freezer, carry it in a wheelbarrow to the graveyard, and then lower it into the grave where it would thaw and flower.

  “I loved June Good and June Good loved me,” Vera began, hands clasped in front of her. She was wearing June’s fur coat and pearls. She would wear them every day for the rest of her life.

  The Shoveler and Ernesto had their heads lowered and eyes closed, but they peeked at each other as Vera began. Ernest was playing in the mound of fresh dirt.

  She continued, now with her eyes open. “That’s all I know. That’s all I care to know.”

  “Very beautiful,” said The Shoveler.

  With his knife, The Shoveler carefully carved these words on the face of the tree stump at the head of the grave: June Good is dead / in here. With the writing on it, the tree stump looked like a birthday cake.

  “Let’s put candles in it,” suggested Ernest.

  It felt like the right time to start traditions, so Vera agreed.

  “That’s a good idea, son,” said The Shoveler. “Run home and grab us some candles from the kitchen.”

  The Shoveler, wearing his new suit and tie, shoveled the dirt back into the hole on top of June’s frozen corpse. The first shovelful of dirt filled June’s death hole in the center of her chest. “May the dead be happy there,” he said. He thought about his wife, Lois, when he said it.

  Once the grave was filled, Ernest returned with a handful of wax birthday candles. He carved out two holes in the stump, and stuck the candles in there. Vera lit one of the candles with a match, and insisted that the other one stay unlit. That felt like a proper idea for a tradition to everyone—leaving the other candle unlit.

  Then June took out four Pie Time cigarettes from her purse, which was actually June’s purse, and handed three of them out to The Shoveler, Ernesto, and Ernest. Ernesto and Ernest both looked at their father as if to ask for permission, and permission was granted. They each lit their cigarette on Mrs. Good’s birthday candle.

  “To June,” Vera said, as she took a drag.

  “To June,” repeated The Shoveler, who took a drag.

  “And to my mother, too,” added Ernesto. He took his first drag ever of a cigarette, and coughed.

  “Here, here!” The Shoveler cheered.

  Vera laughed at Ernesto. “First cigarette?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He kept coughing.

  Ernest just chewed on his cigarette like it was a piece of gum until the fire on its tip died.

  23.

  Enid Pine was asleep in the changing room of Lady Blood’s new confession booth when Lil’ Jorge walked in. He was the booth’s primary caretaker, and it was his job to sweep it and dust it for the day.

  The confession booth had been well-used since it was built. Many people had made their first confession, and already, the north wall of the church had over 100 naked confession photographs on display. Over 100 people had been cleansed through their willingness to become vulnerable, and therefore pure, in the face of their own sins. Also, Mothers was quickly becoming a skilled photographer with an exceptional eye for the contours of the naked human body. He added another lamp in the booth, and arranged the lighting so that the body would be lit most complimentary. He could recognize a naked person’s problem areas and shade them by adjusting the light, and he understood which parts of everyone’s body should be accentuated with more light. He added a window to the confession booth, too. The window had curtains, so the natural light streaming through it could be controlled.

  Each week more and more people came to church on Sundays, which was partly due to the success of the beautiful naked confession photographs. Each Sunday, some believers even had to be turned away because of a lack of capacity in the church—a sign, claimed Mothers, that a church is blessed. Despite his fiery homilies, his damning sentiment, and his finger pointing, Mothers had become the most successful of the three priests in Pie Time’s history.

  A sign-up sheet on the front door of the confession booth was managed by Lil’ Jorge. He allowed no more than a dozen people into the booth each day. Enid’s name was not on the list, and the booth wasn’t to be open to the public for another ten minutes. Lil’ Jorge had no way of knowing that Enid, who had snuck into the booth overnight because she couldn’t bear the thought of another night alone in her home, was already inside the changing room, just now waking up.

  Lil’ Jorge walked behind the screen where Father Mothers sat during confessions to pat the dust out of the seat cushion.

  Pat, pat, pat.

  From the changing room, Enid heard the patting of the cushion, and knew it was time for her first confession in the new booth. Days earlier, Enid had overheard Mary and Mimi Minutes talking about the new booth. She had stopped talking to Mary and Mimi after they tore apart Mano’s dead mother like wolves, but she couldn’t escape hearing their conversations with each other all day at the factory. Mary and Mimi’s favorite part to talk about was how you were supposed to take off your clothes once you entered the booth.

  In Enid’s ears, Mothers was taking his seat. She imagined him cracking his knuckles, and loading new film into his camera. She lifted her red blouse over her head, and lifted her knees up through her red skirt. She kicked off her red Mary Janes, and unsnapped her white bra. Her white panties had a pattern of strawberries on them. When she pulled them off of her body and placed them on top of the pile of her clothes, for a moment she thought that the pile looked like a full basket of strawberries.

  When Enid entered the main room of the confession booth, she became the first naked person Lil’ Jorge had ever seen in real life, outside of Mothers’ photographs. The sight of her naked body shocked him, because it was living and moving, and gave off a heat that filled the booth. It was the first time he had ever thought a person was beautiful.

  Enid’s impulse was to become smaller when she was naked. Her shoulders fell forw
ard to hide her chest, and her chin dropped to hide her face. Her bangs were cut far too short to hide her eyes, but the rest of her hair fell like curtains to hide what they could. Her body didn’t feel like her own. It felt like some other woman’s, maybe her mother’s, or Mary’s, or maybe even Inez’s, but not hers. She didn’t even really know how to move it. She tried to suck in her belly, but her knees bent instead. Her new hips felt like an empty basket that she had to carry, but she didn’t know with what to fill it.

  “Forgive me, Father.” She braced herself for a bright flash of light as she spoke. “I am full of envy.”

  Lil’ Jorge was paralyzed, at first by Enid’s moving body, and then by her voice. He was standing on Mothers’ seat, and bending down to gaze at Enid through the lens of his camera. Her body, to him, was its own bright flash of light. And he was stunned by it.

  Enid continued, still bracing, “Father, also, I have had impure thoughts.”

  Lil’ Jorge put his hands on the camera to make it look more closely at the bends of Enid’s body, the parts of her body that the light held.

  “Should I go on?” Enid paused. “Father?” She assumed that Mothers’ silence meant that she hadn’t confessed quite enough, or perhaps not specially enough. She thought maybe her confession wasn’t yet worthy enough to warrant a photograph be taken. So, she continued more deeply into her confession. “Father, all I can think about since my mother died is this new feeling of emptiness. A void. A hunger to fill the void. There’s a hole deep inside me that I need filled.” Still, no photograph. Enid took a breath, and went even further. “I can only have it filled by a certain boy, a boy who loves a woman. I mean, a different woman. Not me. I don’t think. A boy who...who, who...Father, I’m ready. I’m ready to be a woman.”

  The fat little hands of Lil’ Jorge slipped in that exact moment, which caused the bulb on the camera to flash. Enid’s photograph was finally taken. Her body burned a shadow behind it on the wall of the booth, and she stumbled backward into the door. Then she fell to her knees in the center of the booth. Her eyes were wide when the flash came, and she was briefly blinded.

  At that point, thinking the knock of the door that Enid had just made with her body was some sort of signal, The Businessman, who were patiently waiting for their confession outside the booth, opened the booth’s front door. Their name was the first on the list for the day. Just then, Mothers walked in through the back door into his area of the booth, and thanked Lil’ Jorge for preparing the booth for the day, for his sweeping, dusting, and patting.

  “You can go now, Jorge,” said Mothers. Lil’ Jorge leapt from the chair, and ran from the booth.

  The Businessman nearly stepped over Enid, who was still on her knees on the floor. “Mothers, it appears that you have a naked girl on your floor.”

  Mothers peered through the screen for the first time and was shocked at what he found there. “Enid, is that you? I haven’t seen you in years. What’s gotten into you? You have to wait your turn. Is your name even on the list?”

  The Businessman sat on the stool while Enid escaped, confused and embarrassed, into the changing room. She drew the curtains. She began the task of assembling what looked like a basket of strawberries back into the wardrobe she was wearing.

  While Enid dressed, The Businessman asked her questions from the other side of the curtain. “Young girl, what do you know of death?” They opened a briefcase as they asked Enid their question. The briefcase was full of plans and propositions, contracts and sketches. They had not planned to use their time with Mothers for confession, and certainly not for disrobing. They set their briefcase down on the floor next to the stool, in order to take a notebook and pen out of their breast pocket. “Little girl, are you afraid of the finger? What is it worth to you to fight death?” The Businessman clicked the pen.

  Enid was still silent in the booth. The Businessman stood from their stool to pull the curtain back a little with their fingers. “You have a body that needs protecting. No one would want to see it get poked...” said The Businessman.

  Enid bit one of their fingers from her side of the curtain. The Businessman howled in pain, and fell backward onto their stool to nurse their wounds in disbelief.

  “Settle down, please. This is a place of worship,” pleaded Mothers.

  Enid walked out of the changing room back into the main room of the confession booth. She was somehow even more naked than she was before she retreated. “I’m not a little girl,” she said. “And I’m not afraid of death, motherfucker.” She pointed her finger into all three faces. The Businessman didn’t know where to look. They were still squeezing their throbbing finger. “I won’t fight death!” shouted Enid. “And, I especially won’t fight yours. May it come too soon.”

  “Enid, your anger!” Mothers tried to calm Enid down.

  “My sin is not anger,” Enid said.

  24.

  With little apology and without approaching Mano first, The Landlord, with the help of The Lawyer, lawfully ceased ownership of the house that Mano had shared with his mother his entire life. According to Pie Time’s laws, any house that goes abandoned for over 30 days can be purchased by any interested party. And the interested party was always The Landlord. The house where, every morning, Mano delivered his mother a cold Pie Time, a pack of Pie Times, and talked to her while sitting on the toilet, was now the property of someone who had never set foot inside of it. The value that the house now held for The Landlord, was a fraction of the love it once held for Mano.

  “It’s a lovely home, really.”

  “Thanks.” Mano was emptily thankful for The Landlord’s empty compliment. He was trimming the long hairs coming out of The Landlord’s deep dark nostrils.

  “You know, Mano, it’s a business decision. You understand.”

  “I do, I do,” said Mano. And he did, he did understand. In a way, Mano was happy to let it go. He hadn’t been in the house since the night his mother was torn apart at the banks of The Cure, and simply owning the house was a burden. He didn’t want to return to it. He didn’t want to sleep in it. He didn’t even want to sleep. And he didn’t want to look inside the bathroom where his mother lived. Yet he didn’t know what else to do but leave it sit, to let it settle in. Like a memory. The house was only there to remind him that he was born in the present, which also reminded him that he will die in the present, that the past and the future can never be places to store his love and his pain.

  The Landlord sold the home to The Humanitarians, a man and a woman who had traveled to Pie Time from a neighboring town called Nun’s Hat. Nun’s Hat was nestled into a bend in The Cure much closer to the sea. Sitting on the banks of The Cause—which is what they called The Cure in Nun’s Hat—the people of Nun’s Hat would watch dead bodies float past them to the sea. They liked to count the bodies. Sometimes they would count two or three corpses in a day, each one burnt and each one with a hole in its chest. Eventually, the people of Nun’s Hat built a net, and stretched the net across The Cause to catch all the charred and chest-hollowed corpses. They would make a tally mark on a giant chalkboard set up in their movie theater where, in the time when the body count was increasing most rapidly, this giant chalkboard was built to replace the screen. Everyone in Nun’s Hat would come to the movie theater to see the tally marks on the giant chalkboard instead of seeing a movie on the screen. Watching the tally marks tally up became the new entertainment in Nun’s Hat, which unlike Pie Time, was a town filled with artists, poets, architects, and counseling psychologists.

  With the help of their best architects and artists, the people of Nun’s Hat stacked the charred bodies they fished from The Cause into a giant pyramid, and they hollowed a tomb from the pyramid’s center. The pyramid of dead bodies had no other purpose other than to be a monument to the dead, a concept that would have been difficult for the people of Pie Time to fully understand.

  The death pyramid was a monument of great cultural significance to the people of Nun’s Hat. The poets often spen
t their days and nights in the tomb in the center of all those charred and chest-hollowed bodies that came from nowhere anyone knew, and wrote poems. They wrote poems mostly about the origins of the mysterious dead, and about where this death came from, where it floated into Nun’s Hat from, which naturally led to poetry about where their own deaths came from, and where their deaths were going.

  Some of the first people of Nun’s Hat to dare to answer that question were The Humanitarians who bought Mano’s house in Pie Time. Instead of helping to catch bodies in a net, or make tally marks, or stack the bodies in a pyramid, the man and woman wanted to see where the charred bodies with hollowed chests were floating in from. So, they simply walked up the banks of The Cause.

  The Humanitarians eventually became so busy with the business of God’s Finger in Pie Time that many of Pie Time’s original residents thought they had lived there all along. At every death, which was daily, The Humanitarians were in the center of its activity. They were somehow the first people to arrive at the scene of each death. How they knew of the deaths so quickly, no one really knew. They just knew. They were tuned in; their ears were pinned. They would immediately hold the hand of whoever was grieving the most, and tell them that they were sorry. They would ask the griever what he or she needed. And they would say it was ok to cry. That was the most important thing. Grievers sometimes needed permission to cry, and they needed to hear that permission be given out loud, and they needed to be held as they cried. They needed a soft wall to cry into, something that would catch all the grief so that it didn’t spill all over the earth and soak back into the soil. Grievers want to look at their grief, and they want to love it. They want to hold it like a baby when no one else is around.