Mammother

by Zachary Schomburg

  “You don’t have to butcher the poodle,” said The Shoveler, who put his hand on the back of Mano’s shoulder as he sat in the mud. He tried to lean all the way down and give Mano a hug, but his back hurt from all the grave shoveling he had been doing lately.

  “I don’t?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  But The Shoveler was wrong. Mano did have to, and he knew it. Learning to let go of the thing you love once it is picked is the whole point of The Death Lessons. Without that point at its center, The Death Lessons just becomes senseless killing. So, he picked the black poodle up, and he carried it inside. He thought for a moment about Beulah Minx, and her dead husband, The Postman. It was The Postman’s death hole from where the poodle came. The black poodle’s butchering would be a butchering of Beulah’s grief as much as it was a butchering of Mano’s own love.

  The Shoveler and his two boys followed Mano inside, then they said their own goodbyes to the black poodle. They left the butcher shop because they understood that Mano needed to be alone. The man and woman stayed on their backs in the sheep’s pen, resting their bodies completely in the mud. Mano could hear them still giggling. When he looked back at them, they looked happy. They were staring at the sky. When they both closed their eyes, two black birds flew overhead.

  Mano sobbed as he told the black poodle what he was going to do to it. He looked it in the eyes and explained everything. “I’m going to stun you with this hammer,” was the first thing he said. He showed the poodle the hammer that would stun it. He felt the weight of the hammer in his hands. It felt so heavy. It felt like maybe it was the same weight as the poodle. The poodle looked at the hammer as if it didn’t know what a hammer was for. Mano picked up the poodle and placed it on its side. He held it down with one hand so it couldn’t stand back up. He held the hammer above the poodle.

  Mano wasn’t quite ready, so he said something else. He said, “I shouldn’t have let you play in the mud today after Inez gave you a bath. Look at you. You’re so muddy.” Just the thought of Inez made the hammer in Mano’s hand even heavier. He couldn’t hold it up any longer, and he couldn’t look at the poodle while the hammer came down, so he looked at the door.

  That’s when Mitzi Let came back from the dead to knock on the front window of the butcher shop.

  28.

  Mitzi Let opened the double doors of the butcher shop slowly. She had never seen double doors before. Her eyes were wide open. “Our dead bodies are not going to the sea!”

  Mitzi was out of breath. She was alive, but she looked entirely dead. Her face was full of cuts and scrapes, and one gash stretched all the way across the bridge of her nose, past her cheek, and to her ear. Her clothes were torn and heavy with river water. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. Her hair was matted with blood. She smelled like a rotten animal. Her left arm had been broken in many places, and it hung off her shoulder. It swung at her side when she walked. In her right hand, she was holding Sisi Medium’s bathroom clock.

  Mano thought he was seeing the dead. Seeing the dead walk in at the very moment that you’re about to kill your poodle was just enough of an omen for Mano to spare the poodle. He set down his hammer next to it on the chopping block.

  “Mitzi?” Mano had never really met Mitzi in person before, other than when her body floated beneath the bridge after her husband and Pepe. So he wasn’t even so sure it was Mitzi at all. The poodle was licking Mano’s ankle. The dead felt like they were now living all around him. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Mano. I’m Pepe’s...”

  Mitzi interrupted Mano as he searched for the right word. “There is no time to talk now. I’ve come to tell you something. They’re catching our bodies down river in Nun’s Hat. But they don’t have enough. We need to send more.”

  “Mitzi, slow down. This is all too much. I watched you die in the river.”

  “...There is a pyramid there. It’s made of all the dead bodies...”

  “Mitzi, Mitzi...”

  “They put me on it, right near the top, but I woke up.”

  Mano needed Mitzi to slow down. He didn’t understand what she was trying to say, and her eyes were too big for him to look into.

  “I yelled for three days and nights, ‘Hey, I’m not dead, I’m not dead, please help me,’ but no one came.”

  Weeks before, when Mitzi woke up from her coma near the top of the pyramid of dead bodies in Nun’s Hat, everyone in that town was waiting by the nets in The Cause for more bodies. The monument was nearly complete, but the bodies stopped coming at the worst time. They needed just a few more to make a pinnacle, but the charred and chest-hollowed bodies stopped floating downriver. When the bodies from upriver stopped washing up in their nets, they had to wait for their own to die. But everyone died natural deaths at the very ends of their long lives in Nun’s Hat, and everyone was young there. So the pyramid would stay incomplete for some time.

  No one in Nun’s Hat could hear Mitzi’s call from her spot near the top of the pyramid, so she had to crawl down the monument without anyone’s help. She was much too cold to wait for anyone to help. It was the middle of the night. The moon shone on the dead faces of everyone she knew from Pie Time as she used their bodies like a staircase. She saw the faces of The Postman and The Barber, and she saw the face of her son, Pepe. She took the chance to finally kiss it goodbye. She told it she loved it, and she brushed its hair. It wasn’t burned like the others. She didn’t see the face of her husband, The Butcher, even though she looked for it on every body she stepped on.

  Mano pulled out a stool from behind the counter for Mitzi to sit on. “Mitzi, would you like a seat? Can I get you some water?”

  “They want more bodies.” Mitzi’s eyes were still wide and unblinking.

  “Ok, ok, they want more bodies. But first, drink some water.”

  “They want more bodies to finish the monument. They’re waiting for us to send more bodies down the river.”

  “Mitzi, who are you talking about? Who wants more bodies? What monument?” Mano put a glass of water on the chopping block next to Mitzi.

  Mitzi set down Sisi’s clock, and picked up the water with her good arm. “You said you needed more clocks for the shop, so I brought you one.”

  “I said that?”

  “It doesn’t have a cow on it though. Still, it works. I fixed it.” She looked around the butcher shop for a place to put it. “Did you change things around in here? Didn’t the chopping block used to be further in the back?”

  “Yes, it did. I wanted customers to watch me do their butchering.” Mano was being patient for the right time to ask Mitzi about the bodies and the monument again. But it seemed like Mitzi was suddenly less interested in that subject, and more interested in the changes Mano had made to the butcher shop since her husband’s death.

  “I like it. Change is good.” Mitzi stood up and dragged her broken body around the rest of the shop to see what else had changed. She picked up Sisi’s clock from the chopping block and put it on a shelf next to the jars of salt. “You are so much bigger. Look at you!” Mitzi was now completely focused on Mano’s body. She moved her head up and down. “You’re gigantic! I mean, you’re mammoth!”

  “Ok, yes.”

  “How did you get so big? Was I really gone that long?”

  “You’ve been gone for a month or so. You’re counted among the dead.” Mano sat down on the stool. He was relieved that Mitzi was alive. He felt like that would make Pepe happy, if he could know that. Mano thought about all the questions he could ask her about Pepe.

  “But I’m not dead.” Mitzi was standing directly behind Mano now. She threw her torso forward and to the side so that her broken arm was tossed over Mano’s shoulders. “Can’t you tell?”

  “Yes. I know, now, of course. Here’s your water. Drink, drink.” Mano picked up her glass of water and was about to turn around to hand it to her.

  “Do you need me to prove it to you?” With her good arm, she pulled Mano backward into her body. He felt her big
breasts on his back. She smelled like an old raccoon that had been rooting in trash. Now that his body had been washed the night before by Inez, it was a smell he was acutely aware of.

  “Mitzi, this isn’t...”

  Mitzi shushed him. She moved her arm upward in front of Mano, where Mano was holding so many things. She pressed her finger against where she thought his lips were, but she was pressing against his nose. She closed her arms and pressed her forehead against the back of his neck. She had to push some of the encyclopedias on Mano’s body to the side. “It’s ok. Pepe’s asleep.”

  “Oh! I’m not...” Mano stopped his sentence to think. He suddenly understood that, in her eyes, he was her husband, The Butcher. He thought to tell her that Pepe was dead, not asleep, and that her husband was dead, too. Instead, he continued with a different strategy. “I think Pepe is waking up. Will you go check on him?”

  “But I missed you. I want this first.” She pushed her hands down past all the things that Mano was holding around his chest, and down through all the things he was holding in front of his stomach, past the paper strap that held his hot water bottle tight against his back, and past the bicycle pump. She pumped the bicycle pump a few times, then let go. Mano felt the puffs of air between his legs. Her hand kept moving past the black umbrella, which accidentally opened halfway. She pushed it closed, and her hand kept going down.

  When her hand moved further down, past all of the things Mano held there, he stopped her. “You can’t have this yet, Mitzi. You have to check on Pepe first.”

  “I do?” Her hand held as much of Mano in it as it could. It was warm and strong.

  Mano grabbed Mitzi’s good arm and carefully pulled it out of his pants. A few of his things fell to the floor and made a crashing sound. He turned around to face her. “Don’t you hear Pepe crying?”

  “Yes.”

  He was stern. “Go put him back to sleep, then you can have whatever you want.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes.”

  Mano gently pushed her toward the double doors at the back of the butcher shop which led out to the sheep pen. He gathered his things to his body, and stood up straight. He thought about leaving her alone in the butcher shop, a space that was familiar to her, until she gained her reality back, until she knew how to be among the living again. He started walking toward the front doors.

  “Pepe!”

  Mano was just slipping out of the front doors when he heard Mitzi’s voice calling Pepe from the sheep’s pen. Her voice sounded different than before. It sounded more like what he imagined her voice to sound like when it knew reality. Mano understood he was now supposed to be Pepe for her. “Yes, mother?”

  “There are two dead people out here.”

  The caged man and caged woman from Nun’s Hat were the first people not from Pie Time to die in the plague of God’s Finger.

  “They’re so beautiful!” Mitzi yelled.

  “Are you sure they’re dead?” he yelled back, standing still in the double doors at the front of the butcher shop, now wanting to escape even more than before.

  “Yes, I’m very sure. They have death holes, just like you did.”

  “I’m not Pepe,” Mano whispered to himself.

  Once outside, Mano saw the man and woman were still on their backs in the mud. Curls was still licking the woman’s face. Both of their faces still looked happy. Their cages were still side by side, open on the ground outside of the pen.

  “What are those?” Mitzi was pointing to the cages.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Hmm...War...on...Death,” she read out loud. “It looks like these two lost that war.”

  Inside the death hole in the woman’s chest was a red dog collar, and in the man’s death hole was a set of dog tags. Mano picked up the collar and the tags. He thanked the man and the woman. He folded their arms over the holes in their chests, and he moved their hands so that they were touching. He didn’t know if they loved each other while they were alive, but he thought they would at least appreciate being able to hold the hand of the one they died alongside.

  “Tomorrow, I’ll take you to The Shoveler’s new graveyard,” Mano said to the dead bodies. “You’ll like it there.”

  Mano walked back into his shop, leaving The Humanitarians just as they were. He left Mitzi outside, too, as she was trying to figure out how to wear the smaller of the two cages. He felt overwhelmed now with death, with all of the things that he was holding on to, with the idea of being Pepe in the face of Pepe’s mother, with the idea—even for a few moments—of being a son again.

  Mano didn’t know the black poodle’s name, or if it had a name, so he couldn’t etch its name into the new dog tags. Instead, with his most precise knife, he etched I’m Sorry into the tags, and hung it from the poodle’s collar. The poodle looked happier with a collar. It looked more like a pet now than a shadow.

  “I’m sorry,” Mano said to the poodle. He held the tag forward in his hands. “See how easy it is to say?”

  Mitzi walked back in through the back door. She was wearing the smaller of the two XO Life Cages around her body. She had been crying. The sun was going down. “We should send those bodies down The Cure so they can finish their monument.”

  Mano sighed with helplessness. “Mitzi, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The pyramid for the dead,” she explained. “It only needs a few more.”

  “Mitzi,” Mano put his hands into her new cage and held her shoulders to face him. With Mitzi in a cage, she was now almost half the size of Mano. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Of course,” she said. “A mother knows her own son.”

  Mano looked Mitzi directly in her eyes and asked her to go home and wait for him there. “I have to work in dad’s shop tonight, but I’ll be home soon.”

  “Ok,” she agreed. Mitzi opened both double doors, this time with more awareness of how they work. “Wait...what do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  “About my new cage?” She did a circle for Mano.

  “I think it looks great,” said Mano.

  “Should I wear it?”

  “Yes. And you should never take it off.”

  29.

  The XO House of the Lord Everlasting was the official name of Pie Time’s new church, but it soon became more widely known, simply, as The Hole. The Hole was only the second church ever built in Pie Time, but most importantly, its capacity to hold believers was more than twice that of Lady Blood’s. The Hole was a cathedral—something Lady Blood could never claim—and it was built with the expectation of future generations, with stone and granite and iron or something like it. It was flanked by flying buttresses, and stone carvings of all the apostles at the last supper were above the cathedral’s entrance. Even the faces of Judas and Jesus were made distinguishable, which could not be said of the wood carving rendition of the last supper above the main doors of Lady Blood. Its windows were made with stained glass, and its pews, of which there were twice as many as Lady Blood, were made of wood imported from other countries, not wood cut for the sake of efficiency from the trees west of Pie Time.

  The Hole was clean, strong, serious, large, and most importantly, it was new. It was exactly what Pie Time wanted, or needed, at that exact time in its history, even though it didn’t know it wanted or needed it until it had been built. It made Lady Blood look more like an old round white barn, which, more or less, it was, and very few people were willing to continue attending church in an old round barn when something like The Hole existed across the street.

  After the construction of The Hole was complete, which only took a week—a feat that many in town claimed was a miracle—a mass exodus from Lady Blood began. That week Father Mothers III delivered his most fiery homily of all time, though only six people were there to witness it. “Friends, we’re already in purgatory. Can you feel it? Can you feel the hellfire licking its pointy rat tongue between our toes?” He looked right
at Beulah Minx, who was deaf, and he waited a few seconds for her to answer his question, but no answer to his question ever came.

  So, technically, only five of the six people in attendance heard it, because one was Beulah Minx. And another one of those remaining five people was Lil’ Jorge, with his tabletop haircut, who could barely speak, and who was eating an XO chocolate bar behind the pulpit during the homily. The remaining four people were in attendance primarily to get another chance to study the nude confessional photographs pinned on the north wall.

  At The Hole, the new priest in town, Father Felipe, regaled his new attentive audience with stories and music from foreign lands. His hair was shiny and black, and his eyebrows were thick and even blacker. His lips were small and rough from cigarettes, and he got his shaves on Saturdays at XO Haircuts. So by Sundays, he had a perfect layer of stubble. When he introduced himself, he did so at length, and with a very charming accent that floated around, bouncily at the vowels, and came down softly on all the consonants, always with a Spanish guitar in his arms, which he strummed beautifully and effortlessly as his sentences flipped and twisted, and always with an XO Smoke in his mouth that gestured as if it were conducting its own tiny orchestra just outside his mouth as he spoke. That’s how Father Felipe told of his travels. He was a traveling priest, and would go where there was the most need. Unbeknownst to the residents of Pie Time, the news of God’s Finger was spreading widely with the help of The Businessman.

  Unlike in Mothers’ homily, there was no talk of God’s Finger in Father Felipe’s homily, and there was no sense of doom—only the kind of language that made the world seem much larger than anyone ever knew. At the eucharist, he served wine imported from the Burgundy region of France, and bread imported from a tiny town where he once served as priest in the mountains of Oaxaca. “Bahty of Christ, Blaht of Christ, Bahty of Christ,” he’d say over and over again with his charming accent, as he poured good wine and pushed good bread into the mouths of the scared and sad.