Mammother

by Zachary Schomburg

  A young man was now standing in front of her.

  “Have you seen my lost love?” he asked.

  In Enid’s mind, she said, “Who are you?”

  His beard was full and his eyes were blue. Bees swarmed around his head. His mouth moved inside his beard. She couldn’t hear his voice in the swarming.

  In her mind, she said, “Are you my son?”

  The young man’s hands pressed against his heart. His mouth kept moving, and his eyes welled with love and fear.

  In her mind, she said, “I’m right here.”

  The man’s mouth stopped and hung open so slightly. The sound of bees slipped out of it. He looked at Enid’s body. She could feel his eyes on her. He got down on his knee and looked even closer.

  In her mind, she said, “Touch me, son.”

  After he left, she just kept looking at the high-rises, the woods, and what little was left of the sun.

  40.

  “Zuzu!”

  “Zuzu, come out, come out!”

  “Zuuu zuuuuuu!”

  A buzzing swarm of searchers walked from XO Meats into the center of the city, chanting Zuzu’s name, and asking everyone that they saw if they knew of Zuzu’s whereabouts. The Butcher was at the front of the swarm with Inez, calling Zuzu’s name, leaving the swarm every now and then to ask people who were working in their fields. The Butcher asked Enid, who was standing still in her strawberry field, if she knew of the whereabouts of Zuzu. Enid, however, was catatonic as always and was of no help to him.

  Inez’s new husband, The Barber, was in the back of the swarm of searchers, looking into the windows and open doorways of all the new houses. Inside the swarm was everyone else, some of the bird hunters who remained in town after all the birds were gone, and many of the children from The Good House of Children and the Very Sick and Old. Leda, Hera, The Shoveler, Ernest, Ernesto, Luis, Luis, Lois, and, of course, Vera, were among the searchers, too. They all loved Zuzu very deeply. But they also all knew Zuzu well enough to trust that wherever Zuzu was, that was where she likely wanted to be.

  In the afternoon before the swarm had formed, Inez carried her own half-broken, half-dead body from the fresh grave behind The Good House to XO Meats to ask The Butcher to help her search for Zuzu. She looked like she had just crawled out of her own grave which, of course, she had.

  “I may not know where Zuzu is right now, but I know that she was here yesterday,” said Inez.

  “You do?” asked The Butcher.

  “I do. And so do you.”

  “I do?” The Butcher’s question was genuine. He thought about the previous day, which was full only of pulling the hearts out of the chests of pigs, things like that. He thought hard about whether or not Zuzu had been a part of it.

  “Yes, you do. It’s ok. Now is not the time for secrets. Zuzu is in love. I can see it in her body. In the way she talks to me. In the first days of being a woman, you learn how big the world is. And she got lost somewhere in it. But where could she be?”

  The Butcher was as intrigued by Inez’s revelation as he was confused. He pushed his fingers through his beard. He let Inez keep speaking.

  “She’s no boy. She’s a woman now. It’s ok. I know you know all this already. I don’t need to tell you.”

  The Butcher just made a knowing sound, even though he knew nothing. He now pushed his fingers from both hands through his beard. He only knew Zuzu from coming into the shop, picking up pork chops for Inez and The Barber. The only other way he remembered her was as the baby who won the first ever pretty baby contest. The Butcher was just a caged boy then who had lost the smile contest. No one, as far as he knew, had ever been in love with him before. But now that he knew this love for him existed, that it was his heart that Zuzu wanted all those times she had come into XO Meats, and not just the hearts of pigs, he felt love for her in return. His love swelled in a matter of seconds and overcame him, possessed him like a magical spell. Now, for the first time, The Butcher thought about Zuzu as a woman, too, and he wanted to find her just as much as Inez wanted to find her.

  Inez asked him direct questions. “Where could she be? If she isn’t with you, then where? Tell me you know. Tell me anything you know.” Fresh soil was falling from Inez’s hair as she shook her head. “I won’t be angry at you.”

  The Butcher wanted more than anything to have answers for these questions. “I think she sometimes confesses down at Lady Bods.” Put on the spot, Lady Bods was the only place he could think of in all of Pie Time.

  Lady Bods was the old confession booth designed to look a little like a submarine, still run by Mothers, with portal windows to peek through at its naked confessors and a neon sign above the door that once, in its earliest years, read LADY BLOOD’S SUB. In time, Mothers fell behind on his electricity bills, and his energy for maintaining the neon of his sign waned. The neon letters L and O blew out, and then the entire word, SUB, blew out, too, leaving only LADY B-O-D’S. Lady Bods was now in the center of an empty, weedy lot where Mothers’ grandfather first found the bear with no legs.

  “Lady Bods? No. Zuzu may be a woman now, but I know she’s never once been to Lady Bods.”

  The Butcher had no idea if this was true or not, but he was so newly in love, he needed everything to be true. “Zuzu loves Lady Bods. She is one of its best confessors.”

  Lady Bods was the first place Inez and her swarm of searchers searched.

  They chanted Zuzu’s name outside of the booth.

  Inez’s husband, The Barber, was as concerned about the weather as he was about finding Zuzu. “It’s supposed to get cold tonight. I hope this doesn’t take too long,” he said to the people nearest him.

  “Quiet down, quiet down.” The Butcher had taken charge of the search for Inez’s benefit. He was young and had the energy of new love, and Inez had exhausted herself. The Butcher raised his arms to indicate that the chanting should stop. He continued. “I know Zuzu well enough that if she doesn’t want to be found, she won’t come out for your chants. We must give it a look.”

  The Butcher put coins into the mechanical coin slot as if he knew very well how it operated. He pulled aside a sliding door and peeked inside. Even though the night was young and the sun was just going down, Mothers had already passed out face down on the floor of Lady Bods in a bed of empty cans of Nun’s Hat beer. His passing out each night was typical, but he rarely passed out so early. There were no confessors in the booth, and no obvious sign of Zuzu.

  The Butcher knocked on the portal window with his middle knuckle.

  “What do you see?” asked Inez.

  “It’s just Mothers. He’s passed out again.”

  Inez asked her husband if he’d climb up to the portal on Lady Bods’ roof to look inside.

  “Inez, my back hurts. I can’t...” he complained.

  “Here, never mind.” Inez politely pushed The Butcher from the side window and stepped up on the stool to peer inside. “Mothers! Wake up!”

  “Maybe he’s dead.” The Butcher said to Inez’s back.

  “Is he? Is he dead?“ The question buzzed around in the swarm of searchers with excitement. Death was their prodigal son. The news of death’s possible return was like a spark in a dry field of hay.

  The Butcher traded places with Inez and looked through the window again. Then he quelled the swarm’s excitement. “No, he’s not dead, of course. He’s stirring though. He’s coming over now.” The Butcher felt a certain pressure to detail everything that he was seeing for the dozen people standing behind him. “Oh, no, wait...”

  “What? Is it Zuzu?”

  “No, Mothers is throwing up. He just threw up into a beer can.”

  The crowd went ahhhh.

  “But do you see Zuzu?” asked Inez, again.

  “Now he’s washing his face with the holy water.”

  “Zuzu?!” yelled Inez.

  “What is it?” yelled Mothers from inside Lady Bods. “What do you people want from me?” Mothers’ face was big in the circul
ar window now. It looked incredibly old, creased with deep lines, pocked with age. His nose looked like one of Enid’s strawberries, beyond ripe. His eyes were fogged with glaucoma. “There’s no one here to confess. Come back another day.”

  “Mothers, it’s your turn to confess,” yelled Inez, who took her place at the window again. Where is Zuzu? Is she in there? Bebé?! Bebé?!”

  “Pepe? No. That boy died a long...” started Mothers.

  “No, no, not Pepe. Zuzu! You know, Zuzu. Have you seen her?”

  “I know you know where she is, old man,” yelled The Butcher from behind Inez.

  “Do you want to come in and confess, Inez,” said Mothers sarcastically. “It’s been a very long time, a long long time.” From inside, Mothers hit a switch, and the neon sign crackled and zapped. Just the B-O-D came on at first. Then LADY B-O-D’S.

  “She’s not in there.” Inez knew, deep down, exactly where they should be looking for Zuzu. But Inez wasn’t willing to find her there. “She’ll come home. She’ll come home,” she said just to The Barber and The Butcher.

  “Thank you, everyone! You can go home now.” The Butcher declared.

  The Barber tried doing his best to be helpful. “It’s going to be cold tonight. And it might rain.”

  “We’ll just have to wait.” Inez held the young wanting hand of The Butcher. “Can you wait? When she comes back, everything will be perfect.”

  The Butcher stood there like a flower that bloomed only when you looked at it.

  41.

  Zuzu had to stand on her tippy toes to see smears of blood and the four crushed cans of Nun’s Hat on the gigantic table. Despite that, and despite everything in the cabin being salvaged and remade into a larger version of itself, the cabin had been kept clean. Or, it seemed clean for a cabin that housed a big monster. It seemed whatever lived here cared about something. It smelled like sweat, bodies, toil, and struggle, but it did not smell like death. There were black birds everywhere, sitting on the windowsill, on top of the refrigerator, and perched on the faucet above the double sink, but they were calm. She couldn’t see their shit anywhere. The frame of the cabin’s front door was more like the wide mouth of a cave. The door, which earlier hung on only one hinge, and was more like the size of a barn door, now hung correctly on both hinges. All of the doors to all the rooms were also especially wide like barn doors. The cabin itself was one large square, and was made up of four large and equally square rooms, with doors leading from one room to the other: the living room, then the bathroom, then the bedroom, and then the kitchen. Zuzu felt tiny inside it.

  “Hello?”

  Zuzu wasn’t sure why she had returned. She tried to convince herself that she returned to see her first dead body, but the truth lay somewhere deeper inside of her than that. She stood in the center of the kitchen, and reached up to brush her fingers along the top of the table where hours earlier she had witnessed a scene of indescribable bloodshed. Wherever the woman was now, Zuzu thought, she was either wishing for death—a mercy from the mangling, which wasn’t a possibility in these deathless days—or she was wishing for more.

  Zuzu thought that this cabin either belonged to the monster, who captured the woman inside of it, or it belonged to the mangled woman, who was attacked by the monster inside her own home. Or it belonged to neither of them. Perhaps the most likely possibility, in Zuzu’s mind, was that it was the abandoned cabin of one of the professional bird hunters, within which, earlier, a tragically unfortunate meeting occurred between a monster and a woman. That is what Zuzu convinced herself of after she climbed up to sit on the corner of the gigantic bed, and thought about sleeping there that night. Everything was made of wood. The tall walls, the endless floor, the big chair in the corner. She felt like she was on the inside of a giant tree. She felt like a tiny forest animal sitting there on the corner of that big bed. She couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping another night on the couch outside of the bedroom her mother shared with The Barber, near the rug that smelled like cat pee.

  The bed springs screeched with rust when she bounced. The sheets were tucked and the quilt was pulled back perfectly beneath the two pillows. It was far too big for one girl, she thought, and also, perhaps, too bouncy. And, most importantly, it awaited someone who was not her. She imagined herself being wakened by that someone, maybe the woman, who would surely need the reparative promise of her whole bed to tend to her terrible wounds, like a cat. Or maybe the monster, to whom she’d surely look like another meal, raw and warm and fresh, who’d eat her alive from the inside. Or maybe a bird hunter, who’d be just as capable, perhaps, of terrible things, who’d be surprised to find a girl in his bed when all he really wanted was sleep. Or worse. Or even her mother, who’d likely have tracked her down by scent by morning, and who’d drag her by her ear back down the hill, through the tall trees, over the footbridge over The Cure, and into town. Either way, if she slept in the giant bed, she’d likely learn something of death or, at least, of pain.

  “Is this your bed?” she said through the giant door in front of her into the empty kitchen. She turned her head to the right and asked a question into the empty bathroom. “Can I sleep here? Will you be mad?”

  Of course no one spoke back to her, because no one was there. “I shouldn’t sleep here,” she said to herself. The bed squeaked back into place as she stood up and walked into the kitchen. There, she looked around for a place to sleep. The table looked very heavy, as if it had been carved from a single tree, with two placemats ready to be eaten upon. Between them was an empty glass vase. The table seemed like maybe it was just the right size for Zuzu’s body. Her body would easily fit there, and she would sleep well there. But it was also where the woman had been eaten earlier. Zuzu worried that sleeping there she’d look like dinner to anyone who’d walk in.

  Zuzu found a pack of Nun’s Hats on the kitchen counter and stood on her tippy toes to get it. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Then she walked outside to stare toward the city. She could only see the very tops of the highest new buildings from this deep in the woods. She could hear the birds above her head in the blackness. They sounded busy. They sounded like they knew where to go, and that they knew where they’d sleep that night. They were just making their beds ready for their bird children before they settled into their own. She remembered the manic sounds of birds in town for a brief time when she was a young girl. She missed those sounds. Without them, the town sounded forgotten about.

  She picked white daisies from the foot of one of the nearby trees, and then walked back inside the cabin. She put them in the vase and arranged them with care. She filled the vase up with water from the giant sink, and ashed what was left of her Nun’s Hat into the water. The sink was a better place to sleep than the table, she thought. She set down the vase on the table, took off her shoes, and folded her body up into the sink. But, even though it was a good size, it was just too cold. And the faucet was in the way. She hit her head on it every time she tried to move her body into a more comfortable position.

  The bathtub in the bathroom, finally, is what Zuzu settled on. It was very large for a bathtub. It looked a little like a small pool. She borrowed a pillow from the bed, which she figured was a reasonable thing to do, then lowered herself into the tub, and back onto the pillow. She brought with her a cold Nun’s Hat beer from the refrigerator, and she lit another Nun’s Hat cigarette. She cracked open the can, and rested her head back on the porcelain, then blew smoke toward the ceiling, which was so high above her. The smoke formed a little black cloud there. The bathtub was just right, she thought.

  “Fill this tub up,” she said to the black cloud. “Float me out to sea.” She blew more smoke into the black cloud. “Go on. Go on.”

  42.

  “Thank you for the flowers.”

  “Huh?”

  The morning sun poured in through the window.

  “This is going to be cold at first.”

  Mano turned the cold handle of the bathtub faucet counter clo
ckwise halfway, and then turned the hot handle of the bathtub faucet counter clockwise all the way.

  Zuzu screamed. In that first half-second of opening her eyes, she thought she was being eaten alive, the monster’s cold tongue on her feet, swallowing her feet whole. She didn’t recognize the room she was in, or what time it was, or what day it was. She knew nothing. She was a newborn baby in that half-second, and nothing of this new world was known. She had to learn everything again. She tucked her legs up into her chest. The monster was sitting on the toilet.

  “Hold on. Hold on. It’s about to get warm.”

  Zuzu quickly remembered where she was, and why and how. “Don’t eat me!” she pleaded. “Oh god! Please, please!” Zuzu started to cry, and she suddenly regretted not returning home the night before. She wasn’t ready to die, not like this.

  “I promise I won’t eat you.” Mano smiled and cracked open two Nun’s Hats.

  Zuzu felt stuck between two feelings mixing into one, like the hot and cold faucets at her feet. “I’m not ready to be eaten.”

  “Good. Because I’m not ready to eat anyone,” said Mano.

  Zuzu was still speaking with a voice that sounded like crying. She rubbed her eyes to let some of the light in. She wasn’t looking at Mano, but over the top of her knees at her feet, as the water approached. “But you are. I saw you. You were eating a woman.”

  Mano thought for a second before responding. He took the first sip from his can. “Oh, yes, that woman. Yes, I was eating her. You’re right.” Mano laughed. It was then that he realized that this girl he found sleeping in his bathtub was the boy he thought had been Pepe, touching himself with his hand down his pants outside the window while he went down on Mimi. Mano looked carefully at the part in her hair, and her corduroys. He sucked in air through his teeth, and held the can between his knees as he leaned over on the toilet. “But you know what? She deserved it,” he said.