Mammother

by Zachary Schomburg

  “I have, yes,” Mano confessed. “And a lot of other people, too,” he added.

  “You really are a fucking monster.”

  Mano looked up and yelled. He wanted to hear how loud his voice could get. It became louder as he spoke, more like a monster’s. “You don’t know my life! You don’t know anything about me.” He wanted to tell her right then that he’d build her a room. The ache in his chest was so deep it felt like a hole. He thought maybe the promise of that room would fill up that emptiness. Instead, he just screamed, “You’re just a girl! You’re just a scared little girl!” It was easier to scream those words.

  Zuzu threw her mother’s bra onto the roof, and it bounced off and landed on the ground. She walked back to it and picked it up. She slingshotted it up onto the roof this time, and it hung down from the gutter. “You’re the one who’s scared. You have no fucking idea about love.You think you do, but you don’t. You don’t know shit. Look at you! You’re still holding on to your dead boyfriend’s accordion.”

  Mano tried to open his hands, tried to drop everything he had ever held, the accordion, all of it. But that’s not how things worked anymore. Nothing could fall like that.

  And just like that, Zuzu was gone, a dot on the horizon, getting smaller and smaller. Mano was now just a monster sitting alone by a fire. He picked up the stick she used for her vegetables. He wanted to run down the hill, down the path through the trees to give her the vegetables she had been cooking. They were done grilling now and perfectly crispy. He didn’t want her to go without them. They were hers, not his. Instead, he pulled them off with his hands and threw them into the fire. The petals of onions sizzled and curled up around the edges. He could smell the oils from the peppers. With the stick, he wrote his name in the dirt. He didn’t want to do any thinking, so he needed to move something with his hands. He needed to do something to something else so that he wouldn’t do something to himself. “You’re ok. It’s ok. It’s ok. Let’s just go home,” he said out loud to himself. With the stick, he wrote his name in the dirt.

  Mano Medium.

  Then he circled his name with a heart. It was the first shape he thought of to circle his name with. He looked at his name in the light of the fire, how it looked uncomfortable there, and very alone. He wondered if Zuzu ever came back if she’d see his name written there, with a heart around it, and what she’d think about it, what she’d think about him writing his own name at a time like this. He smeared out the heart, and then he drew a rectangle around his name instead. He liked that better. It made his name look like it was being buried in a coffin. Then, he stepped on his name to smear it out.

  The first way Mano tried to die was by falling on the fire. He just fell onto it and after the initial flash, he settled into the pain. He could smell some of his chest hair burning. But that pain lasted only a few seconds. His enormous body didn’t leave any room for oxygen for the fire, so it was snuffed out.

  Now Mano was alone in the dark night, without a fire, and a terrible pulsing burn on the flesh somewhere deep in the mess of his chest. All of the birds, from the tops of all the trees, flew onto the roof of his house at once. It was a loud sound in the sky, like the sound of an ocean freezing over in a few seconds. His roof looked alive with birds. His entire house looked alive. It looked like it was moving toward him as he stood still. The light in the bathroom came on.

  He had made his house out of The Reckoner. He knew that much. He was sure of it now, as his house crawled to him. The time for his reckoning was now.

  When Enid finally arrived at Mano’s cabin, three months after her journey had begun, she was emaciated, having eaten her entire supply of peanuts a few weeks earlier while starting on the path into the woods. She spent the last week crawling toward the cabin with it in sight. There were black birds everywhere, in the trees around the cabin, on the ground on the path to the cabin, on its roof, in its window, in her hair and on her back, squawking and shitting all over everything. Like a true statue, Enid had white bird shit on top of her head, on the backs of her hands, and on her eyelids. The birds needed a hunter, Enid thought. But she would leave that to the bird hunters. She was no bird hunter. There was no reason to hunt for what she could see already existed.

  When Enid finally crawled close enough to Mano’s door to open it, there was a river of blood trickling from beneath it. Still, she was scared of nothing. She knew that no matter what she found in his cabin, or didn’t find, that she wasn’t going to go back to where she had been standing in the strawberry fields. At least she wasn’t going to go back the same way she had come. She arrived, for better or for worse, at the end of something.

  Once inside, Enid could see that Mano wasn’t in the living room, but that the river of blood led to the bathroom. It was a stain on the floor now, absorbed into the grain of the wood. It was a day’s journey for Enid, on her hands and knees, up that red river.

  Inside the bathroom, the river led to the bathtub, which was overflowing with blood. It was the pond of her dreams. Just as big, and just as still. A dozen empty cans of Nun’s Hat were floating on the surface of the blood pond. Enid looked for Mano in the bottom of it, but the blood was so dark that she couldn’t be sure he was there. So she plunged her arms down below the surface for him. The blood was cold, and it spilled down her chest, and onto the front of her dress. It looked like the strawberries on her dress were being juiced. She couldn’t feel Mano’s body. It wasn’t in that pond.

  Enid felt exhausted. Other than her week in the grave, she hadn’t really slept in three months. She rested her forehead on the edge of the tub, with her arms still plunged into the blood, and she called Mano’s name as she started to drift off to sleep.

  “Mano, Mano, Mano. Mano, Mano. You are such a coward.”

  50.

  Mano thought he heard his mother calling his name from the bathtub behind the door of his bathroom. He was dead, he thought, but he wasn’t sure for how long. He’d been on the floor for a few weeks maybe. The sun kept going up past the hole left in the center of his roof, lighting up what was left of the ceiling, then it kept going down and darkening what was left of the ceiling. People kept coming by, and people kept leaving. The rope was still around his neck. The stool was on its side in the rubble.

  Of his post-mortem visitors, he remembered The Lawyer, who just kicked him in his knee to see if he was still alive, then left. Mimi screamed when she saw him, and waddled off immediately, while Mary said a few kind words, and gently combed his dead hair for him. He remembered The Florist lying with him for a few hours, kissing him, and trying to wake him up. Beulah stayed the longest. She made a dinner while he was dead, and told him a few stories as best as she could, in a voice that she herself couldn’t hear. She cried over the top of him, he remembered that, and then she said goodbye. Inez never came back to visit him. Neither did Zuzu. That’s what made his death the most unbearable. Other than that, death was what he expected.

  “Mother? Are you taking a bath?” Mano heard his mother getting out of the bathtub, which was a sound he had never heard before.

  “Mano?”

  “Mother?”

  The door opened. It wasn’t Mano’s mother who walked through it. It was Enid. She was still on her hands and knees when she opened the door of the bedroom. Her dress was soaked in blood. When she first saw him, she lost her breath. She covered her face with her blood-stained hands. Her forearms were covered in blood. She didn’t say anything. She just stared at him.

  Enid looked much older, but she was still wearing the same dress, except the dress had blood all over it now. Mano could see in the horrified way that she was looking at him that he must be alive. “Hi, Enid,” Mano said.

  Her horrified look softened. “Hi, Mano.”

  “I think maybe I’m dead. Am I dead?”

  “No, you’re not dead, Mano.” She started crawling over to him. Now that she had found Mano at the end of her epic journey, she could move at the same pace as the world around her. “Am I dead
?”

  “No, you’re not dead either.”

  They both smiled at that.

  “You can hear me?” asked Enid.

  “Of course.”

  Enid stood up next to Mano on the floor so she could reach the giant noose around his giant neck. She pulled it over his face, and he ducked down to make it easier for her. “You’re too heavy to hang yourself. Do you see what happened?” She pointed up at what was left of the bedroom roof.

  “Yeah.” Mano sighed, ashamed. “I tried a lot of other ways first though.”

  “I can see that.”

  He remembered filling the bathtub with blood. “It must be true,” he said.

  “What?”

  “About how people can’t die anymore.”

  “No, it’s not true,” Enid said.

  “But, no one has died since I left. Isn’t that true?”

  “That’s not true, Mano.” Enid pushed some wooden planks of the roof over on the bed, and she stood up on the corner of it.

  Mano looked up at her, confused.

  Enid wanted to be at eye level with him when she told him what she came there to tell him. “Our baby died.”

  Mano couldn’t understand. His head still hurt. He never had a baby. “Our baby?”

  “Yeah, after you left. It died inside of me.”

  He didn’t want to ask any more questions. He wanted to think. He picked up a beer can, but it was empty. His neck was sore. “When?”

  “After you left. I came here to tell you those two things. We made a baby, and it’s dead. I think it got too big inside of me.”

  “It got too big? Why didn’t it come out?”

  “It was in there for over a year.”

  “That’s too long. It was in there too long. Enid, it was supposed to come out before that.”

  “It just didn’t want to come out. And no one knew I was pregnant.” She put her face in her bloody hands. “This whole time, after you left, I’ve had a hole on the inside. It’s still in there. This hole is still inside.”

  “You should have told someone. You should have told me. Enid, we should have...we could have...”

  “I read in one of our father’s hunting books that baby mammoths stay inside their mothers for almost two years. It wasn’t even halfway done growing,” said Enid.

  “Mammoths don’t exist.” Mano was still trying to figure out the possibility of what Enid was explaining. “It didn’t come out because it wasn’t meant for this world. It wasn’t supposed to exist.”

  “Mano, look at you. You’re a mammoth.”

  Mano looked down at himself. “No. I’m nothing,” he said.

  For a brief moment, after hearing that he had been a father, Mano turned into nothing. And as nothing, he drifted up through the hole in his roof, and through the tree tops. The birds were building nests. They looked at him, but they didn’t make a sound. He thought this is what a bird must feel like, sitting in nests near other birds, looking down at the world. He could see all of XO City from above the trees. From that height, he could see it and hear it growing. Mano drifted up even higher above the trees, and could see a few more cities growing in the valley to the east and the north. He was a father now, he thought. But what good was knowing that?

  From high above the trees, Mano could hear Enid crying inside his cabin. It wasn’t the crying sounds of sorrow; it was the crying sounds of pain. Enid was on her back on his bed, red-faced and sweating. Mano was no longer nothing. He was a father. That was something. As something, Mano drifted back down from above the trees, and onto what was left of his roof above Enid. He pushed the remainder of the roof off of the bed so she would have enough space. She pulled her bloody dress up around her waist. He put a pillow behind her head, and she bent her knees.

  “What’s happening?” Mano asked.

  “I don’t know. Something’s coming out.”

  “Is it our baby?”

  “Of course not.” She gritted her teeth. “Our baby came out years ago.” She tried to breathe deep breaths through her nose. “I buried her at my feet in the strawberry patch.”

  Mano put his big hand on her forehead. “It was a girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Us,” said Enid.

  Mano held Enid’s hand and touched her hair for hours as she pushed and cried. He was the father of a girl. That was something he could feel proud of, somehow. He had so many questions, but now was not the time to ask them. “So what’s coming out now?”

  “I don’t know,” Enid cried.

  What was coming out of Enid wasn’t their daughter, of course, but what their daughter had left behind. Their daughter was the very last person to die during the plague of God’s Finger, and she died no differently.

  The sharp point of the tusk poked out of Enid’s vagina just enough for Mano to grip it with his fingers. It was yellow with plaque, and smooth, but he had to pull hard, and very slowly, to get the tusk all the way out. With every tug on the tusk, Mano was causing Enid an indescribable pain. Still, there was nowhere for the tusk to go but outward, through Enid’s vagina. She would nod to Mano when she was ready for him to tug, and then he would tug. A few more inches of it came out into the world, streaked with her blood.

  Enid’s knees were as far apart as they could possibly go, and she made a pool of sweat in the center of the very large bed. Mano pulled for a few minutes at a time, and then walked back around her to wipe the sweat off her forehead. After hours of agony, hours of tugging and resting, the tusk finally came out. They both looked at the tusk with astonishment, like gawkers in a natural history museum, like what had just come out of her didn’t belong to her, or to this world. It was a spectacle unlike anything. The tusk was over 15 feet long, and curved down and around. When Mano stood it up on its wider end, it was taller than his roof. The fatter end, which came out of Enid last, was the most yellow with plaque, and it was stained with blood.

  Mano retreated for a few minutes to the kitchen, and he came back with two buckets of warm water. With one, he wiped Enid’s forehead clean, and her chest, and the back of her neck. That felt very good to Enid. And with the other, he washed the tusk. Both of them agreed how beautiful it was, how it shined.

  After everything was cleaned, there was the problem of the second tusk. It needed to come out, too. Enid tried to ignore the pain at first, but the pain became the clearest indicator that their daughter had left behind more than a single tusk. Just like before, Mano tugged, while Enid nodded and breathed. There were a few more hours of screaming and indescribable pain. Then just like the first tusk, the second was born, bloody and shiny and yellow. Enid’s body felt emptied and broken.

  While Enid rested for hours after the second tusk came out of her body, Mano drained the blood from his bathtub, and cleaned up his house. When she woke up, he helped lower her into the bathtub where she could soak and begin to heal. She slept in the bathtub, too. Mano let her sleep. He set a pack of Nun’s Hats on the toilet, so she could smoke one when she woke up. He cleaned the second tusk with soap and water.

  Once Enid awoke, she called to him, weakly, from the bathroom. “Can I see them?”

  “Yes, you can see them.” Mano picked up one tusk at a time in the bedroom. He pointed the first one forward, holding it like a spear, so it would fit through the bathroom door. It was much heavier than he imagined. Both tusks were too tall to fit in the bathroom, but he stood them up anyway. They each tore their own hole through the roof of the bathroom as he stood them up, but he no longer cared about the shape of his cabin.

  As Mano and Enid looked at the tusks together, Mano felt a tremendous sense of pride. It was not the kind of pride that a father would have, although these tusks were left behind by his daughter. They were of her, of his daughter, so when he touched them, it was like he could touch her. But his pride was a more general kind of pride. He had something to show for himself. And the tusks were both so big, and heavy, just like him.

 
“Do you think they’re beautiful?” asked Enid.

  Mano lit Enid’s cigarette for her. It was the first one she had smoked since she was just a teenager. “I do,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes. Very much.” Enid coughed on her first drag. “How are you going to hold them?”

  “What do you mean?” He lit up his own cigarette without taking his eyes off of the tusks.

  “Don’t you still hold the things the dead leave behind? Where are you going to put these tusks?”

  It had been a long time since Mano had thought about holding the things the dead left behind. “Hmm...I don’t know. It’s been so long since anyone has died.” He looked down at his body, and could see the remnants of some of the things he had held for many years.

  “Do you even have any room?” she asked.

  Mano didn’t think he had any room left, or any strength to hold anything else, especially two incredibly heavy tusks. But these tusks were his daughter’s tusks. These tusks were his. They were Enid’s, too. He had a family now, he thought. “Of course, yes. I have room,” he said.

  With her cigarette between her wet fingers, Enid pointed from the bathtub at Mano’s face. “There,” she said.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Right there.” She closed one eye, and looked down the barrel of her arm, as if she was going to shoot right into the mouth of the wild beast.

  51.

  Enid Pine rode her mammoth into town. No one knew how long she had been in the woods, but it was long enough that they had forgotten she had left XO City in the first place. The people of XO City had quickly forgotten her epic journey into the woods, and replaced it with their memories of her return, more than 12 feet high above the ground on the back of the mammoth’s neck, riding perilously with full trust for the wild beast. She rode the mammoth fast, at a gallop, and held on, at times, with only her knees. She waved as she passed people, as if she was in a parade. The people remembered that it was past strawberry season because they remembered that when Enid took her mammoth up and down every row of her strawberry patch, as if she was giving it a private tour, that the bushes were brown, and the strawberries were rotting in the dirt. She took it past what was left of the old abandoned barbershop, too. The entire front wall had crumbled, so Enid and her mammoth could easily fit inside. They stayed in there for a long time, her mammoth sitting on top of what was left of the old chair. By the time Enid led her mammoth out through the front of what was left of the barbershop, a few people from XO City started to gather around them. Some people trailed behind Enid and her mammoth like a tiny parade, at first.