CATACLYSM BABY

By Matt Bell

For my parents,

who survived five cataclysms of their own

“And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping thing, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth.”

—Genesis 7:23, KJV

“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

—Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Abelard, Abraham, Absalom

This smoldered cigar, last of a box of twenty, bought to celebrate happier times, now smoked to keep away the smell of our unwashed skin, of our slipping flesh, of our baby grown in my wife’s belly, the submerged sign of a prophecy burning, stretching taut her hard bulge: All hair, just like the others, gone wrong again.

Fists of black hail fall from the cloudless sky and spatter the house, streak the skin of our walls, break windows above broken beds. The birth-room fills with air the texture of mud, with black birds forgetting how to fly, these crows and vultures waiting to make a nest of our child, and still I focus, keep my eyes on shattered glass, on my wife’s pelvis tilting toward sunlight, toward sun turned the color of baby’s first stool, then the color of blood.

Then the blood, flowing between my wife’s legs.

Hopeful cigar smoked, held between loose teeth, I say, Push. I say, Push right now.

And then it comes, becomes: A baby boy, born just like the others. Hair on cheeks, on forehead, on lips and tongue. Inverse of our own nakedness. Shame in an equal and opposite amount.

For our baby, a name chosen from a book of names. Each name exhausted one after another, a sequenced failure. I hook a finger into our baby’s tiny mouth and pull out hair, hairball. From furred windpipe. From matted esophagus.

Only my wife cries. Only the birds caw, flap their wings. Only again a howl of spoor, cigar sputter.

Pull, my wife says. Pull.

As if I could ever pull enough. As if I could ever clear the lungs of this fur. As if I could clear the stomach. As if I could clear the heart, its chambers full, clenched, wrong for what harrowed world awaits. Pull, she says. Pull. Pull. Pull. And what coward I would be to stop.

Beatrice, Bella, Blaise

The older was the first to show us the scars, the archeology of her sister-scribed history, hard-written by their cutting, their stabbing, their sawing. The younger better hid her sister’s handiwork, bore well the bands of reddened flesh and puckered scars beneath shirt, beneath sleeve, beneath shorts and underwear.

Even in the bath we barely noticed.

Even when the younger found trouble standing, even then we refused to believe.

Always the younger had limped, we argued. Always she had struggled to balance. Always her ears had been notched, her fingers a crooked nine.

What trust we had in the older then! What light touch she had, what blinding perfect smile made to answer our questions!

It had taken the younger’s retribution to reveal the older’s now-avenged crime, took the continuing destruction of that first body for us to discover the slower attrition of the second, and so afterward what right to anger did we have toward the younger, even at the shocking sight of the diminished older, our beloved eldest?

Perhaps none, we decided. Perhaps girls will be girls, no matter what we parents say.

And what else to do next, but let them work this out themselves?

To support their interests, we buy stocks of whetstones, of wood blocks filled with meat knives, of blister-packaged scissors, until at last our house is pregnant with the voices of children playing, craving only to get nearer each other, to have the other close at hand: Tag, you’re it, then, Duck, duck, goose! The older leads these games, a born teacher, but it is the younger who best exploits their rules. Every evening their screaming laughter cuts through our locked bedroom door, until one night we hear only the voice of the younger, playing all alone.

Ring around the rosie, she sings, skipping through the house, calling out our names, our titles—yelling mother up the stairs, shouting father outside our door.

We all fall down, she sings, throwing her skinny bones against the bolts.

We all fall down together!

And then: the creak of the doorframe, the give of the lock, the tenuous grace of a chain, pulled short.

Cain, Caleb, Cameron

The doctors promised twins but delivered only one baby from my wife’s pummeled womb, her troubled cavity. First the push, push, then the blood, then my mistake-toothed firstborn gnashing in the nurse’s arms: chubby, too chubby, too covered in mother’s gore.

And then my wife continuing to scream.

And then the doctors begging her to stop.

And then what came next, what loose hair, what loose skin, what loose son or daughter, what delta of destruction flowing: my eyes, my wife’s nose, swimming small and recognizable in the flotsam—and then what once-plump arms, what legs covered in bite marks, such expired flesh taken clean off soft baby bones.

In the nursery, our son cried sleepless, sucked frozen pacifiers, pulled at his ears with his fingers, and from behind the glass between us I watched helpless as he chewed his blanket, as he choked past his pillow’s stuffing, unsatisfied.

At home, it is my wife who cries, while our firstborn sucks her tit dry, while his rows of teeth puncture her skin, pock-mark her areola. And how to respond when she complains of his always-hunger, when in an empty voice she begs me to allow the bottle instead?

But look at our son, I say.

Look how tall he’s grown. Look how strong.

Look how he walks, only a month old.

Look how he lifts the icebox lid, how he opens the packaging with his teeth.

Look at his mouth, stained again a ring of red, just like the day he was born.

Domina, Doreen, Dorma

What month of dark mornings followed? What spring or fall, what remade season of locusts and black flies besetting our town, flown in on thickening air and sickening smell? And there, in the middle of its days, appears this chrysalis, this cocoon, this child-shaped bundle found wrapped in our morning sheets, tangled in the space where our toddling daughter once slept, dream-thrashed and nightmare-ridden as she clung to our skin, our heat.

A chrysalis? I ask my wife. A cocoon?

What’s the difference, she says, when it’s your child inside, when it’s your caterpillar?

We vow to keep it close, to sleep beside it until it ruptures, until what cocoons are for: until she emerges, no longer a child.

To cradle my pupa in my arms. To rock it in the rocking chair. To wait and hope, and at last to see the new shape pressed urgent against the inner skin of the chitin—and then to crack wide the chrysalis with one hand, to with the other force my daughter free.

To behold the dripping wings, the glistening thorax; the changed head, the new mouth.

I open the nursery window and let the room fill with locusts and flies, those other black wings, other black legs, other black mouths bent on devouring all they can catch: Only me, only what flaking skin I have left. Only my daughter’s fresh wings, her span of translucent amber flapping free the scent of molt dust, of moth smoke.

And then the hairy touch of her legs on my legs, on my hips, on my chest; then the click of her mandibles, clipping locusts from my ears, knocking flies from my lips and eyes.

And then my wife and I at the nursery window, watching her leave. Watching her join the town’s other golden children, together flying a sky clouded shut. Keeping us safe, at least until the locusts run out. Until the flies are gone. Until the trees and grass and shrubs are empty of leaf and branch.

Until all the rest the creeping thing stops.

Until my grief-stung wife disappears, first into herself, a body spun inside a heartache, and then again outside our home, into the cloud of children blacking our sky.

The rest of us shut our hungry selves away, whisper through glass pane, through locked door: You can’t ever come home, we say, but no words can stop the knocking against our lit windows, our delicate houses.

The next time I see her, how big she’s gotten: My only daughter, all grown up.

And now her string of milky eggs across the window.

Now her own caterpillars, hungry for what world remains.

Edgar, Edric, Eduardo

My wife and I are too bloated to climb by the time the vines reach the floor of this spoiled forest, our bodies too quaking with fat to grasp even the lowest of their fruits. We call for our son, that skinny boy sunburned from his scavenging, and then we teach him to climb, to imitate the monkeys that screech from the branches. From our backs, we holler how best to shimmy the twenty-story vines of this new jungle, this eruption of trunk and thorn and branch and thistle rising from where our concrete once strangled the earth: All that old life gone now, replaced by towering trees, by mud made anew, by daily wallows and failed waddles, by the deforestation diet of my hungry wife and my own hearty appetite.

To our son: Climb, we cry. Climb, and bring us back what there is to find.

For some while it works. He returns with bony arms full of guavas, peaches, papaya, descends the vines with breeches torn and stained, his pockets stuffed with bananas, other fruits dropped whole into my gulping gullet, into the strained esophagus of his mother.

Our baby boy, our darling son, born into this lonely forest, made for this world to which we cannot adapt: Without him we would be lost, would surely starve and waste away.

For a month he brings such quantities of fruit, until our cheeks bulge with the feasts of his foraging, and after each feeding we bid him stay close, bid him to sit beside us while we question him about the treetops. We ask, Have you seen anyone else above, in the sway and the swing? Are there others still left? Other boys and girls feeding other parents trapped below?

Our boy shakes his head in feigned loneliness, but each passing day reveals the length of his lie: First a bracelet of flowering vines, knitted by another, then a pox of hickies, a necklace of bruises. Suck-marks, my wife sneers, driving our son back into the high trees, where he leaps easy from vine to branch to trunk. Her disapproval follows him, pushes him higher and higher, until there is nothing to see, until the forest is silent around us.

Then our breakfast arriving slow, our lunch late.

Then our dinners not coming at all.

Then our guts aching, desperate for what grows above.

We gather our quivering bodies, release our screamed demands into the canopy, but still no son appears. Still no meal follows. To keep us company there is only the squawk of the monkeys descending lower by the day, growing braver on the vines in the absence of our once overprotective son. There is only their toothy muzzles, stained with the fruits of the hunt, and then, from far above, the airy laughter of our child, of all our children who have ascended into the bowers, into the verdant newness suspended above this fallen earth, this last of all the muck and mud we’ve known.

Fawn, Fiona, Fjola

They take our daughter and in return they grant us eight hours of light a day, plus nutrient-enriched air pumped thick and cool through the vents in the concrete ceilings, the non-slip floors. The mother and I alternate days washing ourselves in the extra fifteen minutes of water we’re rationed, but despite their promises this cleanliness does not lead us to renewed conversation, to revigored copulation. Before the makings of our daughter I did not know this woman, and now that the daughter is gone we rarely speak, barely look in each other’s direction even when the thrumming lights permit.

Instead, our eyes swivel toward the silver screens set into the walls, into every tight-cornered wall. Working silently, the mother and I move all our furniture: In the living room, we discard tables and ottomans, push the couch so near we have to climb over the arms to sit cross-legged before the flicker, and then we continue on, driving room to room the destruction of inessential surfaces, unnecessary seating, until in the bedroom we shift our mattress into the cleared space below the largest screen, beneath the silver stretch of video as long as our once-used bed.

On our knees, we press our faces to the screen, put our ears to speakers making only soothing static, the swooping sound of television dreams: This is where they promised we’d see our daughter again, where they said she’d return beautiful and whole, not womb-thrashed and gene-short, not malnourished and depressed.

Not like her parents, they promised.

The mother and I waste our brightest hours peering into the static, but no matter how many channels we check we find no daughter, and also no other programming, as there was the last cycle of abundant light, of quick electricity.

Each day that passes, we breathe deeper of the processed air, let its engineered taste force us into health, into some state like happiness.

Each day, we wash in our daily bucket of water, perfume ourselves before showing off our broadening faces, our fresh flesh plump with improved circumstance.

For one minute we tell each other our trade was worth it, because only then can we bring ourselves to gaze again the daughterless static, to stare until our eyes ache, until we cannot resist calling the talent scouts who took from us our only child.

Into the phone, we say, Where is her better life you promised? Where is her bright and shining future? What channel you guaranteed, what better reality captured beneath lights and microphones, and where is it to be found?

They do not answer our questions.

All they say is, Keep watching.

All they say is, Trust us—And what other choice do we have?

How healthy the mother appears, how fat my face reflected in her worried eyes, until the day the power whirrs off, the lights go dark, the fans stop blowing.

The television’s dwindling dim casts us into silence, leaving only our still-stinking breath to fill the air once stubborn with its sound. With hands held between us for the first time since the daughter-making, the mother and I kneel upon the bed, press our bodies to the screen. Wracked with rediscovered heat and hunger, we beg for a glimpse, any single sound from the throat of our mistake-given daughter, but the screen offers only glassy potential, only what might still be, if we watch, if we believe.

How far gone are we then, when the mother begins to beg, when she first pleads aloud?

I have forgotten our daughter’s face, she says, her own deflating cheeks pressed against the screen, streaming the stale dark, washing the dust from its silence.

She says, Please. Please describe her, remind me, tell me what I cannot see so that I might recognize her when she comes: Her new hair, her new face, her new body.

I tell the mother again what the scout promised, what he told us our daughter would have because of our sacrifice, because of our willingness to go without.

I tell her how our daughter resides now on the surface, under the sun we have not seen in years, except on this still-dark screen.

I tell her about the shining mane that surely grows from our daughter’s once-shorn scalp, the teeth that must sprout white from her once-unsocketed gums.

I tell her about our daughter’s rebuilt mind, her promised ability to sound whole words, to speak in fullest sentences, her voice made so different from when she lived with us.

I tell her how I see our once-daughter hugged by new parents.

I tell her how this girl has probably forgotten all about us.

How she’s never coming back. How that’s a kindness.

How instead of our daughter, we have chosen each other, and how I am sorry.

I tell her, The power will be restored any minute. They promised us.

This for that, I tell her. This for that is what they promised us.

I tell her, Stop crying. I tell her, Stop crying right now.

Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo

Perhaps only their mother could distinguish between the boys, could reckon their slight variations in weight, the distinct cervix-bends of their skulls. I never could, not when they appeared as three redheaded infants and not when they were toddlers, all dressed alike in the preference of my good and then gone wife.

As teenagers they each ate the same amount of porridge each morning, the same third of a meat-can at dusk, and even the first time I caught one masturbating, I caught all three, circled between their bunks, each mimicking the motion of another’s hands. Ditto drinking, ditto the glass-pipes, ditto the new milk-drawn drugs I’d never known before their schoolmaster called.

With their mandatory facemasks and goggles affixed, no one could tell my boys apart, but then no one could recognize anyone else either, not after the baggy state-issued jumpsuits, the preventative head-shavings.

Even after this handicapping, some people remained more charming than others, and if there was an attribute each of my sons possessed equally, it was charm.

All these excuses and more were given by the women in town after every wife and daughter and matron and maiden from fourteen to forty-five swelled with my sons’ oft-spilled spunk, with the fruits of their inseparable loins. Later it grew difficult to prove whose child each mother carried, amid whole seasons of confused houses packed with breaking bellies, those quick-sequenced summer and fall and winter months filled with spread legs, with the emptying of wombs, with new mothers seeking out my sons for shotgunned weddings and promises of child support.

Hidden away in my house, my sons now celebrate their success: This is how you start a dynasty, one says over family dinner, a meal eaten behind blackout curtains, barricaded doors.

A kingdom, says the next, then corrects himself. A franchise.

In a world that’s dying, says the third, isn’t this all sort of beautiful?

I ask you: What possible solution to these childbirths overpopulating this town with more redheaded babies, with fiery scalps awaiting the state-razor, whole streets lined with my sons’ progeny, with their strong genes wiping out the faces of their children’s mothers in deference to their own perfect jawlines?

How many babies are born before we realize that all their children are boys? That our town’s women are the past, thanks to my one-note issue, to their deadly sperm making deathly pregnancies, taking each of their partners the way of their own mother: blood-wet, breath-gasped, split-wombed, at best to linger, never to recover from the makings of their children?

Now these babies left behind. Now only me and my three sons, only us four shut-ins against a town full of adulterated widowers, of shamed cuckolds and seething fathers, all parading our yard, my many grandsons in tow.

Now the first babies being left on our doorstep. Now the rest, following soon after.

Now my walking out onto the front porch to see the rows and rows of abandoned twins and triplets, the exponential crop of my line.

What loud reverberations their hunger-cries make! What diaper-complaints, what pain, what suffering, and amid it always my boys, unfeeling for what they have done, and so what else to do but discipline again these three failed fathers, these three no-use sons of mine?

What next but to make them take up the scythe and the shovel, if they will not take up their right roles instead?

What point in anything else? What good fathering could boys as bad as they possibly do?

So at last their lesson in how to reap. And how to sow. And how, when there is nothing better, to plow the world back under.

Hali, Halle, Hamako

The day came when we could no longer hide the glistening sight of our daughter’s flippers, nor the secret of her skin, its oils and fur.

Like the other parents afflicted before us, we took her to the lonely end of the island, to the cliffs hung high above the breaking surf. There my wife kissed our daughter’s wet nose, after which I bound tight her swaddling, stilling her wide limbs to her sleek middle, and then together we let our baby tumble from our hands, through the tall air, into the swallowing sea.

Afterward, what endeavors we undertook to forget, even as our guilty bodies tried again for some more right-birthed baby, even as our bodies proved unable to produce another—even as we entered this famished sea, this season of nets cast out and collected empty, until throughout our village every stomach was as hollowed as our crib.

And now these legs, walking me back to the cliff, my guilt-path worn through the jungle.

Now these eyes, watching the ocean crash its anger-fist upon the shore, a parade of knuckles on top of knuckles on top of knuckles.

Now this hurt-drowned heart, when I see how other times the ocean is flat like so much glass, like the unwalked beach below, its sand stormed upon, lightning-fused and mirror-smooth; when sometimes I catch my own face staring back from the water beyond.

Those waveless days, I see my face or a face like my face, but not the faces of the fish that once swam in those depths.

Our fish are gone, and our daughter too, and together her mother and I pray for some rewinding of waves, some reversal of what awful ripples we have made, so that our daughter might one day find her way to the flatter side of the island, to the yellow beaches, to the path leading to our small hut, our home meant once to be her home.

And if it happens? If our pup returns? Then what?

Then how: With anger? With forgiveness? With love?

Or with what thing we deserve instead, a new mood from our new daughter, dredged deep from the dark, rising slow and sure, purposed only to take us back down.

Isaac, Isaiah, Ishmael

Even at birth they were already damaged, their brittle bones opened and crushed, powdered by their mother’s powerful organs, her pressing canal: All those thin ribs snapped and splintered upon the stainless steel of the operating room. All those skulls crooked and cracked, all those twisted greenstick limbs. We lifted each child out from the mother’s body and into surgeries of its own, did our best to splint and screw our prides together.

So few survived, and for what next chance? On what legs would they stand, with no milk to grow them strong except from the body that had already failed to make them so?

If only there was some other mother, some second receptacle for the babies we want so badly to make. But no, there is only me and my brothers, only this last-caught woman between us.

To quell my brothers’ anger, to beg their patience, I say, This woman may not be capable of producing what heir we need, but perhaps she may yet birth the one who might, if only one of her daughters lives to have a set of hipbones strong enough to better bear our advances.

I say, The end isn’t short, but long. And so always we must not rush, must be in no hurry.

And so we fill the mother with powdered milk, with canned peaches, with vitamin-paste squeezed from nearly empty tubes.

And so we fill her with meat.

Every new wish is followed by another waiting, followed by another failure: Push, we say, our voices speaking in unison, our wants aligned after a lifetime of bitterest division, of brotherly strife. Together, we make what we can make, and we save what we can save. Push, we say, and then comes this next baby born just as broken, its first cries already choked with the chalk of its bones. Its newborn everything else shattering into dust. This daughter-like reminder that not all birthed into this world shall see it reborn—and then again our determination, our willingness to try once more.

And then, Lie still, I say, and then, Hold her, brothers, hold her, and then, I will plant again in her this seed, until at last we grow the world we desire.

Justina, Justine, Justise

For the first crime my daughters took only my thumb. They refused to apologize for their aggression, even after I confronted them, after I tossed their bedroom and confiscated the hatchet hidden in their toy box, beneath their miniature gavel. When lined up and accused beside her sisters, all the oldest would say was that my trial had been fair, their court complete even without my presence: One daughter for a judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense.

My middle daughter, she spit onto what was left of our thread-worn carpet, said my defense had been particularly difficult, considering my obvious guilt.

She said, Perhaps you should tell our mother you cut your thumb at work, so that she will not have to know why we took it.

She said, Your records are sealed until you unseal them, and then she made the locking motion over her lips that I taught her when she was just my baby, when she first needed to know what secrets were.

What milky-stern eyes the youngest had too, set in her pale face, floating above the high collar of her blackest dress: Blinded as both her sisters, still her blank eyes accused, threatened, made me sorry for what I was.

This youngest daughter, she walked me back to my room, her hand folded small in my uninjured one as she explained that she and the others hoped I had learned my lesson, because they did not want to hear my sorry case again.

Then the key turning in the lock, jailing me for my wife to rescue, to admonish for leaving the girls alone, because who knew what trouble they might make when no one was watching.

How I tried to be sneakier: To send messages only at work. To go out after they were already in bed. To change my clothes away from home, so that they might not smell the other upon me.

And then waking with my hand gone, divorced from my wrist, a tourniquet tightened around my stump and my mouth cottoned with morphine. And then wondering where my beautiful daughters could have gotten their tools, their skillful medicines.

And then not knowing what to tell my wife or my mistress, each curious about my wounds, and also still being unable to choose, to pick one woman over the other.

How now the gavel sounds in my sleep, how I hear my oldest pounding its loud weight against the surface of her child-sized desk, bringing into line the pointless arguing of the middle daughter, of the youngest—Because in my defense, what could the middle daughter say? What judicious lies could she tell that the others might believe? When all she wanted was for me to see the wrong of my ways, to repent and rehabilitate so that her mother and I might remain married forever?

In the last days of my affair, I lift my middle daughter into my arms, feel how much weight she’s lost, how her hair has wisped beneath its ribbons.

She meets my apologies with a slap, squirms free. She says, Don’t think I’m still daddy’s little girl.

She says, I only defended you because no one else would.

She says, In justice, we are divided, but in punishment, we are one.

The lullaby she sings as she walks away, I am the one who taught it to her. I am the one who sat beside her crib and held her hand when she could not sleep. I am the one who rocked her and fed her when her mother could not, exhausted as she was by her difficult pregnancies and the changing of the air.

I want this good behavior to matter, but I know it does not.

Some weeks later, I awake restrained to my now half-empty bed, nothing visible in the darkness except the silhouettes of my blind daughters in their black dresses, their white blindfolds wrapped tight round empty eyes.

And then it comes, and then they come with it: the children I deserve, if never the children I wanted; my three little furies, my three furious daughters.

Kidd, Kier, Kimball

Another new rain falls, dumped from the complicated sky, its acid-heavy droplets pelting our shoulders as we run from awning to awning, from collapsing home porch to crumbling chapel steps. Along our way, we see every kind of bird upon the ground, all heavy with forgotten flying, and around them their mud-left eggs, as thin-walled as my wife’s uterus, that tender space slung inside her unsteady body.

Within it, within us both, sound always these trapped prayers, necessary to be loosed.

Inside the church, that last dry place, we give them voice from our lungs, beg them from our knees, clasp them between hands wrapped in rosaries gathered from this dead town, this plague-slapped village. Above our heads, stained glass strains against the wind, refracts the last minutes of dusk-light wrong and weird upon our faces, reduces our speech to mumbles. Exhausted of words, we move together to light a candle for each baby lost, each fetus formed but not right-birthed.

By now, this takes us all night long. This takes every minute of every night.

At dawn, we extinguish the flames so the candles will be there to relight tomorrow, and then again we pray: Oh lord, just once. Just once, deliver us a child not wrecked from the beginning. Grant us a son not lousy with fur, not ruined with scales or feathers. Give us a daughter made for the old world instead of this new one, this waste of weather and wild.

And what we would do.And how we would do anything.

Our only answers are the church’s silent histories, those sequenced promises written in terrible stone, decorating each circling step from the vestibule to the altar, from the sacristy to the last unburned pews. Each station a horrid hope too unbearable to believe, this world made only the end of mystery, only the opposite of miracles.

Inside my wife, perhaps there is only the same, only these doubling doubts, these many questions that fill my own still-beating heart: Oh lord, for who else might be promised the inheritance of the earth? For who else is meant the receiving of the kingdom? If not our impossible, short-lived children, then what new race still to come, undreamt in our present darkness? Who are these next babes, about to be poured down upon the earth, come at last to wash us from off its tear-soaked face?

Lakin, Lamia, Lakshmi

Remember the difficulty of your labor, and how at first the doctors mistook our daughter for a breech birth, but then came no foot, no other hard limb or promontory leading the way?

What was stuck instead: Only this plump fluff of flesh, these greased rolls of fat. Only flush skin in handfuls, leaving nothing for the doctors to do but tug the mess free—And what a baby they found within, what gigantic girth of daughter, her face hung with meat, her fingers barely able to poke free from the folds of her wrists.

Remember how afterward you were too weak to hold her weight, how for the first months of her life the only way to feed her was to bring your breast to her buried mouth, those lips moving within the pancake of her face? How at bath time you would stretch her skin tight so I might wash within her creases, so that together we could clear the lint-slop between, scrub free the mold grown in every hanging crevice?

Remember the surgeons advising operations to remove that excess, to suck the fat from around her eyes so she might be able to see? From around her ears, so she might be able to hear?

How you hated the doctors then: for trying to decide in what ways our daughter could be beautiful, how she should see the world, and how the world should see her.

No, you said. She will eat what she wants to eat, until she fills out that great skin, until she stretches it taut, until jagged lines of purpled flesh mark new territories upon the body of her person.

My daughter could fill a room, you said, and still I would think her perfect.

Remember saying these words?

Tell me you remember. Turn around from the stove, from the meat-stink you’re making, and tell me.

Remember how she grew, how she continued to grow? How her head sagged so she needed a brace to support it, and yet there was no device that could fit the trunk of her neck? How she toddled, now a worm the size of a bulldog, buried in rolls of flesh that restricted her movement, that reduced her to a slither, to lunging and dragging across the carpet?

Blind and deaf, mumbling behind the smother of her face, she cried for help, but all we heard was a muffle, a moan, and still you refused, named her your pretty darling, your shining star.

Remember how you buried your face in her belly, laughing and tickling her with your lips? How you said she was so delicious you wanted to eat her? Or how the salt-shame of her tears collected in the shelves of her face, left their etchings for us to find with the washcloth?

When the doctors finally cut our skin-gorged daughter free, when they returned her wrapped in bandages, mutilated of face, but escaped from the flapping weight of her birth, how bad was it for her then, because we’d pretended for so long?

How much worse when the bandages came off, and we saw what skinny creature your honest love had hid?

How hungry she was then, how little food there was left in the stores, the depleted and shuttered supermarkets, and how dry your breasts were, empty as our larder—

And then what? How to feed our daughter, who you loved, whose forgiveness you wished to earn?

Remember how once, long before this gristle-spat daughter now munching and chewing in her highchair, remember how then you said my legs were my best attribute, that you fell in love starting from my feet and working your way up?

Remember how thick the muscle of my thighs, how fine the curve of my calves?

Say you remember, then look again upon our daughter’s re-fleshed face: As awful as it was to make a monster of her before, how much worse to have made her so once again?

Remember how once I claimed I would stop this—But how you believed me wrong, because who am I, without those legs?

Who am I, without those hands, offered in the absence of better gifts?

Who I am: I am still her father. I am still your husband, your partner, a half wedded to match your half, and even if you have made me less of a man to make her more of a daughter, still I mean to retake the whole of what is mine.

Come close, my one-time love. Come closer and find out our ravening daughter is not the only one with teeth, nor the only one who hungers.

Closer now. Closer.

Closer: Taste what’s happened to me, to you, to our daughter, this fat wedge shoved between us until we splintered. Open your mouth as we have opened ours, and taste how soon I will tear you both free, how I will wrench our daughter from you, from where you are together wrapped tight, trapped, floating mad within the weight of all she once was.

Meshach, Meshach, Meshach

We knew our firstborn might not last, his weak constitution revealed even before he could walk, signaled by his crinkled little fingers, his wet coughs full of sputum and phlegm. Still my wife nursed him, still I wiped the sweat off his sallow face and his caved chest. At night, we let him sleep between our bodies, even though his raucous breathing often woke us, even though there was no need to keep warm his small shape, not in the furnace of our bedchamber, our tiny hole of a home.

Each morning, we awoke from our dreams covered in the night’s soot, the expectorate that blew upward from the vents in the floor, the ash and worse that could not escape through the clogged height of the chimney above.

Once our boy could walk, once his toddler arms were thick enough to lift himself, then we wrapped his mouth and nose with breathable cloth and set him at the ledge of the chimney, at the bottom rung of the skinny ladder leading up into the narrow smokestack.

Up, we cried. Up, and loose what there is to be loosed.

Oh, and what a baby he was then! What cries and wails at being separated from us, at being alone in the dark of the stack. But still he climbed, did his best to keep the air flowing, to keep what came from below ascending to wherever it floated above.

By the time he was old enough to talk, his voice was already strained with the black glass the heat made of his lungs.

By then, his brother baked in my wife’s womb, growing to replace him when he inevitably tumbled loose, plummeting from the chimney’s great heights.

When we heard the thump of his crash, we set aside our brooms, left the newest ash where it lay, so that we might hold him as he went.

We cried for him as best we could, but those years the furnaces were so hot that no moisture lasted: not our tears, not the milk of my wife’s breast. Our second boy, he never had enough to eat, and when his growth halted I put another in his mother’s belly, even though there was no room for the three of us then birthed, even though we could barely stand the sight of each other in the heat-stunk cramp of our chamber.

Our second boy, he climbs as his brother once did, and when he comes down to see us he is black-skinned, slick with wide burns shut tight by soot. His only words are cries for mercy, entreaties against going back up the chimney— but of course he must go.

When he refuses, I tell him about the good of the many. About the good of my wife, about the good of myself, about the good of his baby brother, coming soon. I take him bodily and I force him into the chimney, push with my hands until he is above the damper, the trapdoor between our world and his, and then I hold the damper shut while I tell him the truth I have never wanted to tell.

I tell him I can make more of him, but there is only one of me, only one of his mother.

I tell him that when he is gone, I will still love him as much as I loved the brother before, as much as I will love the brother who comes after.

I tell him, This is why we gave you all the same name, so that you might be equals in our hearts.

This conversation, it is an understanding I began with one son long ago and will end with another, perhaps here in this hot room built between the furnace below and the floor above, or perhaps somewhere new, some earned place cool and star-struck, or else some other kind of heaven I have not yet imagined, set aside as reward for our long hot labors, our series of sacrifices.

I do not know. I have only been in this one room, and I cannot guess what others the world might yet contain.

I know only this: Myself, the father. Her, the mother. Them, the son. And between us all, this hot hell to be shared, and the crematorium chimney above to be kept clean no matter what the cost, lest all below choke on the ashes of our ashes.

Nessa, Neve, Nevina

All afternoon, we watch our kids scatter through the fields, lowing and bleating, until what storm they smell in the air chases them back to us, to the fence-line that separates pasture from village. They put their hoofed hands upon the rungs of our fences, then resume their sad noises, the warning signs our village long ago learned to heed.

Within an hour we are gathered in the meeting-hall, where, one after another, we men say what we always say first: What bad timing our children have, when all around us grow these fields of barely-hay, of almost-wheat, our first true harvest in almost a decade, more precious than anything else we’ve grown on this blasted plain.

Still, if it comes down to our children or our crops, then for once we must pick our children.

We say this, and we do our best to mean every word, but without our crops, we will starve.

Without our children, without their wool-covered skins so easily shaved, we may be cold, but we will not be hungry.

I am not the richest man in the village, nor the tallest nor the strongest nor the smartest, but I am a married man with my own farm, and so in the meeting-hall my voice is the equal of any other. Once everyone has spoken, I stand again and say what must be said next, what has always been called out whenever wild weather waits on the horizon, whenever our children have warned of some dust-storm or sod-twister threatening our homes and our fields.

What I say is this: It is not all of our children who have to go.

One will be enough, I say.

I say, One has always been enough before, and then my neighbors clamor to their feet, clapping their hands and stomping the wooden floorboards in assent, praising me for my bravery.

This praise, I have seen it given to others but have never received it, and so I beam as I organize the writing of our children’s names on slips of paper, then the mixing of the slips into my hat.

All that’s left is for someone to pick a name, knowing that for the next year he’ll be the most reviled person in town, hated for singling out someone’s son or daughter for what must be done to save the rest.

When no one steps forward, I volunteer myself, because my wife and I only have one child, and out of all the other possibilities what is the chance of her name being the one I choose?

And then reaching into the hat.

And then pulling one slip out.

And then reading my daughter’s name, first to myself, then slowly to the others assembled, who again chant my name, applaud my ability to save their families.

While my wife wails, I go with the other men to lift my daughter over the fence-line and into the town square, the open butcher-block of this shared abattoir. I stroke her head, her long ears. With my nose to her muzzle, I tell her I love her, that her mother loves her, that what happens next is not her fault.

I say, You’re just a little girl—all child-fur and finger-hooves—and so how could it be?

Even though this is her eighth season, still she bawls when we shear her, and even after, when she is naked of wool, folded and trembling in my arms. By dusk-light I hold her quiet so each husband and wife can lay a hand on her forehead, so all that we have done wrong—our petty crimes, our coveting and untruths, our backward parenting, inadequate for these new children— all can be displaced upon my daughter’s back.

As I walk her out of the village with my wife and our neighbors trailing behind, then I try not to look at the empty sky, at the lack of storm our children’s crying prophesied. At the lack of obvious reason for what we are about to do.

I try not to think about how we haven’t had a plain-storm in years.

Not since I was a boy, maybe.

Thanks to this ritual, I tell myself. Thanks to these sacrifices.

Past the far limit of our fences, at the crossroads between our village and the wilderness, there I set down my daughter.

I step back, and from the distance between us I take a stone.

While she quivers, cold on skinny legs, I choose another.

It is enough to simply drive her off, so to the others I say, I do not wish to see my daughter hurt—but as all around me the rocks fly, what hurt there is, what whimper in her throat, what storm in her eyes!

And in return her herd sounds from beyond the fences, adding their voices to her crying, her begging caught beneath our hail of scape-stones that must continue until she is gone away. The other children bang their bodies against the slats, bleat with their mouths so different from ours, enough to distract us, to give us pause.

To give us pause, but not to make us stop.

Oneida, Ophelia, Ornella

My siren-daughters, my sweet-singing beauties: Whose songs pierced even the thickest of our soundproofed buildings, even the home where once they lived inside, when they were still part of my fractured family, still children under my care. Who, long before the floods began, once lined up beside their mother upon her piano bench, each daughter differing only in age and size, otherwise blessed with the same white-blonde hair, the same eyes so green they glittered even after we extinguished the lamp-light.

While their mother pressed each key in turn, these three daughters hummed along, matching their voices to the piano’s percussion, to the tones that escaped its upright body. One by one they captured its voice, contained it in their chests, so that soon we heard the piano even when no one was playing, its notes coming from our white-fenced yard, from their playroom, from the tight porcelain confines of their shared bath times.

It wasn’t until the rains started that the oldest learned to mimic her mother’s mouth-noises, and so it was she who first licked her lips at the dinner table and then repeated every sonorous syllable of my wife’s speech, the description of her day at the dykes, binding dams with all the other mothers recently pressed into service, no longer allowed to stay home with their children. Soon the younger two could do as well as the oldest, all of them speaking in their mother’s many voices, matching the pitch and timbre that accompanied each shift of mood and mannerism.

How soon after did they learn to throw their own voices, to call out from places they could not possibly be? When did I first hear my wife’s words from every room, calling me to dinner, calling me to work, calling me to bed to make another daughter, so that the song might go on, might swell?

What choir of sisters my daughters wanted, and what chorus they were denied, for my wife had already shut her womb to me and to the wet world around us, saying that if we could not ensure the future of the children we already had, then what point was there in bringing more into our flooding home?

Still our daughters pestered. Still they mimicked. Still I fell for their many tricks, because I too wanted the next child they wished my wife to make.

With their changeable voices, they lured me out of the study, out of the house and into the drowned neighborhood left behind by the breeching of the levees, those imperfect barriers giving way to the rush of rainwater, to the floating freeze of recent hail. And if I never caught my daughters, I at least found what they wanted to show me, the new landmarks of our remade neighborhood: First, a dog floating short-leashed and bloated, then the submerged beauty of our once dry library. Other things they’d wanted, and by our failing world were denied.

What family meeting we had then, loud of volume, each daughter throwing out her mother’s speech and then mine too, until all our parentage was lost to their same-enunciated disavowals, on and on until my lungs hung empty against my sorrowed heart, until I could no longer give voice to the word no, to the word stop, to the words no please stop.

And what then? What could we do to these daughters after we were forced to move onto the second floor, those cramped rooms stuck atop our submerged stairs? Or even later, when our neighbors rowed over to bring us news about the first of the drowned, victims rushing out into the water to save some loved one screaming for help but finding only undertows thick with brambles and water snakes?

To pretend it wasn’t happening. To go to rooftop funerals and say nothing. To stand with my hand in my wife’s or some daughter’s, while widows and widowers lamented that they’d never hear their loved ones again, and then to say, Well, perhaps not, but perhaps yes too.

And then my wife being lured out. My wife who should have known better being trapped in water over her head, treading for hours in the river that used to be our tree-lined street.

And then my not going to help her, my believing her dying words only the voices of our missing daughters, another of their tricks: That it was me they were trying to kill, and their mother’s voice the bait.

And then those daughters returned to my side, mock-crying into each other’s mourning dresses, each bedecked with my wife’s pearls, her costumed brooches and rings.

Long after her funeral barge had been pushed away, still I heard my wife begging me to save her from the steep waters beyond the bounds of our town, swirling beneath the all-day and all-night pitch of our cloud-darked world.

When my rowboat left again and did not come back, when my daughters who took it did not come back either, even then I did not fear for their safety, because still at night I could stand on my roof and listen to my wife crying out in the downpour, accompanied only by the frog-song and wind-roar that replaced all the other sounds I once heard upon our submerged street.

And now? How many wet years has it been? How long since I last saw land, since I knew the smell of grass or tree or rock or dirt?

How far removed those things seem, despite their voices still out there, somewhere upon the surface of the water, remembered only by my daughters who cry out in the yip of the coyote, the slither of the snake, the rustle of oak and fern.

Now there is only me, floating after them in the dark.

Now only me and also this barge, built from the flotsam and jetsam that bumped into my sunken home, and above me only these clouds, and around me only this rain, which I must bail every second I am not steering, not sinking my pole toward some hopeful bottom.

All this, so someday I might walk again on dry land, so I might stand before my three wife-voiced daughters, so I might tell them that I am not mad anymore.

That although they have cost me everything, I will not punish them.

That because everything they took from me was all they had themselves, they have already been punished enough.

Prescott, Presley, Preston

Know how we once believed our coming children would surprise us. And how we were wrong.

Know how as soon as he can speak our oldest tells us the day and date his first brother will be born, and then together they apprise us of the youngest’s coming, disclosing the hour of my wife’s water breaking, the length of her labor, the exact moment of the crowning of their brother’s head.

Know that by the end of each family breakfast they predict the rest of our day: What hour it will rain. What my wife will cook for lunch and dinner. What horrible words I will say when my sons will not stop talking, and also how I will try to make them, to force them into saying anything that is not a prediction, that is not the certainty-cursed future coming our way.

Before my wife can send them to their shared bedroom, my sons have already told her she will.

It’s there that our oldest starts his book, the book he calls his diary even though its every word is the future, some event coming later, some doom to fear, to be traumatized by both before and after.

The day he turns thirteen, he tells me I will wait three more months before I sneak into his room and read this diary, and that by then it will be too late.

He says, You could save us if you read it today, but I know you won’t.

Know it’s a lie, another adolescent taunt, a poke at what he knows has already happened, because I have read his diary, including the early entry predicting I would: At the end of the summer, our house will burn, and all my boys will burn too, caught in their shared bedroom because their mother cannot stand anymore to always be told what will happen next, cannot bear her life being scripted by her oldest son, appended and corrected in the margins by his younger brothers.

Know I could stop her. Know my sons knowing I could.

Know how when the day comes they bang their fists against the locked and nailed door, the thick-boarded windows. Know how they curse and accuse and scream for mercy when the house begins to collapse, and even after it crumbles, while still they struggle beneath its weight of wood and stone.

My wife and I hold hands in the street, at the end of our yard, safely past the widening circle of heat-blackened, smoke-wilted grass, and what joy crosses her face then, despite the last screams of our sons: To again have a world unknown, beset with unexpected joys, unplanned tribulations. To again live our lives with both doubt and hope.

Know how she says, Will you ever forgive me?

And how I say, Not yet. But soon.

And then my wife staring at my face, wondering but not knowing whether I have stolen the diary she believed still hidden in the boy’s room, secreted under their bunks.

And also not knowing that our eldest told me I would take it. That I wouldn’t be able to give up possessing the future just because he was gone.

And also: That there are only a few pages past today’s date, and on each page only a single day.

Know there is not much else to know.

Know there is a finite amount of everything remaining.

Know this future is almost over, know we will live to see it end.

And afterward: Whatever cataclysm follows, at last a surprise.

Quella, Querida, Quintessa

How beautiful our daughter is in her white Tethering dress, dancing her younger cousins across the decorated length of our yard: First the waltz, then the cha-cha, then the tango. Old people dances, she called them when she was eleven, but now, twelve years old, feet shod for the final time in bobby socks and dress-flats, she can’t wait to teach the others every step, every turn and twirl, every last aching contact of foot upon grass.

The band plays on while my wife cuts the cake, while she passes out thick frosting-dripped slices of vanilla to everyone present, whether they want cake or not. Only afterward is our flush-faced daughter allowed to open her presents, her gifts from her many aunts and uncles, this family extending to include our entire community, all us lonely adults closer now than when we were kids, when there were no Tethering parties to bring us together.

My daughter is all teeth and dimples as she says thank you to each gift-giver, to each sad-eyed parent in the crowd—and as she lifts her ankle to show off the present her mother and I gave her, opened during the Tethering itself: a steel cuff, clasped around her ankle, concealed by the fanciest lace and pearls we could afford.

After the party ends, I help her pack, placing each gift—each sealed bottle of water, each nonperishable food item, each oversized cable-knit sweater—into her tether-bags, attached to the braided-steel cord already fed through the carabiners and guide-loops, already secured to the clasp on her tether, that anklet which will for a time keep her life close to ours.

And then me hugging her goodbye. And then her mother doing the same, refusing to let go.

And then my pulling mother from daughter so that our child might climb the ladder to the platform where she will await her rising.

How great our sorrow is during the first few months, when she is still close enough that we can climb the ladder ourselves to hold her floating hands, to bring her food and drink so that she might not consume the supplies meant for the trip ahead. Already she longs to be farther away, to be up in the air with the other sons and daughters drifting in the wind, her cousins ballooned with this adolescent gas that fills their bodies and never filled ours.

Together, my wife and I wait until our daughter is ten or twelve feet above the platform, her belly bloating until she floats out of reach, then out of yelling distance, then too far away to see with the naked eye.

Only then do we host this second party, the one where everyone brings binoculars and spyglasses instead of presents and a dish to pass.

The Untethering, it is more a party for us than for our daughter, but it doesn’t feel like a celebration, not with everyone dressed all in black.

Midway through the dancing, I remind my wife that she’s the one who must release our daughter.

I say, If our daughter was a son, then I would do it, because it is what has to be done, what has always been done since the time of the first rising.

I say, We don’t know where she will float to, but if you do not let her go, then she will starve to death upon her tether. Together, we will have to watch her deflate, then float back to the earth, our own lifeless feather.

Our hushed guests wait while my wife looks through her spyglass at our daughter, that fat far-off speck caught in an updraft, spinning uncomfortable at the end of her line. They watch through their binoculars, struggling to read my daughter’s lips, the last message of our only child, only half-mouthed when my wife, already turning away, finally pulls the release lever.

How quick the rest of the cord shoots up and out through the guide-loops, speeding into the air behind my daughter, and how fast our baby girl disappears, off for whatever world awaits her up there in the atmosphere, among all the other children this town has released.

And who can imagine what far-off countries they might settle, what new families they might next inhabit?

All we know is how sad our landlocked bodies are now, comforted only by each other’s flightless, balloonless limbs. Her mother and I, we weep, black-clad, while around us our neighbors sing the Untethering song and cut our Untethering cake: Chocolate, my wife’s favorite, the one she hasn’t had since the day our allergic daughter was born, when we traded its pleasure for some other flavor, some taste thought even sweeter.

Rohan, Rohit, Roho

Sod furrows behind the plow, behind our slow son tacked to its traces, his shoulders and thighs bulging as he scratches the blade across the earth, sundering scars to be scabbed over by his mother’s following hand. All day she walks behind the hulk of him, doing the work I used to do. With her slender fingers she pushes the seeds carefully into the dank dirt, into soil exposed only briefly to this uncertain sun, this angry air, this quavering question posed as perhaps unreasonable hope: Because even though what grows from the world’s womb might be no better than what grew from my wife’s, what other choice do we have but to try again?

There are some who say it’s the earth that’s gone wrong, and some that say the seed, and it is this my wife and I debate after she pushes my wheelchair up to the dining table, after she sets the brakes my fumbling fingers are too weak to work. While we fight, our son takes more than his share of our food, offers less than his fair part to the conversation. Everything about him is retarded except his appetite, the cost of his too-big body, his still-nameless face, left so because what right name was there? What title for a child best loved as a beast of burden, best desired for the plow he can drag, for the twisted tree trunks he pulls from the ground to make more farm?

What do you call an animal that eats more than it helps grow, until crop after crop yields less, until soon there won’t be enough feed for the three of you?

What do you even say to a son like that? What you say is, Come here, boy. In the middle of the night, you say this. You say, Carry me, and then he carries you.

With your crippled body in his arms, he chases your pointing finger out of the bedroom, out of the house, out into the field still flipped fresh by the plowing.

Right here, you say. Do it right here.You say, Hug me the way you hugged me last.

You say, This time, away from the house, there’ll be no mother to stop us.

And then you give thanks for a boy too stupid to know his own strength, too broken to understand the patricide carried latent within his sausage-thick fingers, his ox-stunk palms that close over your skull, that crack those flat bones loose from their jagged moorings.

And what then? What’s this?

Already a world where nothing grows right, and now a world where nothing dies?

More, you beg, more! Son, tear me from the earth like a trunk! Husk me like the corn! Scatter me into seed again, plant me in the earth, let grow what grows! Feed your mother my share, or else plant her too—

And then your bored son dropping you unfinished to the dirt, then you watching as he bounds away, his big idiot-happy body receding, leaving you broken in the fields, screaming hoarsely for morning, for the sharp edge of the approaching plow.

Svara, Sveta, Sylvana

See now our subterranean daughters, our dark-eyed beauties so impossible to keep in their wicker cribs, to keep inside our rude-made gravedigger’s hut, perched at the rent edge of this barren plot.

See them squirm free of their cribs, their new and segmented bodies falling to the packed-dirt floor, down and out of this home I built for them and their mother.

See me with shovel and mattock, tearing up the flooring, uncovering tunnels, chambers, new and deeper rooms.

See them tangled in each other’s sleeping bodies, keeping each other warm in the dampness of the earth, their spade-thumbs sucked and suckled in the absence of us, their parents.

See what watch I keep, what eyes I fix on their cribs, but see also how it is never enough, how all day there are piles of the plagued to heap into graves, and then all night there is their sick mother, bedridden, her vulgar pains leaving her no chance of sleep.

See me feed their mother through her stomach tube. See me soak her sore skin. See her tears at the rub of the sponge, the touch of the soap.

See our daughters taking advantage of my absence to again escape the confines of their cribs.

See me waking to their three tiny gowns beside three tiny holes, three petite piles of spent dirt, then to their wailing mother in the next room.

See me digging up the floor to find their burrows empty.

See me on my knees, reaching into the dirt, feeling their new passages, exit vectors from the confines of our home, our yard: Three tunnels for three baby girls, each in a direction of its own.

See my wife, their mother, my fading light. See me cutting her screaming hair while she cries for her children to return.

See also what I do not do: See me not covering the burrows, not filling in the caved pit of our kitchen floor, the room where I fed our daughters porridge after prying free the grubs and beetles they held stubborn in their hands and mouths.

See the day my wife loses her last voice, the day she sends me from the room with weak flurries of spotted hands, because if she cannot have her daughters she does not want me instead.

See how I crawl down into the dirt, into the sunken ruins of our home. See me whisper into the center of the earth, see me beg them to come back, to visit their mother once more before she is gone.

See the day they emerge together, clothed only in grave-dirt.

See how they’ve grown, how their toddling days have ended, how some new age is upon them.

See next their fists clenched around ginger and burdock, around echinacea, around liquorice and marshmallow.

See me gather them up onto my chest. See me carry all three at once in my arms. See me take them into our bedchamber, their hands stuffed with the medicine they traveled so far to find.

See until you cannot see anymore.

Listen: Their first words in turn, three broken intonations of cure and mother and save her, save her. What stories they tell then, of places they have gone, of the things they have seen! What hard hurt of my heart follows, what ungrantable wish shaping this trembling flesh, this poor gravedigger again made quaking father!

Listen: The sound of herbs hitting the floor is a whisper, then a word. Roots collapse, tubers tumble, and what sentence can follow? What good noise can I make for my daughters then, clinging reluctant to my body, this earth they no longer love?

Travis, Travon, Tremaine

When we are sure the hospital is empty, only then do we leave the youngest to hold the mother’s hand, to stroke the clammy baldness of her head while the rest of us search and scavenge, bulge backpacks to bursting with clean gauze, ample medicines, new needles for her drips and fresh inserts for her catheters, everything else we will need for her care.

For ourselves, we take just what last food remains in the commissary, what few blankets we cannot go without.

We take as little as possible, because their mother is already so much to carry.

At the top of the spiral stairs we collapse her gurney, fold its wheels beneath its chassis, and then we lift, each as much as he can: Myself at the bottom, walking the heavy end backward into the decline, and then my small sons at the head of the bed, doing the best their little bodies can do.

At each landing, I bark orders, beg my boys to lift, lift higher, over the railing and around the corner, and then again we descend, again we dive through the deep toward the new dark below.

For twenty floors, we do this. We do this for two hundred vertical feet, and then we are in the lobby, then across the paper-strewn reception, then through the handprint-smeared glass doors and out onto the street.

What destruction greets us, surrounds us, hangs above us: The high-rises swaying in their foundations. The towers towering. The diseased dead crashed everywhere, up and over and around all the abandoned cars and trucks, the overturned carts and stalls.

And then the sky spitting black rain, and then my boys each opening their umbrellas, crowding in close to keep their sick mother dry.

I drag their mother. I drag their mother’s gurney. I drag the gurney flat like a sledge, with their mother atop it, with the boys and their umbrellas huddled close because the rain never stops.

At every rest, we do what the doctors once did, what they taught us to do before they fled: My boys know the names of their mother’s medicines, have learned every sequenced step involved in her care. Beneath their umbrellas they change her dressings, inject appropriate doses into her ports, pour cans of gray formula into her feeding tube until her belly bloats, until her waste-bag is ready for the emptying.

One after the other, they pump her legs to keep the muscles straight, flex her arms to do the same, because still they believe she might one day need them, because on our long walk I tell the boys that when I am gone she might once again carry them, as we have carried her so far.

We make weeks of slow progress across the city, until one morning I wake up fevered, the sound of my new cough enough to set my youngest to bawling, to clutching at my pant leg. By the next morning, my muscles have already begun to tighten, as the boy’s mother complained hers did, back when no doctor knew what these signs portended.

I look around at my three boys, my exhausted sons arrayed, each smaller than the next, each spaced too far apart to fill another’s shoes, let alone mine, and then I do the only thing I can: I take my oldest son aside, and I tell him that I will go on alone, that alone I will enter the rumble and ramble to prepare the way for their passage.

Through my hacking cough, I tell him that I love him, and that I love his brothers, and that he is the one who must watch over the others from now on.

Don’t go, he says. We need you yet.

No, I say. He has his mother, still alive, still sleeping. He has his brothers.

He has enough, I tell him. What he has, it will have to be enough.

And then he is the man of the family, and then I tell him so: Two separate events, happening so close together that I can barely separate them afterward, when I am crawling alone through streets of panic-crushed cars, disease-fat corpses, caught up in the tight spaces the mother-laden gurney would never have fit, no matter how hard I tugged.

And then the sins of the spirit, punished upon the flesh; until I cannot move, until my muscles clutch into paralysis.

How much later is it when I hear their voices following, coming behind me through the dark, shouting my name, my title, reminders of my renounced fatherhood?

And then their little hands lifting me onto the empty gurney.

And then their ignoring me when I ask or try to ask, Where is your mother?

In silence the younger two move my joints, bend my elbows and shoulders and knees to busy me while the oldest wipes clean a used needle on his stained trousers, then seeks its entrance to my veins. As they prepare me for transit, all I see are their determined faces, foreheads bent with their decision to trade one near-dead parent for the other—and also the mistake they have made, leaving behind the only person they were ever tasked with caring for, all so that they might preserve what’s left of me, this shell of an undeserving father, who tried so hard to abandon them first.

Ulmer, Ulric, Ursa

I wait until the winter moon peeks from behind its shadow and then I call to the harrow-hunt this pack, these sons and cousins and half-brothers and grandsons, all these evolutions of my own beast-headed form, an overlapping of altered progenies, some mimicking my own shape and some their mothers’, so that we are become a family united by blood but not body, our forms as far-ranging as our hunting grounds, as the sprawl of forest we’ve claimed for ourselves, where despite our differing shapes we live together by the same rules:

That each kill we make is shared among the pack.

That each wound incurred in the hunt is licked clean by a brother.

That after we hunt we eat. And after we eat we howl. And after we howl we run.

The moon waxes wider each night, and soon there is little time to pause, no matter how empty our bellies or how tired our legs. In single-file, we cross forest floor and snow-clenched clearing, each pack mate putting his paws in the unshared footprints of a father or brother, until together we reach the high rock, the place of decision agreed upon a year ago, when last the forest tribes met.

What spectacle there is to see upon our arrival, what new variety of form only a year past our last meeting: What bear-bodies, what cougar-hearts, what boar-teeth, and among them all the other wolf-head packs, flush with brothers despite the endless snow, the failing prey.

When all are assembled and greeted—when we have each sniffed and nuzzled and marked each other as friends, as temporary extended family—then each father-alpha relates his tale in turn, some with words, some with beast-noise, some with both at once. We speak loudly and with great length, give speeches that consume many nights, that take the whole fullness of the moon to complete.

We speak these many words as if we have to, as if the limitations of syllables could somehow mask the truer language of our shifted bodies.

The failure of our great hunt, the one each tribe is engaged in for the good of all others, it has already been communicated by our lowered heads, our tucked tails, and so even before our speeches all our boys know what we fathers know too: It has been years since any of us have seen a human woman, and the beast-heads make no daughters.

The wives we share our dens with welcome us gladly because they too are short of number, their own males scarce even before the dwindling of the world, but they cannot give us human children, cannot keep our lines from drifting toward wildness.

They cannot, and if we complain they cry bitterly, for they do not see why our children should look only like us, why they should not also take after their mothers.

They say this, but it is not their race that is disappeared, and so our sorrow is not theirs to share. They do not mind their children who are only wolves, only cougars, only bears and boars, because what else should they desire but more of themselves, new packs made stronger by our mingled blood and seed?

When the meeting is over—when the moon enters the waning that awaits it on the other side of our words—only then do we give up one language for another, to come together as one people, one troubled nation of tribes. As one mouth we combine our voices, a cacophony rising as if to crack the earth, as if to shake the heavens, as if to loose the turning moon from her mount and bring it crashing down upon us, the only mass heavy enough to bury our giant grief.

There is this big noise, and then afterward there is my prone form, whole of body but spirit-quaked, hope-bloodied.

All around me, my wolf-children gather, licking my face and chest, pulling loose what matters they find fouled upon my fur, while beside them my beast-headed boys stroke my coat with clawed fingers, make what few words their dumb tongues can make.

All these children, these many pups, and yet gathered to me are no true sons, no sons I wanted, in their place rise only these altered generations, these boys who will not grow up to be their father, not without the mothers I wanted them to have.

And if I refuse to stand? If, like the other alphas, I demand to be left here at the meeting place, the high rock of the woods? If I tell my sons and grandsons that I have failed, that I am no longer worthy to lead their pack, what then follows my quitting them, their family?

Then the song of farewell. Then the song of forgiveness. Then the song of funeral.

Then the song of their teeth upon my throat, upon my haunch and perineum and tendons, the soft spots of the easy kill.

Then in my mind only the face of my own father, the last human visage I saw, which I never again brought forth upon this wilding world, despite all my efforts to prevent his line’s extinction, despite all my attempts to raise these lost boys in his image.

Virgil, Virotte, Vitalis

Starting from the middle of the country, we follow the rumors, the talk that there are no more women, no more mothers or daughters, none remaining to bear our future forth except those afloat beyond the last lands of the west, collected aboard a ship, some tanker meant to carry them away, to keep them safe.

What I know, despite those rumors: There are no women left, except the one beside me, this daughter disguised as a son, who I must somehow see aboard that ship.

On our way west, I cull her hair every few days, steal her layers of clothing from abandoned storefronts, thick shirts and thermal underwear and patterned button-ups distracting enough so that what lies beneath might be harder to see, to suss out and desire. As we walk, I tell her that once this sandy stretch of waste was a plain state, was all fields of waving wheat and corn. Mile after mile, I offer her some bit of this world I’ve known, some memory of what once lay on either side of the wide freeways littered with abandoned cars. For a thousand foot-sore miles I do this, not running out of stories until we cross the last state line, the last desert. Until we enter the last city, perched at the far end of the earth, where we climb down to the shore, our descent cut with broken roads providing unsure passage, switchbacking to the crowded docks leading out above the tossing water.

And there in the distance: The tanker we’d hoped to catch, too quickly departed, left without my daughter.

What choice do we have? No other option but to go out onto the docks anyway, to push through this great crowd of men, only and always men, all armed, all fat with fury, all crowding the shore or else wading out into the oil-black of the water, its brackish thickness, their voices begging, cajoling, demanding the ship to turn back, to return to them these last few mothers and daughters, these final receptacles for the making of legacy, a continuation of our failure.

We push through, my daughter’s hand in my hand, in the one not clutched around my revolver, my own six chances to clear the way. I pull my daughter close, wrap her tight in the leather of my duster, and in the distance the tanker taunts us with its purpose, its promise to stay afloat until all us men are gone, until at least the worst of us have passed, leaving the world for those more deserving of its inheritance—

And then my daughter saying, Look.

Then her eyes peeking out from the blanket of my coat, her hand pointing over the water, and her saying, Look, Daddy.

There, Daddy. There.

How few they are: All the good women of the world. All gathered except for my daughter, who should be among their number.

How few, and how far, but perhaps still close enough.

I nod, open my duster, tell her to get ready.

I tell her, When I start shooting, you run for the end of the dock, and no matter what you keep running.

I tell her, You swim as fast as you can, and pray they rescue you.

She sobs once as I raise the heavy hammer of my revolver, but there is no time for goodbye, and no other word I wish to say that our thousand shared miles did not already allow. I push her out of my duster, follow her into the space my bullets tear free of the men blocking her way, and with each shot I get her one falling body closer to the end of the dock, our escape hung out over the water.

And then my hand scrabbling fresh shells from my pocket, then my hand reloading, then six more shots making six holes in six men, making ten feet of running-space.

And then my daughter, covered in the blood of those who would want only what she is, never who, men waiting to mar her, to tear her away, to hold back her body they desire.

And then reload and fire, reload and fire, and then we run until there are no more men ahead, until we tumble off the edge of the dock, fall far into the cold waves, where the ocean fills my mouth and nostrils, drenches my heavy clothes so tight I can barely kick to get my head above the surface, to suck again the sickened air.

What I know: My daughter is no longer nearby, no longer close at hand, but surely she can’t be lost.

As I am dragged ashore by the kin of the men I have struck down, as they beat the angry stocks of their rifles against my face and chest, as they take from me what satisfaction they could not take from my daughter, then I tell myself that I know she swims on unmolested, that without us men to hold her back she kicks by the buoys that mark the end of this world’s dominion, makes what powerful strokes she needs to take her out past the breakwater, toward the waiting tanker and then into the future, that far flatness beyond.

Walker, Wallace, Warren

Now to make a memorial, a memory meant to outlast those recently gone from my head, lost through the holes eaten by this new wind blowing across my farm, bleached blank by the cloudy water that climbs thick and sluggish from my well. In goggles and duster, I gather my tools, go out of the house and into the ashy remains of the yard, this family orchard once lush and full of apples.

And all around me: Only stilled wood, dead branches over dirty ground. Only this lonely world grown atop my buried children, my planted wife.

With awl and adze, with hammer and chisel, I carve my oldest out of the first tree. I remake him as best I remember, shaping the roundness of his cheeks, grooving out the spaces between his teeth and toes.

When I am done, I fill my ears with my fingers to hold in the sound of his voice, the last words he said to me before we lost him, still too close to the surface of my thoughts. I clench my eyes so his image might not get diffused by the weak sunlight poking through my goggles, a dimness forever threatening to steal him from behind my lids.

Across the orchard, it takes weeks to rough in his sister and his sister and his brother and his brother. Upon a lightning-split husk, I stencil the twins that followed, then whittle out the other babies impossible to call boys or girls, their flesh too bent and broken upon their bones to name.

Our last child, the one birthed runny as yolk, I do not carve it at all. I haven’t the talent to make its nothing form out of wood, haven’t the strength to try.

On the first day of fall, I cut my wife’s body free of the centermost trunk, using my tools to recreate the inverted ribs of her diseased chest, the long-ago smoothness of her oft-emptied belly. With every skill I’ve learned, I remember her upon the wood: Her eyes exactly the proper shape and size, exactly the right tilt to complement the laughing smile last heard too long ago. Her nose alone I work on for days, slicing curl after curl off the bridge until it is the same nose whose tip I kissed goodbye every night, even at the end, when there was so little of it left. I spend a week curving bark into hair, and then a month recreating her favorite blouse, the many folds of its matching skirt, both worn the sun-drenched day we were wed.

And then believing myself done, every cut and carved son as partially complete as he was in life, every doomed daughter dancing in wood around the figure of my long-missed wife.

And then waking to forgetting her name. And then forgetting all their names. And then wishing I had carved those syllables into the trees, so I might know which child is which.

And then telling myself it doesn’t matter, that their names are not important.

It was not their names I loved. It is not their names I miss.

Another weird wind blows, and then it is winter. And then there is me, no longer remembering any day when it was not winter. And still this project, seemingly unfinished: Always some new detail for me to add, some torso to reshape or dimple to correct. Some finger needing a nail, some foot needing the rest of its toes—because surely a child would have ten toes, ten fingers?

Surely every child would have hair and eyes and ears and a nose?

Surely no child could be as incomplete as these?

And then one day berating myself for the lack of skill that left them ugly and warped, rent and ruined.

And then who are these people.

And then who am I to them, these ten perfect children made of trees, this one woman grown out of the applewood to raise them.

And so sad she is. So alone. And how I wish I could join her. And how I wish I could be the father and she the mother and all these our children, so that none of us would be lonely again.

And how sure I am that whoever made them is not the good one who made me, because who would be so cruel as to keep us apart, with this unbearable distance between wood and flesh, this unchangeable differential of atoms.

All winter long I brush the snow from off their faces, so that I might study each one in turn, so that I might practice falling in love with them, as some father must have done, so long ago.

When the snow finally melts, see then this improbable thing I find, sprung forth from the palm of some unrecognizable child: Some new leaf, some green branchlet blooming.

See now how I hold it in my fingers. And how I let it lay its buds across my palm. And how every day I think again I might pluck its growth free of the trunk, so that its fresh promise might tease me no more.

Xarles, Xavier, Xenos

And all around me, only disappointment: Only my house, slowly sinking into the ever-muddying earth. Only my horses and my one remaining milk-cow, lying together upon their sides, moaning in the swamp of our fields. Only my crops, the husk-barren corn plants unable to grow past my kneecaps.

Only my son, with his gray skin and strange skull, his cleft-lisped voice, his useless hands making the arts and crafts his mother taught him, as all around our world shifts less solid, less able to keep us above its porous skin.

While I spend my days adding hopeful supports to our house, burying beams in search of denser ground, this son—this boy I no longer wish to claim—he makes portraits of his mother with the cheap watercolors we bought him as a child. He paints her eyes wrong, colors her hair black instead of blonde, and so every night I take away his papers and throw them into the puddle of our yard.

Every night, I tell him, Again you didn’t paint her right.

I say, Nothing better to do all day, and still you can’t remember your mother’s face.

I say, All our house surrounded by this new swamp, this mad earth that swallowed our neighbors, that sucked deep your mother, when you would not set down your dolls to save her—

This world has taken everything from me, and still there is my boy, sitting here doing nothing, while I have to farm, to herd, to build the struts and floats keeping our house atop this shivering earth.

I say, What good use is a son, if he is a son like you?

Oh, and the hurt in his eyes! So unfair he thinks me, so cruel! Perhaps so, but in no less measure than he deserves, when even after this speech he only puts away his paints to pick up his clay, ready to begin another set of misshapen family figurines, another pairing of plump mothers and dwarfed crack-chested fathers.

What tears when I smash them with my fist, when I crush their bodies upon our food-bare table!

What good tears, so that he might get them out, so that without them he might become the man I want him to be!

For another week, I come in from the fields each night to pull down his construction paper mobiles, to crumble his finger-paintings, his collages cut from our family photo albums.

For another week, I indulge his teenage wastefulness, and then I say, No more.

Then I say, Follow me.

With my rifle in my hands, I say this.

On our porch—warped atop this land of mud-paths and quick-muck—I put my hand on his shoulder.

I put my hand on his shoulder, and then I take it off.

I say, I have decided I would rather have no son than have you.

I say, I will give you a fifty-yard head start, and then I will shoot just once.

If you aren’t killed, then good luck to you.

My sensitive son, always he cries! So unfair, he says. So wrong to do this to my own child, no matter what our differences, sending him out into a world unstable and wet, where who knows which paths might lead to safety, and which to sinking death.

I say, You don’t know, but I do. I know which paths, because I have tread them every day, growing what crops might grow, caring for what horse and cow might scrape through even now.

You have done none of these things, even when asked, even when I wished to teach you to be the man that I am, and so you know nothing of the world outside our walls, outside the confines of your stupid and strange head.

I say, I have never liked you. Not when you were a baby, and not now, when you are less than a man.

I say, I do not know I want to kill you, but I suppose I want a chance. Just to see how this thing might feel, that I have daydreamed for so long.

And then I kick him off the porch, and then I tell him to run.

I wait until he reaches the sycamore slanted at the far border of my yard, slanted as crooked as his limping run, his trunk pulled this way and that by his heavy head, and then I raise the rifle.

I pull the trigger, squeeze its weight made glorious, and then for an instant I am no longer disappointed, despite all this awful world: The short blaze of a muzzle flash, the uncertain flight of a bullet, the razor-edge of chance between one bad outcome and another, worse.

Yaretzi, Yasmina, Yatima

From between my wife’s legs quickened only this puff of womb-air, this gasp of baby-breath trapped for months inside her, followed by no body, no afterbirth, no cord to cut or miscarriage to scrape away. Afterward, my wife insisted she heard the sound of our baby girl crying, but what was I to say in the absence of that child’s shape? How was I to call her anything other than mad, when my wife insisted our baby was near, that she could hear her every move?

If only my wife had lasted longer! If only she could have made it through the too many years of try, try again, through the eventual barrenness that followed all those pregnancies producing only air, only wet sound, then together we might have enjoyed what I first heard only in the weeks and months after her passing: A voice, tinkling from beside my bed, from near my right ear, whenever I sat in the rocking chair bought to rock the many daughters I did not believe had lived.

And what words this daughter-voice says! What new machines she gives to me, filling this old tinker’s mind with complex combinations of horns and needles, with great spoolings of copper wire meant to circle the spindle of our house, reaching higher and higher—

It takes time to build what she first tells me to build, but with the closing of the factories I have nothing but time.

With the departure of every neighbor for miles around, it’s just me and the daughter-voice, together day after day, conversing in whispers while I rig new antennas atop the roof of our house, welding them from the left-behinds of those fled for more hopeful havens.

When she tells me the house isn’t tall enough to reach the signal she’s promised, then I take her advice and abandon the low roof, begin my first true tower in the rock-stubbed field behind our home.

When the tower is finished, the daughter-voice says, Close, but not quite.

She says, Try again, Pa, try again.

And then erecting a second tower taller than the first.

And then a third taller than the second. And then a fourth and a fifth.

Then a whole array of towers, of scavenged wood and steel hung up toward the heavens, an entire village rubbled so I might build the monoliths the daughter-voice commands.

By the time there are a dozen towers dotting the field, it already takes a whole day to climb the tallest, to wrap bundles of wire around some new hanging dongle, some better apparatus designed with her help.

By the time there are a score of towers, my back is stooped, my fingers arthritic. The daughter-voice is older too, her speech husky like mine.

You take after me, I tell her.

Upon the scaffolding of my newest height, I say, Your mother’s voice was softer, sweeter.

With my wet face freezing in the high wind, I say, She never once raised her tone in anger. Not even when I didn’t believe you were real, when she was the only one who could hear you speak.

And the daughter-voice says, Build.

She says, Build so that you might climb, then climb so you might speak to her again.

She says, All the world below is death, but above it other lands still float.

By twenty stories there are no buildings below to go home to, everything scavenged for tower after tower, and so I build bunks in the sky. When the earth below is so wasted nothing will grow, then at twenty-five stories I plant a garden, lifting the last good sod with rope and pulley, hauling questionable seeds up ladders in satchels and packs.

At thirty stories I realize I’m going blind.

At forty, I lose control of my bowels for the first time.

At sixty, I fall deaf in my right ear, and when I scream I hear only half the fear I feel.

When the daughter-voice returns, I refuse to build another inch until she reassures me, and so she tells me to sit still, to put my good ear to the final horn I installed, to listen for what I can.

At last! At last I think I’m going to hear my wife, but no, I do not.

What I hear are several voices just like hers.

Voices as similar to my wife’s as the daughter-voice is to mine.

Other daughters, born of other pregnancies, other once-thought failures now flying at this height, this six-hundredth foot of upstretched steel. All these voices raised without me because I could not see them, could not touch them, because without sight and without touch I would not believe they were real.

How sad they must have been as they each drifted upward, floating frightened in the drafts until they caught here in the first rung of clouds, with all the rest of their sisters.

My daughter-voice says, Pa, you have to build. She says, You’re so old now.She says, I’m so old now too.

Please, she says. How long before your other ear goes? Then what good are these towers? What good is it to reach mother’s voice, still shrieking in the heights, and you with no ear to hear her?

Build, my daughter says, and for the rest of my life I build and I climb and at each new story I strain to hear the first voice I ever loved, the only one I still wish added to the crowded air around me, the dozen daughters singing static from every earpiece and speaker and receiver and crank-powered radio installed along the way.

Their voices lift me, and upon them I climb until below me are only clouds, and below them some lost world I need never see again, because what I want most is already up here with me, or else waiting above. I climb until all I am is wind-carved wrinkles, sun-bleached whiskers, until my hands are crippled by the hammer and the saw and the wire-snips, by the frost that dusts my knuckles every morning.

I climb until my eyes are as empty and useless as the clouds, and always my first daughter teases me with her mother, keeps me chasing my wife, this sky-flung memory she promises still floats.

Higher, the daughter-voice says, her voice crone-rasped, cough-hacked.

Higher, until the sun burns you free of your weak meat. Until you are nothing but voice too. Until you are the same as we, the last loves you have left.

A life is not too much to give, my daughter says.

After how you tortured our mother, a life is hardly anything at all.

Zachary, Zahir, Zedekiah

And then the last crib combusting. And then the wallpaper smoking and the carpets melting. And then the hallways coursing fire room to room, the master bedroom, the master bath. And then the whole house engulfed. And then the timbers splintering, shattering, crashing against the foundations. And then the chimney crumbling. And then the roof-tar slopping across the yard. And then the yard catching. And then the fence, the long-dry grass beyond. And then this great conflagration burning bright, hungry for wood and plain and village. And then all these recently emerged landscapes, ruined first with failure and now with flame. And then the cities blazing. And then the skyscrapers swaying unsteady upon their supports. And then the bridges tipping into their rivers, the overpasses falling onto overpasses. And then whole cities buckling into the dirt. And then the collapse of everything between making sudden highways to nowhere. And then the satellites all falling voiceless and empty from the sky. And then the rain. And then the hail. And then the sleet. And then this pyre taking unmarked decades to smolder out.

And then ashes to ashes. And then maggots in the ash.

And then for a time no more centuries, no more millennia.

And then for a time no more time.

And then only ages: The age of bones. The age of worms. The age of flies. The age of locusts. The age of devouring. The age of dust. The age of sand. The age of flooding. The age of earthquakes and eruptions. The age of erosion and landslides. The age of mud. The age of clouds. The age of oceans swelling. The age of waterspouts and tornados. The age of snow and ice. The age of glaciers. The age of avalanches. The age of melting. The age of new stone, new clay, new soil.

And then at last, at last, the age of seeds.

And then. And then. And then.

And then every morning, some new and constant sun, born upon the horizon.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the editors and staff of the following publications, where portions of Cataclysm Baby previously appeared: Alice Blue, American Short Fiction, Annalemma, Anthills, Artvoice, Everyday Genius, FANZINE, Gargoyle, Guernica, JMWW, > kill author, Knee-Jerk, The Literary Review, Ninth Letter, Poor Claudia, Puerto del Sol, The Reprint, Sleepingfish, TripleQuick Fiction, Wigleaf, and Wrong Tree Review.

Thanks to David McLendon for serving as the first editor of Cataclysm Baby, and for his invaluable friendship throughout the writing of it; to Dan Wickett, Steven Gillis, Brad Green, Sean Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Ellen, Wendell Mayo, Lawrence Coates, Michael Czyzniejewski, and all my colleagues at Bowling Green State University for being early readers of the manuscript that became this book.

“Walker, Wallace, Warren” owes a debt to “Applewood Figure,” kept in the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore—and to Michael Kimball and Tita Chico, for making sure I saw it.

“Xarles, Xavier, Xenos” owes a similar debt of inspiration to Mike McCormack’s “The Terms,” which it wouldn’t exist without.

Most importantly, thanks always to my wife Jessica, whose love and support enables every word.

About the Author

Matt Bell is also the author of How They Were Found, a collection of fiction. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and Willow Springs, and has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and Best American Fantasy, as well as shortlisted for Best American Short Stories. He can be contacted at www.mdbell.com.

The Mud Luscious Press Novel(la) Series:

WE TAKE ME APART

MOLLY GAUDRY

AN ISLAND OF FIFTY

BEN BROOKS

WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS

SASHA FLETCHER

GRIM TALES

NORMAN LOCK

THE HIEROGLYPHICS

MICHAEL STEWART

I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR

MATHIAS SVALINA

THE OREGON TRAIL IS THE OREGON TRAIL

GREGORY SHERL

CATACLYSM BABY

MATT BELL

DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL

KEN SPARLING

THE ALLIGATORS OF ABRAHAM

ROBERT KLOSS

www.mudlusciouspress.com

Praise for Cataclysm Baby

“In extraordinary language, with deep feeling, Matt Bell has crafted a baby name book for the apocalypse, a gorgeous, brilliant, often darkly hilarious and always moving novella. Written with an ingenuity and joy that call to mind Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, each chapter is a treasure: Here are beast of burden children, larval girls, subterranean daughters and choirs of sirens, combustible baby boys. I loved this book and want to recommend it to every human parent and child I know; if trees, rocks, and stars were literate, I would recommend it to them, too. "Where do babies come from?" children ask their parents, and Cataclysm Baby has an alphabet of answers as beautiful and mysterious as that ancient question, while always posing its haunting corollary: ‘Where do they go?’”

—Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“You can read Matt Bell’s apocalyptic abecedarium as a grotesque allegory of the devastations of parenthood, or as a grim realist extrapolation evoked by our crumbling world order. But these lovely, harrowing pieces do not float off into the Ideasphere; they remain tethered to the dusty, arid earth by their palpable nouns: baby, hair, teeth, womb, seed, porridge, hut, crib, bone, mouth, hatchet, shovel, flesh. Like The Red Cavalry Stories or The Age of Wire and String, Cataclysm Baby is both surreal and vividly concrete, as much a Feeling Experiment as a Thought Experiment. The trope of end time is always about revelation, and what is revealed here, among other things, is Bell’s brutal compassion.”

—Chris Bachelder, Abbott Awaits

“The baby born as fur ball, the one who chews up its sibling in the womb, the amputated limbs, the child sacrifices, the girl untethered into the sky, the skewed biblical cadences and the mythic tropes, the continuous horror begot by parenthood and authority—Matt Bell’s collection of condensed narraticules, Cataclysm Baby, is Avant-Gothic at its most remarkable, unsettling, potent.”

—Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets

“Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.”

—Lucy Corin, The Entire Predicament

Praise for How They Were Found

“Matt Bell has built a national reputation on his own terms, completely outside the support system of New York publishing, on the strength of his stories and novellas, which are wholly original and singularly his own. He is that rare sort of writer whose work the reader would recognize even if it were published anonymously. It is formally daring, high-stakes, languaged-up stuff.”

—Kyle Minor, HTMLGiant

“With How They Were Found, Bell joins the company of the great fabulists like Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, or closer to home, the American masters, Steven Millhauser, John Crowley, and Thomas Pynchon. These tales are mysterious, recondite without being just intellectual exercises, extravagant and fanciful, and ultimately winning. And [his] control of his material is imposing and his spectrum often dazzling.”

—Corey Mesler, American Book Review

“Body toll notwithstanding, How They Were Found is anything but bleak. For one thing, there’s the prose: generous, urgent, rhythmic… his rhetorical repetitions echoing the events and obsessions on the page.”

—Reese Okyong Kwon, The Believer

“Bell doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of his character’s lives. Unlike many writers, he isn’t afraid to reveal their true natures… His fiction is honest and raw, frightening and powerful. His writing is lovely and moving—a perfect pairing for the grisly moments his protagonists face.”

—Jennifer Taylor, Bookslut

“In narratives that feel almost uncomfortably honest, Bell exposes unusual acts of desperation, uncovering raw, new representations of heartache and hunger… No less original or thought-provoking than contemporary fabulist stalwarts like Aimee Bender or Etgar Keret, [he] expands the scope of experimental writing.”

—V. Jo Hsu, Fiction Writers Review

“His wild manipulation of form and genre makes the bulk of contemporary fiction feel bloodless and inert in comparison, but it is Bell’s recurring arrival at something sturdy and true about human behavior that makes the stories… so rewarding and resonant.”

—Matthew Derby, Super Flat Times: Stories

“Bell, here, at the start of his career, displays the kind of intelligence, self-awareness, and care with regard to his prose that suggests he may become a major talent.”

—Jeff Vandermeer, Omnivoracious

Copyright

Copyright 2012.

Cover design by Joshua Hagler.

Prepress & typesetting by David McNamara.

Distributed by Small Press Distribution.

Print ISBN 978-0-9830263-7-2.

LCCN 2011939805.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-6175068-2-6.

For further information: info@mudlusciouspress.com.

Content

CATACLYSM BABY
By Matt Bell

Abelard, Abraham, Absalom

Beatrice, Bella, Blaise

Cain, Caleb, Cameron

Domina, Doreen, Dorma

Edgar, Edric, Eduardo

Fawn, Fiona, Fjola

Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo

Hali, Halle, Hamako

Isaac, Isaiah, Ishmael

Justina, Justine, Justise

Kidd, Kier, Kimball

Lakin, Lamia, Lakshmi

Meshach, Meshach, Meshach

Nessa, Neve, Nevina

Oneida, Ophelia, Ornella

Prescott, Presley, Preston

Quella, Querida, Quintessa

Rohan, Rohit, Roho

Svara, Sveta, Sylvana

Travis, Travon, Tremaine

Ulmer, Ulric, Ursa

Virgil, Virotte, Vitalis

Walker, Wallace, Warren

Xarles, Xavier, Xenos

Yaretzi, Yasmina, Yatima

Zachary, Zahir, Zedekiah

Acknowledgments

About the Author

The Mud Luscious Press Novel(la) Series:

Praise for Cataclysm Baby

Praise for How They Were Found

Copyright