My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (18 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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There is the great arched door. It is locked, of course, but she has been given a chicken bone to use as a key. She carefully unfolds the stained napkin. There is nothing inside!
Now six robbers enter the art gallery. You can tell they are robbers because they wear black masks and black capes. They are small robbers—children, or dwarves. Each is exactly the same as all the others, except the sixth. There’s something bulky and white sticking out from under his cape where his left arm should be, almost sweeping the ground. Something soft and white.
They do not bother with the wallets, rings, watches, and cell phones that the guests have already thrown down in anticipation of their demands, but move straight to the wall and take down the little shirts, as calmly as people getting dressed in the morning. There is one shirt each. Naturally, the robber with the white thing under his cape—okay, it’s a wing—chooses the shirt with no left sleeve. He goes to it straightaway, as if he knew it would be there. Probably he did, probably he had cased the joint. He frees the defective shirt from its fiddly hook and falls in behind the others, who are already filing out through the door. The performance artist jerks after them, is stayed by a hand on her arm, her dealer’s. Something confusing is happening outside, a sweeping and whirling—capes and shirts and feathers. A honking call sounds. The performance artist rises to her toes. Her feather boa stirs in the breeze from the closing door.
VARIATIONS
The performance artist picks up a shirt and puts it on. She spreads her wings and falls into the sky.
 
The performance artist picks up a knife and cuts off her baby finger. She inserts it into the glass lock, which clicks smoothly open. Inside are her three children and her six brothers, waiting with open arms, with spread wings, with eleven arms and one wing.
 
The performance artist picks up a pen. (It bites her.)
 
The performance artist picks up a ball of yarn.
 
The performance artist picks up a phone and buys a ticket to Florida.
SLEEPING AND FLYING
A man sleeps, one arm flung over his lover’s chest. In the dark air over the bed, his wing beats; he is dreaming, of course, of flying. But his other arm holds on tight.
Elsewhere, a woman’s hands silvered with scar tissue flutter, too. She is also dreaming of flying. No, she is dreaming
and
flying, reclining in a window seat, her crooked, scarred, shining hands folded in her lap.
YET ANOTHER SHIRT
“I was never very craft-y,” says the woman with silver hands. “For two obvious reasons. But does it have to be feathers or nettles, nettles or feathers? Couldn’t you do something with the yarn?”
READING AND FLYING
A girl is sitting in a room. The sun is slanting in the window, warming her knee, lighting up the book she holds open.
You are reading while walking, she reads. You can’t see your feet. The spread pages glide over the sidewalk, mottled by leaf-shadow, by moonlight and streetlight. Over continents of shadow, continents of light. The book is a bird with white wings.
You
are a bird. Reading, you can fly. You are flying now.
I read hundreds of fairy tales when I was a kid, studied them as if they contained information I would eventually need to use, so I ran into many different versions of the story the Grimms called “The Six Swans.” My experience of the story thus included the confused sense—which my own version attempts to capture—of a compulsive repetition with variation. All the versions agreed, though, that the girl didn’t quite finish the last sleeve of the last shirt, so that her youngest brother kept his wing on that side. That wing marred the happy ending in a way that felt truthful to me—a lasting reminder of her ordeal, and his. It was also surely a suggestion that the desire to fly was only ever dressed up in human clothes. That was the part left out of her story, I always thought: how she must have envied her brothers’ animal freedom even as she worked to save them from it.
—SJ
JOYELLE MCSWEENEY
The Warm Mouth
WARM MOUTH: CHINSCRAPER, WHY ARE YOU LYING THERE IN THE road with your jaw shoved back through your brain and your guts blown out as if you’d tried to swallow the highway?
CHINSCRAPER: Warm Mouth, I used to make my way along the median strips and trashy shoulders, my head in the vinyl noose of a six-pack, pop tabs gilding my teeth. I could steal the grease off a Taco John bag. Styrofoam was my bread. Oh, how far that good life seems from me now, laid out in this attitude of supplication, my head smashed in by a speeding Jeep!
WARM MOUTH: Truly I feel for you, Chinscraper, for I am also alone this night. Climb into my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.
 
WARM MOUTH: Kneescraper, why do you sit so still on that swollen chair which seems to breathe and groan all around you as if to swallow your small self?
KNEESCRAPER: It’s not a chair, it’s my grandmother’s body. Don’t worry, she’s not dead, just sleeping, and below her is the wheelchair, but you can’t see it for her girth. Maybe you’ve seen us neck deep in traffic or working our way across intersections like a fucked-up beetle, an evolutionary no-go, me in her lap and the motor straining to scoot us through the exhaust fumes with our groceries swinging from the arms: two-liters, Sno Balls, turkey jerky. She told me not to leave her but the night is so interesting with train tracks crisscrossing it like a game board and gilt-bellied delivery trucks slithering up to the gas stations. It’s so hard to keep my promise!
WARM MOUTH: Kneescraper, I too am curious about this night and so is my friend Chinscraper. Climb up in my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.
 
WARM MOUTH: Bentneck, why are you lying between the bed and the wall, stuffed into a few inches narrower than a grave, when the whole night spreads out dazzlingly beyond the Wooden Indian?
BENTNECK: Do I look pretty? It’s hard to speak twisted up like this. My mother brings me here to meet men. They like me in my princess nightie and sometimes I do a few ballet steps from my Barbie DVD. Afterward I get a treat—a Slurpee, and I can choose the color. I hardly ever drink it all before I fall asleep. Everything is not always very nice for me but eventually it is over. Tonight was different, though at first it was the same. And now I’m shoved down between the bed and the wall with all these carpet fibers up my nose and something wet on my head and my hair’s not very clean.
WARM MOUTH: Bentneck, we are also dirty, smashed up, bored, curious, and thirsty. Get up from under that bed, bad girl. Climb up into my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.
BENTNECK: From now on, I will be called Beauty, for I will narrate this tale. That night, the Warm Mouth conducted similar interviews with a shot-up dog, the suppurating shinbone of a horse, and a blue egg impaled on a stick. All climbed up into the Warm Mouth until its lower lip ballooned like a bullfrog’s and it grew harder and harder to move around. The stinking troupe tried to make camp on the walkway outside the public library, but hinges and bolts, bottle glass, and the plastic remains of a cheap pair of sunglasses littered the ground, irritating the Warm Mouth’s skin and threatening to pierce its distended lip.
 
WARM MOUTH: Ow!
CHINSCRAPER: Ow!
KNEESCRAPER: Owl!
BENTNECK: Wowl!
DOG: Bowel Wowel!
WOUND: Yowl!
EGG: Buy a vowel! BENTNECK: Ach, nothing’s free! Life’s a peep show, not a look-see!
 
BENTNECK: So they continued on. They came upon a shipwrecked motel in which people were sleeping behind blinds pinched or rifled or skewed in a pointed, irregular semaphore.
KNEESCRAPER: What does it signal? What can it mean? This pattern in the blinds and shades. This blind pattern. And how a gunshot’s made a sunburst of the cashier’s booth.
WOUND: You can’t make a pattern without shattering a few pasterns.
DOG: But not a very large gauge. And the cashier’s long since gone away. No cash changing hands here. These people are on the squat.
EGG: You can’t make a cat without swallowing a canary. You can’t make a Gatsby without firing a few gats.
CHINSCRAPER: Tell you what. I’m as worn out as a lobby rug. I’m falling apart here. Laid out flat. You can’t make a catcall without catching a few winks.
BENTNECK: Just then they detected a spray of light behind the rightmost room. They pressed closer to the glass, nearly bursting their viscous vehicle, peered through a chink in the blinds, and found themselves looking over the shoulder of a young man who was smoking and playing a boxing game on the TV. The room was bare and worn, but the troupe still thought it would be very nice to be inside lounging on the couch playing a boxing game instead of hunched up against the wall of a motel that looked ready to sink right through the ground. That is, it would be better to sink with the motel than fall in after it.
 
ALL: Sink Hole
Whack a mole
Bitch and moan
All roll home
We need the sink
We got the hole
We got the rust
We need the blood
We got the broke
We need the mold
All roll home, all roll home
A hole that will take
What we pour down its throat
At the end of the day
When daddy’s come home
Listen honey it’s been sweet
But I got honey of my own
I’m shunting it off
From a hole in my gut
I’ve got jars of the stuff
I’ve got problems of my own
BENTNECK: But now you’ve got only me. Byoo-tee.
 
BENTNECK: They were lost in this harmony when the young man relit his pipe and then, in a single motion, jumped up and swung around. He yanked at the blinds and peered out into the street. Then he pulled the blinds down so hard that they gave way from the ceiling on the right, exposing half the room. He went out of view and came back, tugging at his lower lip and rubbing at his gum.
YOUNG MAN:
Think and think
Thunk and thunk
Trunk and glove
Land the punch
Bury the pitch
Meat on meat
Whore on whore
Slunk and strove
Strunk and White
Struck and struck out
White light from light
Flight from white flight
Trove, trove
Soul’s trove
What God through me Hove
The bad night I was born
& became a lug
-Nut in this case
Historee.
Locked up with the screws and the bolts.
BENTNECK: But now you’ve got only me. Byootee.
 
BENTNECK: At that, finally, he looked down and saw them: some roadkill, a starving boy, a murdered girl, a shot-up dog, the suppurating shinbone, and the impaled egg, all tucked up inside the Warm Mouth, which was stretched so thin it was nearly transparent, a clear fluid traced with pus seeping from one corner. They all blinked at the young man through their wounds, and their shattered and cramped limbs shifted wetly. Then they all started talking at once, making a sound like an upended graveyard or a circular blade.
(All make a sound like an upended graveyard or a circular blade.)
BENTNECK: The young man clutched at his own rubbery face and then he screamed, though it sounded more like a croak. Then he crashed out through the thin door and past them into the night, which was starting to go a little gray at the seams as if it had been washed too much.

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