Their Mother’s Body
After their mother died, her corpse laid out in the bitterweed flowers and dried cow patties on the pasture’s valley floor. The two brothers had no recourse other than to move into her, property values being what they were, with stagnant wages and rising rents. They’d lived in her love, and now that this was gone, they moved their things from the bank’s house into her body, where they’d spent arguably the best months of their lives already. The elder brother took her mouth, arranging his rock & roll posters and adult western paperbacks on the shelves of her stomach. If he ever married, he planned to knock out a wall and expand into her lungs.
The younger one took her womb. He’d always been babied, his older brother thought, so it made sense. As for egress, he spread a hole out through her belly button, for the sake of decency.
Her body was too big to move without great expense. The city passed the problem to the county, since she wasn’t in city limits. The county passed it to the Department of Transportation who passed it to sanitation who half-heartedly tried to pass it to animal control before losing the paperwork. Each of these shufflings of paperwork were prompted by some local church, who’d wake up to the enormity of the woman’s body and immediately try to foster some control of it, only to find that it had outgrown them, in death.
The body lay where it fell as winter warmed to spring, when March, singing her too-early song woke the land. Asparagus sprouted where the younger brother planted it in the soft fur below her belly, apple and peach trees among her hair. The brothers kept a milk cow and a handful of sows in the space between her knees.
When they ventured into town, the brothers were met by some glares but mostly apathy. Sometimes, women with levitating hair would mutter rudely about them. Their husbands might clench their dull-eyed fists. Young people would mostly rather pop gum, and the rest of the town was too busy trying not to remember that death made house calls than to bother with holding grudges. The brothers felt the weight of the judgmental few, though, amplified beyond their numbers, and rarely ventured into town without the other, other than to work or for supplies, and quickly retreated back to the familiarity of their homes in their mother’s body.
* * *
A List of Discoveries Made by Each Brother in Their Mother’s Body.
Older Brother:
- Their mother’s penchant for processed meats, their smells still lingering, as well as several volumes of poems she’d written and then swallowed.
- A nugget of loss, which he polished into a glowing green and used as a paperweight before finding a vein of it and realizing it wasn’t as rare as he’d thought.
- A picture of him from a school performance he didn’t recall.
- The mostly digested hearts of all the pets she’d told them had gone to live on a farm upstate.
Younger Brother:
- A field of flowers that survived where the cows couldn’t reach them, growing black on the dark blood.
- The feathery remains of an unborn brother, hollow-boned and light as good will, which he never told his older brother about for fear it might unbalance him.
- A list of lovers he’d never met.
* * *
The older brother worked at a succession of factories that followed the same pattern of operation: they’d open, invite in all the able-bodied youth, hook them to tubes for minimum wage, and then suck out their curiosity, spitting them out decrepit and complaining. Then, they’d pack up the factory and move to the next country, while the former employees all stood around the counters spiting the weather its implacability. By the time they regrew the orphaned limb of their youth, another factory rolled in and did it again, until that youth was eventually too dead to be rewatered. It was in this way that the rent was paid.
The older brother didn’t need rent, and his brother grew much of their food, but he did need new posters, 8-tracks, movie tickets, and pornography. His curiosity wasn’t something he ever missed, anyway.
* * *
Things hadn’t always been good between the brothers or their mother. When she was peckish, she’d nip at them. Ears, toes, shoulders, just a scrape of teeth, at first, progressing to slight gouges, which eventually broke the skin, to small bites. The boys learned to hide at certain times of day, halfway between meals, times of great emotion and loneliness. She always smiled and thanked them, bandaged the wounds, sealed with a kiss.
But this was more an annoyance than a test. It was her screaming, her vases bought for the sound of their smashing, her sudden cruelties that hardened them. When some part of her ripped away, she’d tear at them for bits to fill it in. They’d made an unspoken pact to share it equally.
This all wasn’t something either of them could explain to outsiders, but it was an act of love. Just because a person doesn’t have a word for the thing, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
* * *
Their mother had always been cold to the idea of marriage. When he was younger, the older brother thought of this as jealousy, before he saw the true face of that. Like the nibbling, the smashing, the tearing, it was another kind of love. His mother, he had to come to trust, knew better about the ways of betrayal, of disappointment. She understood the hearts of others better than he could.
But with her gone, the loneliness the older brother had fed and raised as long as he’d known grew wild, unmanageable. It went on benders, nights, waking to strange tastes and soiled sheets, hastily jotted notes on the bedside table. The older brother wanted someone to say his name softly, the way only his dead mother ever had, but he suspected there might be something more in the world, if he could only find a path to it.
He started in town, roaming the aisles of the grocery store and eliciting only annoyance, then the library, which got him shushed. He went to city council meetings and was asked to yield his time. He volunteered for the church and found only a hard-eyed neediness the other parishioners made rude jokes about on the van ride home.
One day, he saw an ad in the back of a magazine and sent his address, c/o his mother’s corpse, but all that came to the mailbox was a bunch of desiccated sea shrimp. He dumped them into a pool of water that had collected in his mother’s right ear. He named each of them and liked to pretend they recognized his sounds, but he couldn’t really tell the difference between any of them. He made a stone path to it and put in a bench. The stones, he couldn’t help arranging into the words “Love Me,” though he was sure only the sky would see.
* * *
The younger brother had an easy way with others. Men and women competed to spend time with him, manufacturing situations in which to claim him, guilt-tripping him into sharing his attention, until they eventually grew weary and heartbroken at his lack of interest.
It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but rather that he cared equally; no one seemed particularly more or less deserving of love. When one appeared in front of him in need, he helped as well as he could. When they were out of sight, he shifted his attentions to whoever was. There were those who maintained their unsteadiness in front of him for weeks, months at a time, trying to balance the warmth of his light with their own vulnerability. Invariably, they had to get away from him in order to save themselves. Otherwise, they’d die. Some chose that path. He buried them in tears and wiped the dust from his hands.
* * *
The older brother got it in his head that he was going to be married, though. When trolling the town hot spots didn’t work, he bought a computer and signed up for online dating. The women he chatted with were beautiful, successful, and not at all real. He would exchange messages with them for days at a time, his hope building as they asked for money, information. He sent one airfare from Lithuania and stood by the airport baggage claim in Memphis for hours until a security guard asked him to leave. The account had been deleted when he returned home. Another messaged him immediately. He shifted his attention to this one.
There was a bar a couple towns over, and he spent some time in there. He was usually the only unaccompanied person. Sometimes, there might be other men, nursing beers and eying the couples on their dates. He had the idea that they should get together and discuss their approaches, a sort of support group for lonely men, but any time he tried to converse with these men, they’d threaten violence.
Eventually, a small group of them found him outside, took him back to an alley, and beat him until he crumpled. He returned the next day, bandaged and defiant, and they beat him again. He didn’t go back, though for several days, he’d drive by, thinking of violent acts he would never commit.
* * *
There was a woman the older brother loved, though. She worked at a bank in town. He would go nearly every day to make deposits or withdraw money, alternating the two so that he could do the next the next day, moving his money around without accomplishing anything. She was polite and pretty, tall with big, sad eyes. She wore some kind of perfume that he couldn’t place. It mixed with the cigarettes she smoked and reminded of cherries or something richer.
He liked nothing more than to stand in her line while she worked, taking in that smell. He lived in terror that she would notice his strangeness and be offended. But he convinced himself it was harmless to admire her. He told himself he could replace that sadness in her eyes with something more, but he knew, beneath his bravado, that it would probably be disappointment.
Her nameplate read Donna. She wore no ring. While he stood in line, she didn’t seem to interact with her coworkers very much, though they chatted with each other. She kept her head down when she wasn’t working. He thought of plans to encounter her at the park, walking a dog she may or may not have, or at the post office. He would strike up a conversation, make a joke, somehow shift her past the rapids of their uncomfortableness to the dry land of connection. It came at the grocery store. He saw her in the cereal aisle, and before he could talk himself out of it, went and spoke to her. At first, she was strange with him, which he understood. He chatted and drew forth a smile. Then he stepped away before straining it.
He saw her again at the bank the next day. She recognized him, smiled. He risked a polite compliment and again didn’t linger too long. He saw her again, unplanned, a few days later at the library. They spoke in the parking lot for several minutes. Her nose wrinkled when she was thinking about something, he noticed. It was adorable. She put a hand on his sleeve and asked if he’d like to get coffee sometime. Of course, he would.
Thus began the greatest love affair of the older brother’s life. He would pick her up after work, drive her to the nicest restaurants in the area, of which there were very few. There was an Italian place, which was really just pizza putting on airs. There was a buffet-style catfish place, but when they went, she sat on the edge of her chair as if afraid to touch anything. The best food in town came from a shack out on the highway. It didn’t have a sign, but everybody called it Winchester’s, because that’s who ran it. It had been there for as long as anyone could remember, at first staffed by Zeb and his wife Shirley, and then a succession of kids who all grew up and moved off somewheres, except a son, who stayed on as cook. Zeb died sometime in the 80s, leaving Shirley and Zeb Jr., who eventually married an out-of-town woman. Now, Zeb Jr.’s wife and kids could be found underfoot, keeping the place going. But Shirley still took the orders, scraping her feet across the cement floor. She would walk up to a table with a sigh, after ignoring it for several minutes. She wouldn’t ask anyone what they wanted; she’d just stand there and wait. If you had a question, she would point to the wall, where the menu had been written in tight, small script. After you finished speaking, she’d walk away without a word and disappear into the back.
The place had started as a tight, plywood shack. You ordered your food at a window, where you could see the fryers behind you. They’d close the window, turn around, and cook. Back then, the menu was painted on the side of the building, and there was a picnic table to sit at. The way they’d expanded it was to knock out one wall and add, more or less, a mudroom, screened in for customers to order. There wasn’t room for anyone to eat, but they could get away from some of the bugs for a minute. From there, they expanded to include a small room with a big, round table, which was too intimidating for most folks to sit at. Eventually, they added another, larger room that fit several, more reasonable sized tables.
The wounds of all these expansions were clearly visible; the plywood of the original building was still there, replaced but never updated. The screen had been taken off, but the wounds from the hinges remained on the frame, through which Shirley and whichever grandkids were working passed with the food. Sometimes it was Zeb Jr.’s wife, but she had mostly relegated herself to managerial duties.
The floor of the dining room was uneven concrete. The walls were uninsulated. There was no pretense of refinement. They served most things on paper plates, paper bowls, paper cups with no adornment. The food was startlingly good and absurdly underpriced. One way they’d stayed in business, even when McDonald’s and KFC found the town, was to charge prices that had seemed low when Zeb Sr. was still alive.
Donna blushed when they pulled up to the building. When the older brother went around to open her door, she stared at the front of the building, leaving him standing with her door open.
“It’s good,” he said.
She looked at him, shocked, and finally got out. She held onto his arm as she navigated the rutted parking lot in her heels. When he pulled the screen door (transferred from kitchen) open, she stepped back as though afraid of attack. She turned to him for confirmation—Do you really expect someone like me to go in there? He smiled and nodded, motioning inside. She stepped through. He let her pick the table—“Not even a tablecloth?” and they sat.
The majority of food on offer was deep fried. Some came with gravy or cheese on it. If the older brother had to speculate as to why it was so exceptional, he might say that they fried it all in lard, which hadn’t been changed in eons. Or maybe it was some proprietary spice concoction. Or maybe they’d just borrowed some juice from old Scratch. Whatever it was, the window—which still ran on the side of the kitchen—was rarely free of customers.
“Burgers are good,” the older brother said. “Anything’s good, really.”
“Hmm,” Donna said.
“It’s an adventure,” he said.
“Hmm,” Donna said. “Do we get the menus ourselves, or…?”
“It’s on the wall.” He pointed.
She made a face and leaned toward it. After a moment, she commented, “I don’t even see a salad.”
The older brother smiled, nervous. When Shirley approached, Donna asked if they offered salads. Shirley grunted something that sounded affirmative. The older brother ordered a burger and mozzarella sticks. When the salad arrived, it was in a bowl that appeared to have endured heavy use. There were a few unhappy flakes of iceberg lettuce, some long-dead carrot slivers, a smattering of purple that could have been a mistake, and a large slice of raw red onion. Donna had to ask for salad dressing, and the only kind they had was Ranch. She left it in its paper cup and carefully removed the onion with her fork.
“You should try a mozzarella stick,” the older brother said.
She smiled thinly and tried to make her salad suffice. When she’d eaten about half of it, the smell got to her, and she carefully took a mozzarella stick.
“Most folks like to dip it in marinara sauce, but I like ranch,” the older brother said. He jammed one into her ranch cup and offered it to her. She tentatively bit it.
“Mmmm,” she said. She took another bite. “That’s good.”
“Told ya,” the older brother said. She finished the cheese stick, and he slid the remaining ones over to her. She pretended demureness, but devoured them all. “Want a bite of my burger?” he asked.
She shook her head hesitantly.
“We can just order you one, if you want.”
“I don’t eat things like that,” she said.
“Great time to start,” he said.
* * *
Donna’s past was one of restraint. Her parents raised her severely, and she regarded a lack of joy as a sign of refinement. She didn’t trust desire, which is something the older brother never truly realized. If he had, he’d have known that she could never love him, that the fact that she stayed with him at all meant that she didn’t care for him.
He met her parents once. They lived in some even smaller town south of the mother’s body, one that held a Co-Op and not much else. The few houses he saw were old and elegant, holdovers from the post-war era when people actually had the money to build such things and pretend they weren’t brand new. They regarded him with suspicion and disdain. His open, easy ways were like an insult to them, and they sat, uncomfortable, with sullen expressions as though he’d said something offensive.
But he didn’t care. He sat on their uncomfortable couch and chatted like a baby. He monologued about their daughter, her intelligence, her resourcefulness and resolve in overcoming trivial discomforts, her kindness in letting him escort her. His eyes darted from her face to theirs but returned to her glow. What he wanted to praise was her great beauty, the way her chin hinted at an elegant existence, her sallow cheeks belied her refinement, her sunken eyes shone like dull sparks. He was in love, and he thought that speaking it might make it matter.
The parents liked what he had to say about Donna, taking it all as a compliment on their own horrible parenting. Sure, he was a bumpkin, but he was charming. As the evening progressed, they became more and more open with him. Donna’s mother was bold enough to touch his sleeve at one point. The more open they became, the more complimentary he became, taking in their house, their situations. He regaled them with tales of their own existences, making them blush with a modesty they just then grew.
Donna was so surprised by their graciousness that she sank into quietude. She’d begun the evening stiff and hesitant, but gradually loosened up. She had a drink and then another. The conversation grew raucous as the older brother’s compliments grew bolder and more outlandish. The sun they’d risen above their house was the best he’d ever seen. The land was wiser, here, anyone could see that. It must all be improved by the simple presence of greatness.
When they left, Donna leaned on his arm. Her head nestled on his shoulder, and he breathed in the smell of her. He felt guilty for enjoying her presence, as though he were stealing something from her. He steered her away from the car and out into the front yard to admire the night, so that her nearness wouldn’t end. She looked up at the sky and sighed. He breathed in her sweet exhale.
“I’m going to let you be with me,” she said. “For now,” she added.
* * *
It went like that for some time. He fattened her up on compliments, remembering her tragedies and victories, appreciating her presence. She’d never seen the like. If anyone else had tried it, she wouldn’t have fallen for it, but he was such a dopey, wide-eyed child to her, she never suspected he might be trying to trap the fox of her heart. But it was nothing as possessive as that. He truly loved her. She hated him just the right way, and he loved her for it. If he ever asked for anything, he knew it would shatter the perfect mirror he’d surrounded her with, so he didn’t.
She allowed him to kiss her, and his heart fluttered when she bit his tongue, their mouths filling with the copper taste of his blood. She let him touch her more familiarly, first her hair, her waist, her back. She undid his pants, went down on her knees, and bit him so hard on his thigh he almost passed out. Then she turned on the TV.
One evening, she went into his bedroom, took all her clothes off, and waited for him. He entered cautious as a hare, started undoing his pants.
“Leave them on,” she said.
She spread naked, let him mouth her sex until she was satisfied.
“Go in the bathroom if you have to finish yourself,” she said. “See what it’s like for us.”
He didn’t mind. He thought that, if he did his time, he’d be able to earn her love. If his mother had been more than a body, she’d have told him love didn’t work like that. What he couldn’t put into words was his need to help her while she simultaneously hated him. Need and rejection. He fed on these like a moth worshipping the moon.
* * *
Within the safety of his self-immolation, Donna grew strong and confident. They spent long evenings, her telling him about all the horrors of being a woman, him telling her his imagined slights, as though they could compare. She didn’t mind. It meant he was listening, and it gave her more to hate about him.
For years they lived like this, her, transformed into a blue flame, burning in the breeze, him, want shaped like a man. When she’d grown emotionally fat on him, she left, found a therapist and worked through it all. She grew and softened and made something lovable out of herself. She never saw him again, out of shame both for her own behavior and his.
For his part, the brother kept her things. Sometimes, of an evening, he’d catch a whiff of her, contained in a flower dying on the table. He sucked it in, small thing, shrunk his nostril so that it would be small enough to be filled by what was left of her. In this way, he grew small and old, silent for fear of this bit of almost-her escaping, silent for so long he forgot how to speak.
And the smell, he took to be his new bride. He had a ring of light, the last gleam in his dead mother’s eye, made for its finger, one of glass for his. He kept to himself and wasn’t so much happy as nothing, hollowed and full of perfume.
* * *
While the older brother pursued the vagaries of the heart, the younger brother set out to grow things. He planted a field of wheat in his dead mother’s armpits, interspersed with whims, though he found this to be an unreliable crop.
One night, he was walking the north field of his dead mother’s ear when he saw a light hurtling toward the earth. He followed its burn across the land and finally came to a patch of light. It was a fallen beam. He gathered it up in his coat and took the smoldering mass back. His mother’s left eye hadn’t been touched. He planted it there, tending it daily until it grew something like grapes without diminishing, which he brewed into a stout liquor he’d sometimes share with his brother before the silence overtook them.
* * *
The star wine—as the younger brother called it—brewed strange dreams. The brother dreamed of his mother as a young woman. In the mornings, he convinced himself she’d been dancing through the night, but his dream self knew better. His mother had never been a dancer. She’d been a reader, a quiet sulker, a brilliant woman who read too much and lived between the pages. Each night, after he’d been drinking, she’d share stories she’d read, discussing the characters like they were old friends she’d recently been reacquainted with. It was only when the earth shook or his brother’s snoring woke him suddenly, in the midst of these vivid memories, that the younger brother remembered something of who his mother had truly been. The loss he felt at those times kept him from sleeping any longer, and lingered through much of the following day, many times. He would wander the shellacked and painted halls of his dead mother’s body, tending to any spots that needed preserving. In this way, he honored her and kept her with him.
Every few months, the younger brother thought of their sister, who’d escaped before their mother died, went off to the city—which one, neither he nor she were ever sure of—and made a life to hate for herself. They exchanged postcards—hers of places she wanted to visit, his of places to which he never wanted to return—with scribbled messages referencing shared memories so long forgotten they didn’t exist beyond the scribblings.
She wrote about her kids, whom she hated, her husband, whom she hated more, her job, which she hated, something she’d seen on TV that she didn’t like. It all felt so urbane and sophisticated to the younger brother. He never thought about things enough to hate them; they just were, to him.
* * *
Growing tired of sister’s frequent complaints about their absence, the younger brother convinced the older brother that the two of them should visit her in the city. The older brother was hesitant, but did not have enough spine left to fight his younger brother.
The problem was how to find her. The younger brother wrote her a letter, c/o her disdain, and waited for the mailman to pick it up. They followed the man as he took it to the post office, waited overnight until the next morning, when he picked it up, and approached him for a ride as he carried it out of town. They chatted all the way to the city, about the weather and traffic and the mailman’s beliefs that the government was actually controlled by lizard people. When the mailman took the letter to their sister’s house, the two brothers followed him up and were standing there when their sister opened the door.
* * *
The city was weird to the younger brother. His excursions into it were mostly limited to trips with his sister and her family. He saw the zoo and science center and library, all with his hand being held by his niece, a scared, quiet girl, often overshadowed by her older brothers. He read to her the four nights they stayed and sat with her. His older brother played with the two boys, though not as enthusiastically as the younger brother. The boys were loud and destructive, and the older brother began to slowly wake up to them. When the brothers left, they both gave long, tearful goodbyes. The mailman honked, and the brothers piled in. The younger brother sat by the door, watching the clouds fall behind as his older brother questioned the mailman about lizard people’s dietary habits.
When they got back to their mother’s body, the two brothers said their goodbyes. Each went to his home and spent some time crying in their own ways, the older brother in his bed, the younger brother in his cups. When he’d sobered, the younger brother walked his fields and checked them. His older brother started work on a bookcase he intended to take to his sister.
That evening, when the wind blew through their dead mother’s hair, the younger brother caught a whiff of her. He went and sat on his porch with a glass of starwine. In a little while, his older brother came up and found him. The younger brother offered a chair and a glass. They sat for a while, both smelling it and neither mentioning it. Every so often, one would clear his throat as if to speak, but neither did.
“She seems happy, for all her complaining,” the older brother finally said.
“Quiet, here,” the younger brother said.
“I used to think that was a good thing,” the older brother said. His brother was silent, remembering.
Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe’s poetry collections include Riceland, and his newest, Banana for Scale, as well as his latest novel The Moon On My Back. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his kid.