Mother straddled me again; she liked that control of movement. But she also liked submission; just before this, she’d had me tie her and spank her bottom until it glowed. She rocked atop me now, green eyes drugged in her intensity.
“You missed me, darling. You gave me life as I gave you life. We understand each other. We’re alike. No one else understands us. We need each other. Don’t ever leave me, darling, I missed you, I missed you, I love you, oh fuck me, darling, fuck me…”
Mother leaned her breasts down to dangle in my face. Thinking this was her intention, I sucked at them, but she sat back up and I saw the buck knife in her fist. And I realized she meant to use it.
“No!” I blurted, thinking she intended to kill me; that I might be resurrected and be all the more like her.
Mother plunged the knife down into her own side and cried out as if in orgasm. Blood spattered my belly, then began to flow hot down her body—down mine.
“Fuck me, darling, cut me, fuck me, please…”
“Oh God!”
She raised herself off my erection, took hold of it, and guided me into her incision. She bore her weight down and I slid inside easily amid the lubrication of blood. Her guts were hot in there.
She pushed the knife into my hand. I tried to hurl it away but she closed her fist around mine. She was strong, or I was weak, and she made me thrust the blade into her navel. “Cut me, darling, hurt me, love me, please…” She was sobbing hysterically. Maybe it hurt, or maybe it was the madness. I was sobbing, and now vomiting. I wrestled with her, both of us so slick it would have been hard for another to know which of us had been stabbed. I managed to roll her onto her back and began to slide out of her but she pulled me atop her, legs clinched around me. She inserted me into the second incision. I could barely get in against the push of her intestines, which began to emerge like a blue baby crowning, but I made it, to the hilt, my penis a knife, and I realized then that I had fought to bury my penis in that wound—that she no longer had to force me…
She fellated me through a hole in her cheek. The first wound had healed without leaving a scar, the second was mostly healed, but I made new vaginas. One in her thigh so I could rub up against the bone within. The mattress was awash in blood, a pool in its center. The room smelled like a slaughterhouse must. There was vomit, and a heap of intestines but apparently she regenerated new ones inside, apparently she was immortal, and I heard the creak of the skulls around us as the bone Eden grew more lush.
“Slut!” a voice behind us raged. “God-damn whore!”
I whipped my head around. A man had come into the studio and he smashed himself a path through the bone foliage with his arms, unmindful of the lacerations the jagged branches tore in his flesh. He was naked, and his face was flushed red in fury, and I saw it was my grandfather.
“Bitch! Cheat on me, will you? Run from me, will you? Thought you could hide from me?”
Mother slipped out from under me, and I saw her face was slack with utter terror. All the cat-like confidence had fled her eyes, leaving only that fear I had seen ingrained in them. Hers was the face of a child, helpless to defend itself.
I rose with the knife as Grandfather made it through the barrier. He caught my lunge and swung me aside. He had meant for me to fall into the waiting talons of bone, to become impaled, but I caught myself and only gashed my shoulder.
“No, please, Daddy, please!” Mother wailed.
I tackled Grandfather from behind, reaching around to slam the blade of the buck knife into his chest as I did so. He only grunted, and flipped me off him onto my back. He grunted again as he yanked the knife out of him, and grinned down at me.
“You’ll pay for that one, boy.”
I saw Mother look to the doorway abruptly. Grandfather looked. I looked. A small woman had entered the room through the path Grandfather had smashed. She was naked, and about the age she had been in most of the pictures I had seen of her in the photo album that first night. It was my grandmother.
“Liz!” Grandfather hissed, as surprised as I was.
“Go back, John,” she said quietly.
“No! You go away!”
“I should have stopped you long ago, John. God forgive me…”
Grandmother came forward. Her husband swung the knife threateningly her way. Mother moaned fatalistically. Grandmother moved swiftly past her husband toward the work bench. We all understood what she was reaching for, and as Grandfather lunged to intercept her I tackled him yet again; around the legs this time. He almost fell, pin-wheeled his arms…
I didn’t see what Grandmother with her dead, empty face did when she reached that skull with the sphere in its forehead. I couldn’t see her around Grandfather’s legs. But I knew she had done something when the legs I held became weirdly soft, and then insubstantial…smoke in my embrace. Dust. I began to inhale it, choked, held my breath. The buck knife had dropped to the floor.
I pushed myself up on my hands and knees, facing toward Mother.
Where I had last seen her—cowering on the drenched mattress, that terror in her face—a cloud of dust now hung in the air. For a moment only it held a human outline, as if struggling to retain its integrity, a tormented figure of ash. I thought I saw its eyes, somehow, and I did see an arm. A hand, reaching out to me.
But then the cloud billowed outward, lost its form, swirled and dispersed and settled. Settled around me, on the floor, on the work bench, on the window sill. A sliver of sun showed around the window shade, and motes danced golden in its beam.
I wept. I glanced around me. Grandfather was gone. Grandmother had vanished. Already I heard the cracking and splintering of the bone orchard, as chunks began to break free and drop to the floor.
But the growths weren’t simply crumbling, I saw; they were undergoing some new metamorphosis. I saw a skull begin to climb down the wall off its hook. Its antlers moved stiffly like the legs of some great arthritic spider. It was the skull painted to look like it was covered in flesh and hair. But no, it wasn’t that one. It was covered in flesh and hair. One of its eyes was not a broken Christmas bulb. They were both intact. And they blinked.
I ran out of the room then. I saw no more. I found my long forgotten clothing, and my car keys. I heard sounds from the studio, great crashings. I fled outside, into the light, into the fresh air. I had escaped…
I didn’t see what the neighbors saw. No one believed that I knew nothing about it, but no crime was really committed. A few lawns were damaged. I paid for that when I sold the cows.
How had a small herd of cattle been contained inside that house? I couldn’t explain it to the police. I professed not to know. Though Mother’s blood had simply disappeared from my skin, I had been afraid of what the police would find inside…but when at last I had the courage to return to the house, to the studio, I saw that the mattress was dry and unstained—just very dusty.
There were no cattle skulls left in the studio. I collected up the scrapbooks. I would burn the one with the pictures of Grandfather and my mother. And I would sell the house.
I viewed the penned animals once before I sold them. I looked closely at each one of them, felt their foreheads for hard lumps protruding. I found none. Perhaps one day these beasts will be found dead, mutilated, when the owners of the sphere come looking for it. But perhaps it’s already been restored to them.
I couldn’t help but wonder, however fancifully, if the skulls of those cattle were painted black, and red, and blue like a desert sky, under the layers of skin and hair.
I’m better now. Fewer nightmares. I can smile at the people I work with.
But Mother was right, after all; your relationship with your parents does shape how you learn to love, and lust.