Not that they rolled over. Spondee told me that the Mothers conducted nighttime paragraph raids; I heard rumors, too, of secret underground laboratories where Mothers cultivated new word viruses and experimented on language to make it talk.
That November, though, the Mothers suffered major losses when jargons organized a simultaneous attack on every Nest in Appleseed, destroying five Nests in a single afternoon. More than a thousand Mothers were killed that day. I heard the ambulances from the basement and stepped outside to see the dark sky filled with smoke.
“Mom?” said one of my thoughts.
As I was standing there a prayer came in from my Dad. “
?”
“What,” I said.
“Mom’s OK,” he said. “She was out on assignment. She’s at an undisclosed Nest.”
The Mothers mourned and regrouped; they held a press conference a few days later to denounce the attacks and to promise more security. Every day that winter, you’d see fleets of Mothers trying to repair the town: boarding up broken storefront windows; covering open bookwormholes; transporting people with holes in them to Appleseed Hospital. Orange Traffic Cones, meanwhile, maintained status quo as best they could: they tried to keep the roads open, to protect as many stories as possible from looting or meaningloss, to deliver food to shut-ins and get people to and from work and school. When some hoodlum phrases knocked out the streetlights on Converse early that spring, a Cone even showed up at my door to drive me to school in a Cone-shaped squad car.
By that point, though, school wasn’t really school—it was mostly cages and dark, empty classrooms. Teachers were rare, and if they showed up at all they usually just stood in front of the room, staring back at the students. In Depression IV, the broom teaching the class just posed whats. “What’s the education?” he asked.
Large Odor raised his hand. “The past?” he said.
The broom shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe, maybe not.”
Then Chamblis raised her hand. “What’s our homework?” she said.
“That’s a great question,” the broom said. “What is your home work?”
“The work we do at home?” said Spondee.
I left that room and went to Advanced What to Be Most Frightened Of. But the teacher in that room didn’t say anything at all — she just kept drawing sad faces on the chalkboard.
A few days later I showed up to that classroom and found it empty. I sat there for a few hours, and then I stood up and left. By then the place was a mess — the hallways were filled with garbage and torn-up books, and everything smelled like old ham and mayonnaise. On the way out the door that day — my very last day of high school ever — my sneaker kicked through a stack of papers near the art room and the pages went flying. I picked up a handful of the scattered pages; there was an old school newspaper, plus two blank diplomas and a hall pass. I kept the hall pass and one of the diplomas and threw the rest of it back on the ground. Then I walked out the heavy front doors.
A FAT, SNORING COMMA
MONARCH
Two years after my mother left us, my childhood home hanged itself from a tree in the yard of our Appleseed home.
This was in the dark summer. My father had full-blown workhosis by then, and I was spending most of my free time tilling in the deadgroves with the Memory of Johnny Appleseed; he’d recently returned to town, his face and clothes smudged with ink, refusing to discuss where he’d been. The schools were closed; so were most of the stores — there was no fresh food anymore. I ate mostly chips: plain chips for breakfast, salt and vinegar for lunch, barbecue for dinner. Then I’d open a bag of sour cream and onion and fall asleep watching the house’s memories — memories of me, sleeping in the Vox or running around in the backyard; of the rows of parked cars during my sister’s auctions; of my mother watering her plants while smoking a six-foot cigarette; of the four of us, being watched by the television — rerun over and over on the walls of the living room.
Watching those memories, I should have known that 577 was in crisis. Plus, the house leaned dangerously to one side; every wall curved with sorrow. Not to mention the house’s dreams, which I can see now were honest-to-lou night terrors: dreams of falling, of being shot, of being chased through dark tunnels. Once I woke up in the middle of a housedream of being buried alive: the building screamed as the dirt was piled onto the house-sized coffin, blocking the last slivers of light through pine boards.
I didn’t just sit by and watch the house suffer, though. I went out to Gilbert’s Bookstore and bought some self-help books: A Room with a View, ReHouse, others. I brought them home and put them on the coffee table.
“What are these?” said the house.
“I really think you should read them,” I said.
“What good are books in a situation like this?”
“These ones have some good ideas,” I said.
“I don’t want good ideas,” said the house. “I just want everything, and everyone, to be quiet.”
A week or two later, I was making a chiplunch when the house asked me if I wanted its collection of old 45s: Gordo and Gordo, The Rabbit, vintage OCDs, The Redirected Flights — some great stuff. “You really don’t want these anymore?” I said.
“I want you to have them,” said 577. “Think of me when you play them.”
I didn’t even own a record player. “OK,” I said.
Right as I started eating my lunch, though, a prayer came in from the Memory of Johnny Appleseed: he’d just traded for some new lightseeds and needed help at the Colton Groves. “I’ll be right there,” I said, and I shoveled some chips into my mouth and ran out the door.
A few minutes later, I was riding over there on my Bicycle Built for Two when I saw the Memory of Johnny Appleseed walking down Inherited Wealth Boulevard. “Where are you going?” I said.
“False alarm,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Deadseeds,” he said.
I leaned over the handlebars. “Shit.”
“Got a surprise for you, though,” he said. He held up a soda bottle filled with blue liquid.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Kaddish Cider,” he said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
So we sat in the fields and got kaddished. Cidered out, I lay on my back and looked up at the inside cover. The day-night passed and soon it was dusknight. By then I was sober enough to pick up my bike and ride home.
When I got there, though, the house was gone.
Memory of the Reader: Gone?
It wasn’t there. Which wasn’t so strange on its own — my house, like most houses, took occasional strolls or daytrips. 577 was always sure to tell me where it was going, though, and to return to Converse Street by early evening. But when eight o’clock that night approached, waved, and drove off with no house in sight, I started to worry. I prayed to the house’s friends and family — his mother, his condo brother. His brother didn’t reply; his mother hadn’t seen him.
An hour later, though, I received a prayer from an Or that used to trade with my father. They’d had a falling out over a demo job in Appleseed City — my father said that the Or stole some railroad ties from him — and it would be years more before they coffeed. But the Or prayed that he was down at the Glenwood — a whatif in the downtown — and that my house was sitting right across from him. I rode the Bicycle Built for Two over to the bar. When I walked in, the Or was lounging at the video game table in the front. Or nodded to me. “There’s your domicile,” he said. Then he stood up, gave me a friendly shove, and walked out.