Sometime in the hours between midnight and dawn, they were all gone: all except Dr. Zuvicek, who sat with us on the living room, his own piece of Ethan sealed in a little jar beside his chair.
The house seemed emptier than the mere departure of our extended family could account for; it was as if the great family grief that had laid claim to our home for so long, so vast in its scope that the walls had seemed to creak and warp with the strain of containing it, had left only a void. Mom sat holding a teacup in both hands, staring at the tepid drink as if expecting to find some answers there; Jean and I shared the opposite couch, looking anywhere but at the sealed jar containing our own last piece of our doomed little brother.
Zuvicek had just finished saying that he was going to bring his own piece of Ethan back to the old country, where the farmland once owned by our great-grandparents and still likely our property—that being difficult to determine, so many wars and governments later—had grown wild and been reclaimed by forest primeval; he believed he could identify the spot where the old mansion had stood, and bury his piece of Ethan there. “After I’m done,” he said, his eyes far away, “I think I’ll do a little wandering before my return to these shores. I know I will never again have another patient quite as difficult as this one, but I have still had enough of sickbeds and death vigils for the time being; it is time to… re-grow myself.”
“Good luck with that,” Mother said.
Zuvicek must have detected the bitterness in her voice. “You should do the same thing. It is a shame that your dear husband,” he hesitated, and looked at us, “your father, did not live to enter this time of healing. And a shame that the rest of the family can only help you so much, that the final step can only be completed by parents and blood siblings. But once you are done with that duty, you should not be afraid to embrace life again. As soon as it is decent, go somewhere fun and do something stupid. Remind yourselves who you are, when you don’t have such a terrible thing hanging over you.”
Mother covered her eyes. “I’m not sure I remember anymore.”
“I understand. But you are still a young woman, with many years of life left to you. And you have two fine healthy children who will help you remember, with their own lives, and someday with the blessing of healthy grandchildren. Remember that.” He grabbed his hat and his bag and his piece of Ethan, and stood before us hesitating, searching for the words that would define the moment with as much gravity as it deserved. “You should all move away, when you are done. This has become a bad place for you.”
“I know,” she said.
Zuvicek bade farewell, accepted our thanks, and departed.
The three remaining members of our immediate family sat in silence for several seconds, neither enjoying nor understanding the sudden emptiness of a home that had until now been driven by the engine of unrelenting pain.
For lack of anything better to do, Jean surveyed the detritus of Ethan’s deathwatch: the dirty glasses on their coasters, the plates stained with the remnants of condiments or cake, the extra chairs hauled up from the basement that would need to be folded up and put away. “We’ll help you clean up.”
“That can wait until morning,” Mom said. “We have to say our own goodbyes.”
I said, “I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”
“Neither am I. But he was your brother, my child, our blood. We owe him our strength.”
Mom meant that, of course, but we all knew the other thought that had to cower behind the one she could bear to speak out loud. And besides, this needs to be over. He needs to be gone. This house needs to be quit of him.
I grabbed the vase. “Right. Might as well get this over with.”
The three of us went outside, the screen door slamming behind us. The driveway, all but abandoned by the cars of family members, now only bore my borrowed junker and Jean’s secondhand Yaris, each resting part on gravel and part on lawn. The stars above us were few, thanks to light pollution from the new houses that had come to crowd our beleaguered estate, but the few I could see were bright, distant points of fire that still seemed sharp enough to burn.
The moon was just a waning crescent, points curving upward like the grin of the Cheshire cat. It might have been more appropriate full, of course, but if Ethan’s life story had any moral at all in the context of our family, it was that nobody can control everything, and that some of us are damned to control less than others.
We went together into the backyard, which was still enclosed by the stone wall and protected by what remaining forest the advancing suburbs had left.
Just before I took the stopper off the urn, its contents shifted with a perverse suddenness that startled me and almost made me drop it. The ceramic rang like a bell, and the grisly contents shifted again: willful, insistent, helpless, defiant, and angry.
My voice cracked. “Oh my God, he’s still moving—”
Then the jar lurched again. This time I dropped it, enduring the century and a half it took to hit the ground, feeling myself break even as it broke, releasing what was left of Ethan to explode like a balloon of blood. In the moonlight it looked black and shiny, a lot like an afterbirth. Something like an eye floated to the surface and then popped, leaving ripples that smoothed over and became a surface as placid as any mirror.
I said, “He’s alive—”
Mom put a hand on my wrist. “Lawrence. Stop putting this off.”
“Mom, it’s not over, he’s moving—”
Her fingernails dug into my flesh, drawing blood.
I gasped and looked her in the face, expecting anger but seeing only an ethereal calm.
“It’s over,” she said.
Behind me, Jean had already taken off all her clothes, her breasts hanging pale and white beneath the slivered light. It wasn’t just the change. Even before the fur started to sprout from her cheeks, she looked taller than she had in years, more beautiful, more at peace, and more defiantly free.
“Like you said inside,” she reminded me, her soft voice turning coarse as her jaw began its transformation to elongated snout. “Let’s get this over with.”
By then Mom was midway through her own change; not into the common vulpine creature my sister could become, but into the thing that had never borne a name in any human tongue, the thing that had drawn my father to her in the old-country revels. Our extended family has a saying that we each choose our other skins, and what Mom had chosen, in her youth, was broad and powerful and wrapped in a snow-white mantle that glowed with inner fire.
Watching, I could only wonder how many years this self had been lost to her; how many years she’d been condemned to a life of nothing but dull humanity, as she cared for the child whose body had been incapable of making the permanent choice all of our bodies had made.
I decided. Mom and Jean were right. It was time.
I peeled off my shirt, before it could be damaged by the emergence of my girdle of arms. Then we dropped to all fours, lowered ourselves to our departed blood, and began to feed.
The Boy and the Box
The boy looked like any other boy his age, except that, thanks to him, there had been for some time now no other boys his age, or of any other age. The elimination of all others had transformed him into the entirety of a subset that had once numbered billions. He was now the platonic ideal of his type, not just a boy but the boy.
As the last of his kind currently existing in what he had allowed to remain of the world, he had soft downy cheeks, a pug nose, a fan of freckles across both cheeks, and hazel eyes that went well with lips arrested in a permanent affronted pout. He hadn’t had any means of washing up since he’d made everything go away, so he smelled unclean and wore permanent smudges on his palms and cheeks. His once-short sandy hair now formed a rat’s nest… though that was a meaningless statement as well, as rats were one of the things he’d gotten rid of and there was no longer any need for their nests.