Cataclysm Baby

Abelard, Abraham, Absalom

This smoldered cigar, last of a box of twenty, bought to celebrate happier times, now smoked to keep away the smell of our unwashed skin, of our slipping flesh, of our baby grown in my wife’s belly, the submerged sign of a prophecy burning, stretching taut her hard bulge: All hair, just like the others, gone wrong again.

Fists of black hail fall from the cloudless sky and spatter the house, streak the skin of our walls, break windows above broken beds. The birth-room fills with air the texture of mud, with black birds forgetting how to fly, these crows and vultures waiting to make a nest of our child, and still I focus, keep my eyes on shattered glass, on my wife’s pelvis tilting toward sunlight, toward sun turned the color of baby’s first stool, then the color of blood.

Then the blood, flowing between my wife’s legs.

Hopeful cigar smoked, held between loose teeth, I say, Push. I say, Push right now.

And then it comes, becomes: A baby boy, born just like the others. Hair on cheeks, on forehead, on lips and tongue. Inverse of our own nakedness. Shame in an equal and opposite amount.

For our baby, a name chosen from a book of names. Each name exhausted one after another, a sequenced failure. I hook a finger into our baby’s tiny mouth and pull out hair, hairball. From furred windpipe. From matted esophagus.

Only my wife cries. Only the birds caw, flap their wings. Only again a howl of spoor, cigar sputter.

Pull, my wife says. Pull.

As if I could ever pull enough. As if I could ever clear the lungs of this fur. As if I could clear the stomach. As if I could clear the heart, its chambers full, clenched, wrong for what harrowed world awaits. Pull, she says. Pull. Pull. Pull. And what coward I would be to stop.