Cataclysm Baby

Meshach, Meshach, Meshach

We knew our firstborn might not last, his weak constitution revealed even before he could walk, signaled by his crinkled little fingers, his wet coughs full of sputum and phlegm. Still my wife nursed him, still I wiped the sweat off his sallow face and his caved chest. At night, we let him sleep between our bodies, even though his raucous breathing often woke us, even though there was no need to keep warm his small shape, not in the furnace of our bedchamber, our tiny hole of a home.

Each morning, we awoke from our dreams covered in the night’s soot, the expectorate that blew upward from the vents in the floor, the ash and worse that could not escape through the clogged height of the chimney above.

Once our boy could walk, once his toddler arms were thick enough to lift himself, then we wrapped his mouth and nose with breathable cloth and set him at the ledge of the chimney, at the bottom rung of the skinny ladder leading up into the narrow smokestack.

Up, we cried. Up, and loose what there is to be loosed.

Oh, and what a baby he was then! What cries and wails at being separated from us, at being alone in the dark of the stack. But still he climbed, did his best to keep the air flowing, to keep what came from below ascending to wherever it floated above.

By the time he was old enough to talk, his voice was already strained with the black glass the heat made of his lungs.

By then, his brother baked in my wife’s womb, growing to replace him when he inevitably tumbled loose, plummeting from the chimney’s great heights.

When we heard the thump of his crash, we set aside our brooms, left the newest ash where it lay, so that we might hold him as he went.

We cried for him as best we could, but those years the furnaces were so hot that no moisture lasted: not our tears, not the milk of my wife’s breast. Our second boy, he never had enough to eat, and when his growth halted I put another in his mother’s belly, even though there was no room for the three of us then birthed, even though we could barely stand the sight of each other in the heat-stunk cramp of our chamber.

Our second boy, he climbs as his brother once did, and when he comes down to see us he is black-skinned, slick with wide burns shut tight by soot. His only words are cries for mercy, entreaties against going back up the chimney— but of course he must go.

When he refuses, I tell him about the good of the many. About the good of my wife, about the good of myself, about the good of his baby brother, coming soon. I take him bodily and I force him into the chimney, push with my hands until he is above the damper, the trapdoor between our world and his, and then I hold the damper shut while I tell him the truth I have never wanted to tell.

I tell him I can make more of him, but there is only one of me, only one of his mother.

I tell him that when he is gone, I will still love him as much as I loved the brother before, as much as I will love the brother who comes after.

I tell him, This is why we gave you all the same name, so that you might be equals in our hearts.

This conversation, it is an understanding I began with one son long ago and will end with another, perhaps here in this hot room built between the furnace below and the floor above, or perhaps somewhere new, some earned place cool and star-struck, or else some other kind of heaven I have not yet imagined, set aside as reward for our long hot labors, our series of sacrifices.

I do not know. I have only been in this one room, and I cannot guess what others the world might yet contain.

I know only this: Myself, the father. Her, the mother. Them, the son. And between us all, this hot hell to be shared, and the crematorium chimney above to be kept clean no matter what the cost, lest all below choke on the ashes of our ashes.