Cataclysm Baby

Rohan, Rohit, Roho

Sod furrows behind the plow, behind our slow son tacked to its traces, his shoulders and thighs bulging as he scratches the blade across the earth, sundering scars to be scabbed over by his mother’s following hand. All day she walks behind the hulk of him, doing the work I used to do. With her slender fingers she pushes the seeds carefully into the dank dirt, into soil exposed only briefly to this uncertain sun, this angry air, this quavering question posed as perhaps unreasonable hope: Because even though what grows from the world’s womb might be no better than what grew from my wife’s, what other choice do we have but to try again?

There are some who say it’s the earth that’s gone wrong, and some that say the seed, and it is this my wife and I debate after she pushes my wheelchair up to the dining table, after she sets the brakes my fumbling fingers are too weak to work. While we fight, our son takes more than his share of our food, offers less than his fair part to the conversation. Everything about him is retarded except his appetite, the cost of his too-big body, his still-nameless face, left so because what right name was there? What title for a child best loved as a beast of burden, best desired for the plow he can drag, for the twisted tree trunks he pulls from the ground to make more farm?

What do you call an animal that eats more than it helps grow, until crop after crop yields less, until soon there won’t be enough feed for the three of you?

What do you even say to a son like that? What you say is, Come here, boy. In the middle of the night, you say this. You say, Carry me, and then he carries you.

With your crippled body in his arms, he chases your pointing finger out of the bedroom, out of the house, out into the field still flipped fresh by the plowing.

Right here, you say. Do it right here.You say, Hug me the way you hugged me last.

You say, This time, away from the house, there’ll be no mother to stop us.

And then you give thanks for a boy too stupid to know his own strength, too broken to understand the patricide carried latent within his sausage-thick fingers, his ox-stunk palms that close over your skull, that crack those flat bones loose from their jagged moorings.

And what then? What’s this?

Already a world where nothing grows right, and now a world where nothing dies?

More, you beg, more! Son, tear me from the earth like a trunk! Husk me like the corn! Scatter me into seed again, plant me in the earth, let grow what grows! Feed your mother my share, or else plant her too—

And then your bored son dropping you unfinished to the dirt, then you watching as he bounds away, his big idiot-happy body receding, leaving you broken in the fields, screaming hoarsely for morning, for the sharp edge of the approaching plow.