Cataclysm Baby

Domina, Doreen, Dorma

What month of dark mornings followed? What spring or fall, what remade season of locusts and black flies besetting our town, flown in on thickening air and sickening smell? And there, in the middle of its days, appears this chrysalis, this cocoon, this child-shaped bundle found wrapped in our morning sheets, tangled in the space where our toddling daughter once slept, dream-thrashed and nightmare-ridden as she clung to our skin, our heat.

A chrysalis? I ask my wife. A cocoon?

What’s the difference, she says, when it’s your child inside, when it’s your caterpillar?

We vow to keep it close, to sleep beside it until it ruptures, until what cocoons are for: until she emerges, no longer a child.

To cradle my pupa in my arms. To rock it in the rocking chair. To wait and hope, and at last to see the new shape pressed urgent against the inner skin of the chitin—and then to crack wide the chrysalis with one hand, to with the other force my daughter free.

To behold the dripping wings, the glistening thorax; the changed head, the new mouth.

I open the nursery window and let the room fill with locusts and flies, those other black wings, other black legs, other black mouths bent on devouring all they can catch: Only me, only what flaking skin I have left. Only my daughter’s fresh wings, her span of translucent amber flapping free the scent of molt dust, of moth smoke.

And then the hairy touch of her legs on my legs, on my hips, on my chest; then the click of her mandibles, clipping locusts from my ears, knocking flies from my lips and eyes.

And then my wife and I at the nursery window, watching her leave. Watching her join the town’s other golden children, together flying a sky clouded shut. Keeping us safe, at least until the locusts run out. Until the flies are gone. Until the trees and grass and shrubs are empty of leaf and branch.

Until all the rest the creeping thing stops.

Until my grief-stung wife disappears, first into herself, a body spun inside a heartache, and then again outside our home, into the cloud of children blacking our sky.

The rest of us shut our hungry selves away, whisper through glass pane, through locked door: You can’t ever come home, we say, but no words can stop the knocking against our lit windows, our delicate houses.

The next time I see her, how big she’s gotten: My only daughter, all grown up.

And now her string of milky eggs across the window.

Now her own caterpillars, hungry for what world remains.