Cataclysm Baby

Edgar, Edric, Eduardo

My wife and I are too bloated to climb by the time the vines reach the floor of this spoiled forest, our bodies too quaking with fat to grasp even the lowest of their fruits. We call for our son, that skinny boy sunburned from his scavenging, and then we teach him to climb, to imitate the monkeys that screech from the branches. From our backs, we holler how best to shimmy the twenty-story vines of this new jungle, this eruption of trunk and thorn and branch and thistle rising from where our concrete once strangled the earth: All that old life gone now, replaced by towering trees, by mud made anew, by daily wallows and failed waddles, by the deforestation diet of my hungry wife and my own hearty appetite.

To our son: Climb, we cry. Climb, and bring us back what there is to find.

For some while it works. He returns with bony arms full of guavas, peaches, papaya, descends the vines with breeches torn and stained, his pockets stuffed with bananas, other fruits dropped whole into my gulping gullet, into the strained esophagus of his mother.

Our baby boy, our darling son, born into this lonely forest, made for this world to which we cannot adapt: Without him we would be lost, would surely starve and waste away.

For a month he brings such quantities of fruit, until our cheeks bulge with the feasts of his foraging, and after each feeding we bid him stay close, bid him to sit beside us while we question him about the treetops. We ask, Have you seen anyone else above, in the sway and the swing? Are there others still left? Other boys and girls feeding other parents trapped below?

Our boy shakes his head in feigned loneliness, but each passing day reveals the length of his lie: First a bracelet of flowering vines, knitted by another, then a pox of hickies, a necklace of bruises. Suck-marks, my wife sneers, driving our son back into the high trees, where he leaps easy from vine to branch to trunk. Her disapproval follows him, pushes him higher and higher, until there is nothing to see, until the forest is silent around us.

Then our breakfast arriving slow, our lunch late.

Then our dinners not coming at all.

Then our guts aching, desperate for what grows above.

We gather our quivering bodies, release our screamed demands into the canopy, but still no son appears. Still no meal follows. To keep us company there is only the squawk of the monkeys descending lower by the day, growing braver on the vines in the absence of our once overprotective son. There is only their toothy muzzles, stained with the fruits of the hunt, and then, from far above, the airy laughter of our child, of all our children who have ascended into the bowers, into the verdant newness suspended above this fallen earth, this last of all the muck and mud we’ve known.