Cataclysm Baby

Fawn, Fiona, Fjola

They take our daughter and in return they grant us eight hours of light a day, plus nutrient-enriched air pumped thick and cool through the vents in the concrete ceilings, the non-slip floors. The mother and I alternate days washing ourselves in the extra fifteen minutes of water we’re rationed, but despite their promises this cleanliness does not lead us to renewed conversation, to revigored copulation. Before the makings of our daughter I did not know this woman, and now that the daughter is gone we rarely speak, barely look in each other’s direction even when the thrumming lights permit.

Instead, our eyes swivel toward the silver screens set into the walls, into every tight-cornered wall. Working silently, the mother and I move all our furniture: In the living room, we discard tables and ottomans, push the couch so near we have to climb over the arms to sit cross-legged before the flicker, and then we continue on, driving room to room the destruction of inessential surfaces, unnecessary seating, until in the bedroom we shift our mattress into the cleared space below the largest screen, beneath the silver stretch of video as long as our once-used bed.

On our knees, we press our faces to the screen, put our ears to speakers making only soothing static, the swooping sound of television dreams: This is where they promised we’d see our daughter again, where they said she’d return beautiful and whole, not womb-thrashed and gene-short, not malnourished and depressed.

Not like her parents, they promised.

The mother and I waste our brightest hours peering into the static, but no matter how many channels we check we find no daughter, and also no other programming, as there was the last cycle of abundant light, of quick electricity.

Each day that passes, we breathe deeper of the processed air, let its engineered taste force us into health, into some state like happiness.

Each day, we wash in our daily bucket of water, perfume ourselves before showing off our broadening faces, our fresh flesh plump with improved circumstance.

For one minute we tell each other our trade was worth it, because only then can we bring ourselves to gaze again the daughterless static, to stare until our eyes ache, until we cannot resist calling the talent scouts who took from us our only child.

Into the phone, we say, Where is her better life you promised? Where is her bright and shining future? What channel you guaranteed, what better reality captured beneath lights and microphones, and where is it to be found?

They do not answer our questions.

All they say is, Keep watching.

All they say is, Trust us—And what other choice do we have?

How healthy the mother appears, how fat my face reflected in her worried eyes, until the day the power whirrs off, the lights go dark, the fans stop blowing.

The television’s dwindling dim casts us into silence, leaving only our still-stinking breath to fill the air once stubborn with its sound. With hands held between us for the first time since the daughter-making, the mother and I kneel upon the bed, press our bodies to the screen. Wracked with rediscovered heat and hunger, we beg for a glimpse, any single sound from the throat of our mistake-given daughter, but the screen offers only glassy potential, only what might still be, if we watch, if we believe.

How far gone are we then, when the mother begins to beg, when she first pleads aloud?

I have forgotten our daughter’s face, she says, her own deflating cheeks pressed against the screen, streaming the stale dark, washing the dust from its silence.

She says, Please. Please describe her, remind me, tell me what I cannot see so that I might recognize her when she comes: Her new hair, her new face, her new body.

I tell the mother again what the scout promised, what he told us our daughter would have because of our sacrifice, because of our willingness to go without.

I tell her how our daughter resides now on the surface, under the sun we have not seen in years, except on this still-dark screen.

I tell her about the shining mane that surely grows from our daughter’s once-shorn scalp, the teeth that must sprout white from her once-unsocketed gums.

I tell her about our daughter’s rebuilt mind, her promised ability to sound whole words, to speak in fullest sentences, her voice made so different from when she lived with us.

I tell her how I see our once-daughter hugged by new parents.

I tell her how this girl has probably forgotten all about us.

How she’s never coming back. How that’s a kindness.

How instead of our daughter, we have chosen each other, and how I am sorry.

I tell her, The power will be restored any minute. They promised us.

This for that, I tell her. This for that is what they promised us.

I tell her, Stop crying. I tell her, Stop crying right now.