Cataclysm Baby

Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo

Perhaps only their mother could distinguish between the boys, could reckon their slight variations in weight, the distinct cervix-bends of their skulls. I never could, not when they appeared as three redheaded infants and not when they were toddlers, all dressed alike in the preference of my good and then gone wife.

As teenagers they each ate the same amount of porridge each morning, the same third of a meat-can at dusk, and even the first time I caught one masturbating, I caught all three, circled between their bunks, each mimicking the motion of another’s hands. Ditto drinking, ditto the glass-pipes, ditto the new milk-drawn drugs I’d never known before their schoolmaster called.

With their mandatory facemasks and goggles affixed, no one could tell my boys apart, but then no one could recognize anyone else either, not after the baggy state-issued jumpsuits, the preventative head-shavings.

Even after this handicapping, some people remained more charming than others, and if there was an attribute each of my sons possessed equally, it was charm.

All these excuses and more were given by the women in town after every wife and daughter and matron and maiden from fourteen to forty-five swelled with my sons’ oft-spilled spunk, with the fruits of their inseparable loins. Later it grew difficult to prove whose child each mother carried, amid whole seasons of confused houses packed with breaking bellies, those quick-sequenced summer and fall and winter months filled with spread legs, with the emptying of wombs, with new mothers seeking out my sons for shotgunned weddings and promises of child support.

Hidden away in my house, my sons now celebrate their success: This is how you start a dynasty, one says over family dinner, a meal eaten behind blackout curtains, barricaded doors.

A kingdom, says the next, then corrects himself. A franchise.

In a world that’s dying, says the third, isn’t this all sort of beautiful?

I ask you: What possible solution to these childbirths overpopulating this town with more redheaded babies, with fiery scalps awaiting the state-razor, whole streets lined with my sons’ progeny, with their strong genes wiping out the faces of their children’s mothers in deference to their own perfect jawlines?

How many babies are born before we realize that all their children are boys? That our town’s women are the past, thanks to my one-note issue, to their deadly sperm making deathly pregnancies, taking each of their partners the way of their own mother: blood-wet, breath-gasped, split-wombed, at best to linger, never to recover from the makings of their children?

Now these babies left behind. Now only me and my three sons, only us four shut-ins against a town full of adulterated widowers, of shamed cuckolds and seething fathers, all parading our yard, my many grandsons in tow.

Now the first babies being left on our doorstep. Now the rest, following soon after.

Now my walking out onto the front porch to see the rows and rows of abandoned twins and triplets, the exponential crop of my line.

What loud reverberations their hunger-cries make! What diaper-complaints, what pain, what suffering, and amid it always my boys, unfeeling for what they have done, and so what else to do but discipline again these three failed fathers, these three no-use sons of mine?

What next but to make them take up the scythe and the shovel, if they will not take up their right roles instead?

What point in anything else? What good fathering could boys as bad as they possibly do?

So at last their lesson in how to reap. And how to sow. And how, when there is nothing better, to plow the world back under.