Cataclysm Baby

Isaac, Isaiah, Ishmael

Even at birth they were already damaged, their brittle bones opened and crushed, powdered by their mother’s powerful organs, her pressing canal: All those thin ribs snapped and splintered upon the stainless steel of the operating room. All those skulls crooked and cracked, all those twisted greenstick limbs. We lifted each child out from the mother’s body and into surgeries of its own, did our best to splint and screw our prides together.

So few survived, and for what next chance? On what legs would they stand, with no milk to grow them strong except from the body that had already failed to make them so?

If only there was some other mother, some second receptacle for the babies we want so badly to make. But no, there is only me and my brothers, only this last-caught woman between us.

To quell my brothers’ anger, to beg their patience, I say, This woman may not be capable of producing what heir we need, but perhaps she may yet birth the one who might, if only one of her daughters lives to have a set of hipbones strong enough to better bear our advances.

I say, The end isn’t short, but long. And so always we must not rush, must be in no hurry.

And so we fill the mother with powdered milk, with canned peaches, with vitamin-paste squeezed from nearly empty tubes.

And so we fill her with meat.

Every new wish is followed by another waiting, followed by another failure: Push, we say, our voices speaking in unison, our wants aligned after a lifetime of bitterest division, of brotherly strife. Together, we make what we can make, and we save what we can save. Push, we say, and then comes this next baby born just as broken, its first cries already choked with the chalk of its bones. Its newborn everything else shattering into dust. This daughter-like reminder that not all birthed into this world shall see it reborn—and then again our determination, our willingness to try once more.

And then, Lie still, I say, and then, Hold her, brothers, hold her, and then, I will plant again in her this seed, until at last we grow the world we desire.