In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

6

LONG AGO, I GIRDED MYSELF against the woods with an armor of fur, with a trap chained to my skin, with one knife upon my belt and another swallowed into my heart. Now there were no such arms available, and so when I returned to the house I had to search again for some other method to clothe myself, some other way to make my intentions known. Most of what was in the house was mere domestics, but in our closets there hung one apparel that might serve, that had served me first, on my best day: My wedding suit, white as it was once white, remade again by my wife’s memories, its original purpose as forgotten by her as anything else.

I stripped naked, scrubbed my body in the boil of the last bucket of water, brought earlier from the lake. Washing myself with that captured gallon, I could feel my capacity for transformation in its wetness, dormant but never gone, and when I was clean I shaved my face bare, and when I was shaved I took my wife’s scissors to my hair, cut it in the ancient fashion of our wedding year. I trimmed my nails with the same blades, then brushed my teeth, scrubbed at their squares with my fingers, with soda and salt.

Then the suit, then the pants and the shirt and the jacket, then the tie that my hands had nearly forgotten how to knot, that took too many efforts to hang right.

I did all the things I did the morning of my wedding, and when I was finished I was as close as I could come to what I once was, and what sad and sallow shadow I made, and in our mirror I saw all my ruin made more obvious by its scrubbing: My cataracted eye, hung low in its socket; the many scars of forgotten origin. How my one shoulder lifted lower than the other, how my one leg dragged so that even standing still I looked to limp. How even with the same haircut I did not have the same hair I’d had, its peak upon my forehead higher and thinner than when I was young.

What I saw in the mirror was my dying, and how at last it was near, so near I could always smell it, could put my fingers to my skin and feel it moving beneath, beneath and also within.

I was failed father, failing husband, failure in every role, and still I went on, up and out of that house and toward the tree line, my dragging steps dredging the dusty dirt, that ground bereft of the rain my wife forgot to add to her last world, our deepest house. As I walked I corrected my gait until my hips ached, then I let my body move again in the manner its turned nature wanted, ankle sideways, arms outward, good eye leading my leaning face, pointing me toward what I knew awaited me beneath the first trees, a roaring column of her worst children, some naked and howling, bear-faced or not, and all united in how they would not let me pass.

To recognize the impossibility of hiding my approach from the foundlings, so not to try.

To keep my gaze pointed past their small faces and their wild expressions, into the long woods beyond.

To maintain that the foundlings were no children, no prize, only horded distraction.

To make believe—to make a belief—that I could prevail against them, and that if I did I might find now some recent-made cave farther into the woods, a cave not there before my wife came to dig it from the earth.

And as I crossed the tree line the foundlings fell upon me, and in their haste one another too, their sound swarming, and together they punished me with their sharp bodies, and then they ripped my wedding suit, and then all the man that lay beneath it.

MY FLESH, MARKED WITH A topography of anger.

My hair, torn from my scalp in clumps, my scalp torn.

My eyes, poked and pried, until both the good eye and the cloudy saw only tears, a lasting sparkling.

My ear twisted, then a finger pulled back and back and broken, then enough of that, enough damaging the surface; then the tearing of my skin, the breaking of what was within, and then my crying out, my begging for mercy, mercy, and how I did not deserve it, and then my saying my wife’s name, saying it almost voiceless for there was so little voice left, begging that from wherever she had gone she might remember me and so call off the children she had made, and then, at last, something new to hear, something come through the growls and screams, the hackled roars of these piled children, a sound heard not in my good ear, but in my bad one: A series of notes, not quite like a song, coming from beneath the floor of the woods, up and out of the earth, a sound high pitched at first, and then a noise so low its tone was felt only in my vibrating organs, my jumping spilling blood.

The foundlings unpiled themselves from atop my bones, stood to howl some response, stamping their feet against what frustration the sound brought, and while they were occupied elsewhere I tried to look down and around at my twisted shape, my broken structures, then struggled to turn over, to put hands and feet beneath me—and despite my felt efforts, no change in position happened, no muscles responded. All my bones seemed unconnected to any other, and perhaps they were, for when my right hand and then my left hand returned to my control, all they found was blood, and then everywhere I placed my knees and elbows and head was blood too, and the worst pain was across my belly, and when I put one hand there it slipped right through, into the strung-out hurt of my stomach, the long guts surrounding.

At last I was finished, at last this body was going to fail and fail until it stopped failing, and how for a moment this thought ran a smile across my split lips, my broken teeth, my torn tongue, for some ever-larger part of me no longer wanted to be the one who went on but only the one who had stopped, and yet there was some slim hope left, one cowardly path left untaken: If I could turn away from my wife and leave the woods, if I could make it across the dirt upon my knees and my belly, if I could crawl the length of the dock to drop myself in the water, then I would again become the squid, relieved of my injuries, changed for the last time. I pulled my cowardice forward, felt what was loosed within me dragging against the unpacked earth, felt my insides getting dirty in hollows no longer protected by skin and fat, and then vomit spilled upward, filled my mouth and my nose, and some similar stinking liquid leaked out of my stomach, its punctured sac.

Then the sound again, and then after it the noise, and then the sound and the noise, together, and yes, then at last a song, and yes, and yes, and who sang it where, and I did not know, could not see anymore, and what was not pain was numb, and what was not deaf heard only that song, and then foundlings everywhere, all around, their hands upon me, and me not looking, not able to look and happy for it, for what more did I want of their deadly differences?

A dozen arms lifted me, a dozen more moving under to carry all of me, even the parts escaping the shattered container of my body, all those blood-let organs, and with each step the foundlings took I cried out, and the movement of so many hands made an uneven gurney, but they did not slow nor answer whatever unintelligible queries I tried to make, and anyway I asked only to lose consciousness, to fall toward the buzzing light awaiting, but always I was tasked to witness, to remember, and so I bore it, and from atop their hands I looked through the trees and into that wife-made sky, always before empty, and there I saw some stars appear against the dusky bowl, and I knew those new stars by their old names; for they were the stars my wife had called down from our sky all those longest years before, that had fallen through the lake and into the black below, and in them I saw some letters of that ancient alphabet restored, the old stories, and while they were not complete still I recognized their shapes, sky-bear and tall-tree, gold-crown and lake-whale, first-father and ever-mother—

And then my sight was gone, and then there was no more sky, only some more constrained space, and even through my blindness, some transition from light to darkness, from level to sloped. And then being carried through that darkness, down into it. And then stretches of time not stopping, unmarked by anything but the steady breathing of those many foundlings carrying me onward, and when one tired he was replaced by another, and on the back of this swarming litter I descended without stoppage, all the wreck of me carried as one thing, if a spill could be so carried, rushed onward, down into darker dark, stronger song.

AFTER THAT LONG PORTAGE, THERE was again light, but the sights that returned with it were nothing I saw with my eyes, although I opened them too, useless as they were.

What did I see then, with that other gaze? Ceiling at first, and ceiling only, from where I lay suspended, belly up atop the foundlings, now crowded close together, a press of bodies below me, keeping me aloft. We had entered a cave, and the cave was like the one my wife and I had lived in while I built our house.

To the foundlings, I said, Enough.

I said, Please, you have carried me far enough.

They had carried me, and also the tune of the song, and the song was louder here than it was in the woods or the passages we journeyed down to reach wherever here was. Now I heard how they voiced it without inflection, without tone, and yet all the notes were correct, although correct as opposed to what I did not know, sure only of their correctness. I did not think they would hear me speak, not over the volume of the song, and also of the sound, these two separate but similar things now loud together, loud even through my deafness, which like my blindness had not mitigated, only been made different, so that while it had not been healed still I could hear, and so the foundlings did too, and in one motion they lowered my body to the floor.

By that light I looked upon my body, a glance so brief it could only survey the vast damage, the irreconcilable nature of my wounds, not sickness alone but also the crude angers of these foundlings. There was no saving myself that I saw, and so no reason to withhold any effort. I forced myself to stand, felt the breaks in my body shift around my new stance, and then I gathered my spilled self up into my arms, forced it rudely back through the hole in my belly, which no longer bled. I closed my eyes, breathed in, smelled the copper and cordite of my pains, and when I opened my eyes again, then the song stopped.

Now there was more air in the room, more unbreathed breaths remaining, and soon I saw all there was, gathered in that gloom: All the foundlings, wood-sprung, crowded close in all their wrongness, any slivers of rightness remembered encased in fault and waste and never. On their circled faces were formed all the expressions that together might have combined to make one lost boy’s face, but once separated those features made no sense, nothing any whole person would mistake for the same articulation, and yet I knew my wife had so mistaken, and in their swarmed faces—their hundreds of faces, arrayed in every direction, from wall to wall, point to point in the darkness—I almost missed hers, hung there in front of me, a glowing moon of skin set atop her long neck, her graceful shoulders, her slim body not standing above the foundlings but sitting among them, rested in some rocking chair, so much like the one I had made her that it returned pain to my body, which had been numb to such sensation—or rather, pain returned to me, floating around and through, my body nerveless, barely present.

My wife rocked, but no child sat upon her lap.

My wife, she had tested every child there, but none had fit, no one child matching that weight she missed without admitting her missing, that voice she craved without knowing what it would sound like when next it was heard. These foundlings were her wishes, her griefs manifested in all their glory and blame, and as she stood into the space between me and them I saw in her revealed shape the return of the scorched wife, the burned woman I had found upon reaching the deepest house, and for a moment I startled at the sight, for I realized that in that cave I had expected to find not a wife at all but rather a bear, a bear afire, made from the woman my wife had been.

And what had averted that fate? What had kept her from what change befell the wife before her, the foundling’s mother, my long adversary?

Perhaps only the fire within, which would abide no clothes upon her, and perhaps no fur either.

Away from my stories, she had become herself again, the woman she had arced toward whenever I was not there to tell her whom I wanted her to be; and in her absence I had also moved toward this limited man I was now, this best man I could be.

My wife’s heat blazed immense, and if I’d still had sweat within me it would have burned away, wicked from the flapping of my skin. My armful of myself dried, shrank in my hands, my mouth parched, my nostrils singed with the smell of their hair. I turned my face away, felt the prickle of her heat follow my cheek, and then I righted my gaze, held her eyes steady as she held mine: Here she was, and here I was before her, drawn as always to this woman, these women she had been, pulled through time and memory, through those long bodies of the world.

My wife, I said, and the heat from her licked at my lips, dried my voice.

I said, I have been no husband to you, and the fire ate my words, so that I had to wet my mouth, reloose my tongue.

My wife, I said, I have been no husband, and no father, but you have been a mother to these children—and that was the whole truth of it. As broken and bad as these foundlings might be, they were hers if she wanted them, and she had gathered them close, had accepted the mothering even of the most awful: Not the memories of me, or of our first lost son—my son, my fingerling—but of this foundling, this one whom she had not birthed but for whom she had done all else, had nursed, had taught, had swaddled and sang to, and it was in him that she was best to be found, in this person made lovely to her even if never to me.

Now in this cave, all the foundling’s aspects were gathered, real and otherwise, and I did not doubt she could see them all, all the possibilities of his past and present, his future.

My wife’s skin, black already, blackened again, and as she moved her head around me I heard the crinkle of her flesh, again like the pages of a book, a story crackling.

I knew I could not smell the smoke that filled the room, no longer had any sense of smell, and then through the smoke my wife said, Time and time again you have told me about our children, about all the children you see, but I do not see what you see.

Her face so and close, yes, a whiff of her old perfume, hidden behind history or else only a scented memory, and no right sense. She was so old now—we were both so old—but still I found her beautiful, and here, in this beauty, I always would be arriving, however long delayed: I did not know how much deeper the world went, how many more caves beneath caves there were, but there was no longer any distance I would not follow her, no unlit chambers that could hide her fire, and always I would seek her through the darkness, and always I would deliver my body bowed beneath my awe at what and who she was, by what more she had become and was becoming:

Here were the children I wanted to have with her or, if not the ones I dreamed, then the dreams I deserved, right for what world I had made.

Here was the foundling, now one made many, and on each one’s lips was a song or part of a song, the songs she sang of them before they came and also after.

Here was the foundling, her mothering of him: our parenting that I had barely joined, and then my withdrawal from that arrangement, its continuation in my absence.

Here was her deep house, which I had burned in my frustration.

Here were her great stairs, left to lead me through the black, even if I was too much a coward to follow.

Here was my wife, scorched and sad and forgetful, and here was me, her husband, supplicant and penitent, and how far she’d had to go to get me to follow her right, so that I might arrive at the place where I could at any time have come more easily with less pain for her and for all others.

For all my life, I thought that she was the receptacle into which I would put some seed of mine, make the family I wanted, but it was I who was the empty vessel, carved stubborn as stone, as unburnable as the moon, ready at last to be filled with the fire and with the song, and these last two elements were weaved so deeply into the hidden magic of the world that I had forgotten to count them among my numbers, although all my life they had been there to make us: And then the foundlings sang, Let there be fire, and then there was fire beneath the earth.

MY WIFE PUT HER HAND upon my face, said, I remember you now. You have righted yourself, fixed your face from out your beard, cut away the wrong hair.

She said, You changed without me, and I forgot how to recognize you through the changes.

And what was there to do but to agree?

My wife raised her free hand, placed it on my other bare cheek, and then her body burst black inside its flame, those flicking tongues white-blue, then hotter colors, colors hued indescribable, and the stone floor of the cave heated too, and all the foundlings cried out, their ghostly range of voices so narrow, so similar. My pooled and pooling blood sizzled, evaporated, and then I was falling, and still my wife gripped my face, held me from off my knees. She lifted me straight, pulled me to her, and then the flames were through my skin, inside my open body, razing away the last shreds of my wedding suit, and still I could not look at her, ashamed as I was of my old and broken shape, dying grotesque.

My wife, she took my slipping guts from out my hands, pushed them back in through my open belly, and then she said, Husband.

She said, Husband, I remember you.

She said, I remember singing you your vows, and then her hands were inside me too, so horrible and hot, what her fever must have felt like, the halls of memory enflamed, and still the fire spreading, spreading. I opened my eyes to see her, black before me in the dark and the flame, the surface of her shape again the negative of the one I had better known, and when she removed her hands she left me open, and then she moved against and around me in the fire, her long legs making circling steps, and in the fire she began to sing, and as the fire and the song grew it became a furnace, and we were in it together, and the foundlings too, the vastness of them, their child-faces pressed close, and now like us they were even less flesh and bones than before, and in their difference and their disarray they came faster and faster, and from each of their lips my wife took one note, and when the child was soundless he moved into the fire, and then the fire moved into me, into her, into us, and how full I got, how fast moving my thoughts, like a clock ticking full of futures new and unlikely and somehow possible, and how lovely my wife’s song was, and how long before it was over I knew there would be no foundlings left, that it was in them that my wife’s story was stored, the before and after of my leaving her, kept in her true child, the one I had buried in her last woods, and what she had waited for in her house was not me and my story but her son, returned to her and by the woods restored, as another woods had restored so many of the other lives I had failed to steward or to groom, and the song my wife sang was the finest I had ever heard, but it was not the song I had searched for.

This song, it did not restore me, but that was no longer why I had come, and no more would my want be to go on and on and on, to live without end, a desire that would not have stopped with the death of my body or my children’s or their children’s but only with the extinction of every possible world, so that my end would come at the termination of all things, that last threshold of possibility.

No more, I said, begged with my mouth filling with fire, my eyes and my hands and my stomach and lungs filled with the same.

No more was enough, I begged, and more than I deserved.

Only after the last of the foundling had passed between us was my body closed and my wife’s opened, enclosing me, drawing me in. It was not the love we’d had, but it was enough, and there at the bottom of the world I moved my broken body against hers, and in that cave I once more gave half a child into her, where our many wants might meet the half a child she had left, the memory of a song, and yes, throughout our coupling she sang, and it was a new song, made from the song that had made the fingerling and all his failed brothers and sisters, that had made the new moon and made the deep house and the deeper house and this deepest house, its dirt and lake and woods, its foundlings, its cave beneath them all, buttressed by the bones of the world, made a vault or else a safe haven, so that no matter how many levels collapsed above us still our child might somewhere be protected from the mistakes of its parents.

AFTER OUR RETURN TO THE house, we resumed for a time our lives together, as husband and wife.

My wife’s body paled again, and this new color lasted, her skin now flush only with her songs, a music employed to sing back the world we had known and also to better it: A sun rose in the sky the week after our return, or at least some convincing illusion of one, and that night, after it set, a moon followed its unrestrained arc. Clouds came later, and then rain falling, and then grass poking through the dirt, although from what seeds, from where? I did not know, did not ask. No longer did I need to know all the seats of power. It was enough that my wife’s songs added to what we had, and anyway I was not restored as she was, and so my old and tired body had not the strength to fight. At night we slept in a bed together—a bed of wood again and not of stone—but in the mornings I often arose coughing and sore to find her already gone, hanging again some photographs upon the wall or else rebuilding the nursery I had turned into my den. During the day she gardened, and as she gardened she sang to our child, the one growing within, made below the earth but destined to live upon it.

This time, there was no boredom at the slow progress of her pregnancy, the weeks of slimness nor the first small bulge that followed. Together, we touched and listened and sang, my rough and toneless voice doing its best below the beauty of her right one, and while only rarely had I sung with her before, now I did at every chance, whenever my throat was not too ravaged, and for less than a year, this was our life.

That near year, it was not without its sorrow, and its passing did not forgive us or help us to forget what we had done, but it was good enough for me to accept my fate, the fate of this place, the last of all the world I would ever see, and even as it was improved by measures, still I knew it would prove temporary.

It was the last world for me, but not for my wife, made young again, and not for our child, who with my wife I had determined must escape, must inherit what first home we had made, to make of it as she would or else choose to leave it behind, to return to that country from which her parents had embarked, the one on the other side of the lake, across the mountains, that busy land where we were born, all those many worlds ago.

My wife and I first denied the coming of the end, but the signs became manifest, multiplied. Even with her restored song and her many feats that followed, it seemed this last place was doomed to fall, and so it was the woods that failed first, their trees growing leafless with the advance of days, then rotting, toppling to the ground. There was no life there, and no bear to make more, to roar right the shapes it required, and eventually not even any cave, that hollow having collapsed some months into my wife’s pregnancy, after it became obvious she would not return. The lake was similarly diminished but faded more slowly, drying up with every day I spent on the land instead of swimming beneath its surface as my next nature desired me to do. From the shore, I sometimes watched the fingerling-fish flash through the water, plentiful without my culling but seemingly senseless too, now only animals that I pretended I felt no kinship to, no responsibility for.

With the trees leaf-bare and the water dropping, an ill-tasting wind began to blow across the dirt, eroding its surface into the air, and already that new sun was dimming, that new moon’s orbits growing less straight, more heavy looking upon the sky, and soon there would be no reason to stay here, and perhaps no way. My wife had made the shape we needed for our story, and now our story was ending, and so also its world.

Memory as last conversation: To wait in my chair upon the porch, old and tired, bones aching and eyes heavy, for my now-round wife to return from her gardening behind the house. To allow her to sit down beside me, to take my hand in hers. To smile but to wait for her to speak, then to listen so close to her words, the favorite song of her soft speech, and then to hear her say that it was time for us to leave, to take our child from this place.

My wife then, she was not exactly herself—not the self I had known—but she was some new woman like her and just as easy to love.

My wife, she said: I do not remember the world you spoke of, that you told me was once like this one, but I want to see it, and if I am the reason it was destroyed, then I want to be the method by which it might be rebuilt.

With her hand in my hand, with her eyes on mine, she said, I want our child to have everything we wanted to give a child, and to give her our world together.

Come with me, she said, and for a moment I thought that she knew my plans, but then she continued, and I saw that my latest secret—last of them all—was yet mine alone.

She stood, lifted me from my chair, and then she said, Come with me and help me get ready, for there is much left to do and so little time to do it.

And how she was right, and also wrong, for time was not what she thought it was, in her new youth, nor what I had thought it was in mine, passed so very long ago.

I did not know what my wife would find when she reached the surface, nor truly how well she might weather the journey upward, climbing the great stairs and pushing through the black only to arrive at the terrible truth of the deep house, the rent and ruined rooms of that palace that had held the treasures of her person.

I did not know if the surface above burned or bloomed or if there were any walls remaining of our first house, any chimney still allowing guesses as to where walls once stood, might go again.

Perhaps she would reach the surface to find the way impassible and would not be able to climb out of the earth without more destruction, without carving her way forward, and what then, and what would that do to what unmarked mother she had become?

Perhaps, perhaps, and no answers anyway.

There were just the two of us now, and also the one coming, and most often we were quiet and simple with each other, and in bed that night I laid behind my wife, put my hand atop her belly, and as our baby kicked within I asked her about the song the foundling had sung over me, in the moment after my heart attack. Did she remember that song? Had she taught it to him? Did she still have it to sing?

My wife could not see my face, and I did not permit her to turn around, to face my face while she answered. I did not want her to see my expression, to see what ugly thing hope was doing there, to my twisting lips, my twitching cheeks.

I said, Answer me where you are, or else don’t.

My wife, she pressed back into me, patting my hand on her belly with her hand, and then she said, What if it was the other that restored you? That saved you when you needed him most?

No, I said. It was not him.

And yet! And always, and no matter. All that was ended, and this too.

EARLY STILL, ON THE MORNING of our scheduled departure: I left our bed in the chilled hour before the dawn, careful not to wake my wife. I took one last look at her, at the swelled curves of her body, at her face more precious to me than ever before, except maybe at the very first. When I had seen all I could hope to see, then I slipped out of the house and down to the lake.

At the edge of the dock, I removed my clothes, folded them onto the slats, the sung boards made to resemble the other dock above, the one I had made with my own hands. I felt the dew upon those planks, wiggled my toes against that damp, then shivered at the breeze goosebumping the scarred and folded leather of my skin.

Those scars were my palace as the deep house was my wife’s, as the woods and the cave were the bear’s, as much as any other part of my flesh, another version of my story lashed from my ankle to my back to my shoulder, to my chest and my face and my hands, and now I was leaving all of them behind.

I had told my wife what I had done and what it had made me, and still she took me back.

I believed she loved me again, and because she loved me, I had kept one more secret plan, this tucked-away mercy.

Memory as stretched moment, as elastic time, as always for me the moments have been: To know that I had made all the journeys I could, or would. To believe that my wounds had left me mostly unfit for marriage, for fatherhood, for any world less simple than this one, and my wife and our coming child deserved better, because despite my softening I believed it was better to have no husband than one like me.

To imagine my wife might have said this was not for me to decide.

To agree in principle, while still rejecting her claim, while choosing not to give her the chance to voice it.

When I dared delay no longer, I flexed my body beneath my old skin, felt its sure response despite its many creaks and popping cracks: This man was going to die, but the squid the man could choose to be might live some time longer, at least until the lake was dry, just dust dispersing, blown upon the last wind. In that water awaited the only other I had not forgiven, and before this deep-sunk world was ended I wanted whatever there could be between us, between my last shape and his, even if this thing I would be wanted nothing so grand, needed nothing but what could be provided by instinct, by hunger and rutting. I hoped that within that simplicity was left some space, a slimness where the last of a man might control what a squid would be, what it became—and then I felt the first heat of the morning’s sun—and then I was running for the end of the dock, the last running I would ever do, and as I reached the edge I leaped—and in the air I felt some catch in my throat, a black thread long swallowed, a black hair tugged taut and then snapping—and what an awful relief it was—and after I hit the water, how horrible it was to still be me, how I had hoped that I would not be, and yet still there I was, always me me me, man as trapper and hunter, as bear-bane, as ghost-killer, as husband failed, father-failure, squid and—

—memory as mid-shift, mid-sentence, mid-sound: To be beneath the light-dappled surface but not yet deep. To turn back and see a shape standing on the edge of the platform, tall and heart-proud against the sky, then tumbling forward into the water, a falling pile of bones and skin and regret, what that shape was always going to become, no matter how well it tried to love, no matter how badly it had most often failed to do so, and as it fell it broke the surface of the lake—

—and in the lake there was water and salt and black fish, blacker eels, and more of each every day. How the fish sustained the eels, and the eels the squid. Getting full and staying full. Sated, satisfied. Then the fish moving inside even as they moved without. Then the squid’s body suddenly heavy, until swimming was torture. Then the surface unreachable by any effort, then descending in wide circles, sinking through soundless depths. Then more and more of the black fishes, still each a finger’s length, and then more of the eels, longer and wider and heavier toothed.

Then darkness, then blackness—then what was below the blackness, the second layer of blacker black.

Then realizing the blackness moved, was moving, that the blackness had scales, had fins and tails, had voices, saying FATHER, saying FATHER. Voices hungry, unfooled by new shapes, each speaking memories and prophecies.

Voices, many voices, but also only one, and in the deepest of the depths, something else, a mass of flesh and bone sunk earlier to the bottom, now split and torn, now more food for these angrier shapes, and now the squid trapped beside it, held down by their weight, wounded by their biting through the mantle, their scrabbling at armor and shell—

—and still I remembered, although I did not want to, and still I went on, because I was not without my power, not without danger, protected by hook and tentacle and hard beak, and even then the fingerlings were not worried. There were more of them than there were of me, and they were patient, and they were thorough. One day they would consume me, make their new life from mine, from what mine had become, as always they had promised me they would: When they were done with the bear, they would come for the squid, and from me they would take their last strength, and if it happened before the lake dried, still I would be satisfied, because they would be ended too, trapped as I wanted them trapped, given no more entry to the better worlds above, and their future was so short, and the real future was elsewhere, and when I was not only the squid I could see it coming, a prophecy so sure it seemed a final memory, a history already past:

My wife, pregnant upon the great stairs, climbing tall steps in the dark.

My wife, pregnant upon a landing over a chasm, pregnant in the empty halls of the deep house, crying for what had been lost.

My wife, pregnant and expectant, climbing out of the earth and back onto the dirt, where a shattered house stood or did not stand.

My wife, doubled with contractions, singing through the pain to close the sundered dirt, to flatten the land.

My wife, clutching her swelling, delaying the baby so close now; my wife delaying to sing foundations back down into the dirt, singing up walls atop those foundations, singing up roof and windows and doors—and then when the house was ready my wife walking through the front door, clutching at every new rail and corner, pulling herself into a bedroom much like a bedroom she had known, and then lying down upon the same-shaped bed.

My wife, screaming the birth-song she had waited a life to sing entire, her sound beautiful as a bird’s, angry as a bear’s, and her hands now raising her skirts, now delivering alone this new and howling child, some whole daughter come at last, whom together we had cracked dirt and time in want of, her tiny shape now filling my wife’s messy arms, and still the birth-song continuing, creating everything else a child’s world might need, beasts and fowl and fish, stars and story and songs, more songs, one song to contain all others, and all of them together still only one, all elements combining to make a world, to give that world a name, to give that name to a child, who might carry it forward, onward into whatever awaited her, whatever other landscape she would make to call her own, and then the past was ending, and then the present began, and then I saw the future just beyond it, everything that happened next, but not to me.