She used to tell him that they'd have the house forever. One day their children would live there. When Jack grew too old to walk, or to feed himself, she would take care of him in this house. She would feed him right from her own mouth, with a kiss. He'd always counted on her keeping this promise.
But as her condition worsened, as the changes accelerated, he realized that this was a promise she could not keep. The roles were to be reversed, and it was to be he who fed his lifetime lover with a kiss full of raw meat and blood. Sweet, domestic vintage.
Early in their marriage his wife had told him that there was this history of depression in her family. That's the way members of the family always talked about it: the sadness, the melancholy, the long slow condition. Before he understood what this meant he hadn't taken it that seriously, because at the time she never seemed depressed. Once their two oldest reached the teen years, however, she became sad, and slow to move, her eyes dark stones in the clay mask of her face, and she stopped telling him about her family's history of depression. When he asked her about the old story, she acted as if she didn't know what he was talking about.
At some point during her rapid deterioration someone had labeled his family "possibly dysfunctional." Follow-up visits from teachers and social workers had removed "possibly" from his family's thickening file. Studies and follow-up studies had been completed, detailed reports and addenda analyzing his children's behavior and the family dynamics. He had fought them all the way, and perhaps they had tired of the issue, because they finally gave up on their investigations. His family had weathered their accusations. He had protected his wife and children, fulfilled his obligations. Finally people left them alone, but they could not see that something sacred was occurring in this house.
The house grew old quickly. But not as quickly as his wife and children.
"You're so damned cheerful all the time," she said to him. "It makes me sick."
At one time that might have been a joke. Looking into her gray eyes at this moment, he knew it was not. "I'm maintaining," he said. "That's all." He thought maybe her vision was failing her. He was sure it had been months since he'd last smiled. He bent over her with the tea, then passed her a cracker. She stretched her neck and tried to catch his lips in her teeth. He expected a laugh but it didn't come.
"You love me?" she asked, her voice flat and dusty. He put the cracker in his mouth and let her take it from his lips. He could hear his teenage daughters in the next room moaning from the bed. They'd been there two months already, maybe more.
She reached up with a brittle touch across his cheek. "They take after me, you know?" And then she did smile, then opened her mouth around a dry cough of a laugh.
Downstairs their seven-year-old son made loud motorcycle noises with moist lips and tongue. Thank God he takes after his father, he thought, and would have laughed if he could. Beneath him his sweet wife moaned, her lips cracked and peeling. A white tongue flickered like the corner of a starched handkerchief.
He bit down hard into the tender scar on the inside of his mouth. He ground one tooth, two, through the tentative pain. When he tasted salt he began to suck, mixing the salt and iron taste with a saliva that had become remarkable in its quantity, until the frothy red cocktail was formed.
He bent over her lips with this beverage kiss and allowed her tongue to meet his, her razor teeth still held back in supplication. In this way he fed her when she could no longer feed herself, when she could not move, when she could not hunt, when in their house tall curtains of dust floated gently around them.
"The girls," she said, once her handkerchief tongue was soaked and her pale lips glistened pinkly.
But still he could not go into his daughters' bedroom, and had to listen to them moan their hunger like pale and hairless, motherless rats.
"Tell me again, Jack," his wife whispered wetly from the bed. "Tell me again how wonderful life is." These were among the last words she would ever use with him.
The young man at the front door wore the blue uniform of the delivery service. Overripe brown sacks filled each of his arms, blending into his fat cheeks as if part of them. He smiled all the time. Jack smiled a hungry smile back.
"Your groceries, sir." Behind him were the stirrings of dry skin against cloth, insect legs, pleadings too starved and faint to be heard clearly.
As the young man handed the sacks over to him, Jack's fingertips brushed the pale backs of the man's hands. He imagined he could feel the heat there, the youthful coursing through veins, feeding pale tissues, warming otherwise cold meat.
Sometimes he took his daughters hunting, if they were strong enough, but so far he had been able to limit them to slugs, worms, insects, small animals. He wondered how long he could hold them to that when the stores kept sending them tender young delivery boys. He wondered how long it would be before his daughters were as immobile as his wife, and begged him to bring them something more. Somewhere behind him there was a tiny gasp, the rising pressure of tears which could not fall.
Some evenings he would sit up talking to his family long into the night. They did not always respond precisely to his confessions of loneliness, of dreams which did not include them, and he wondered if it was because of the doors that separated them from him.
Sometimes he would go to the closet doors and open them. Where his wife stood, folded back against the wall with the coats and robes. Where his daughters leaned one against the other like ancient, lesbian mops. Kiss us, the dry whisper came from somewhere within the pale flaps of their faces. Jack still loved them desperately, but he could not do what they asked.
His youngest, his only son, had taken to his bed.
Jack brought his daughters mice and roaches he had killed himself. They sucked on them like sugar candy until most of the color was gone, and then they spat them out.
Months ago they had stopped having their periods. The last few times had been pale pink and runny, and Jack had cried for them, then cleaned them up with old burlap sacks.
His son disappeared from his bed one evening. Jack found him standing in the closet, his eyes full of moths, his hands stiffened into hooks.
Later his son would disappear from time to time, sometimes showing up in one of the other closets, clutching at mother or sisters, sometimes curled up inside the empty toy box (the boy had no more use for toys, having his own body to play with—sometimes he'd chew a finger into odd shapes).
Jack continued to feed his wife from his own mouth. Sometimes his mouth was so raw he could not tear any more skin off the insides. Then he'd bite through a rat or a bird himself, holding its rank warmth in his cheeks until he could deliver the meal. She returned his kisses greedily, always wanting more than he could provide. But he had spoiled her. She would not feed any other way.
His son became a good hunter, and sometimes Jack would hear him feeding on the other side of the closet door. Pets began disappearing from the neighborhood, and Jack stopped answering the door even for delivery boys.
His daughters became despondent and refused to eat. When he opened their closet door they tried to disguise themselves as abandoned brooms. Finally Jack had to hold them one at a time, forcing his blood smeared tongue past their splintered lips into the dry cisterns of their mouths so that they might leech nourishment. Once he'd overcome their initial resistance they scraped his tongue clean, then threatened to carve it down to the root, but Jack always knew the exact moment to pull out.
Sometimes he wondered if they still considered him a good father, an adequate husband. He tried singing his children lullabies, reciting poetry to his wife. They nodded their full heads of dust in the gale of his breath, but said nothing.
When the food delivery boys no longer came he saved a portion of his kills for himself. And whenever possible he swallowed his own bloody wet kisses, and tried to remember the feel of his wife's hands on his face, back when her skin was soft and her breath was sweet.
In the houses around him, he knew a hundred hearts beat, desperately chasing life's apprehensions through a racecourse of veins. He tried to ignore the hunger brought on by such thinking. He tried to picture his neighbors' faces, but could not.
His family became so light he could carry them about the house without effort. If he hadn't heard their close whispers, he might have thought them a few old towels thrown across his shoulder. Sometimes he would set them down and forget them, later rushing around in panic to find where they'd been mislaid.
The lighter, the thinner they became, the more blood they seemed to require. When his mouth became too sore to chew he would apply razor blades to the scar tissue, slicing through new white skin into the thicker layers beneath, finally into muscle so that the blood would fill his mouth to spilling before he could get his mouth completely over theirs. Blood stained their thin chests with a rough crimson bib.
And still they grew thinner, their bones growing fibrous, pulpy-, before beginning to dissolve altogether. He made long rips in his forearms, his thighs, his calves, and held his wife and children up to drink there. The blood soaked through the tissues of their flesh, through the translucent fibres of their hair, washing through their skin until in the dusty shadows of the house they looked vaguely tanned.
But almost as quickly they were pale again, and thin as a distant memory.
He took to slicing off hunks of thigh muscle, severing fingertips, toes. His family ate for months off the bloody bits, their small rat teeth nibbling listlessly. They had ceased using words of any kind long ago, so they could not express their thanks. But Jack didn't mind. This was the family he'd always dreamed of. The look of appreciation in their colorless eyes was thanks enough.
At first he tore his clothes to rags to staunch the blood, but even the rags eventually fell apart. One day seeing his son sucking up the last bit of red from a torn twist of cloth he decided to forego the last vestiges of his modesty and throw the ragged clothes away. After that time he would walk about the dreary old house naked, wearing only the paperthin bodies of his family wrapped around him, their mouths fixed tightly to his oozing wounds.
This went on for months, wearing his family constantly, their feeding so regular and persistent it seemed to alter the very rhythm of his heart. He would wake up in the middle of the night to the soft sucking noise their lips and teeth made against his flesh. He would awaken a few hours later and the first thing he would see was the stupored look in their eyes as they gazed up at him in adoration. He was pleased to see that such constant nourishment fattened them and brought color to their skin so that eventually they fell off his body from the sheer weight of them.
Wriggling about his feet at first, they eventually decided to explore the house on their own. Obviously, they felt far healthier than before.
Again they did not thank him, but what did a good husband and father need of thanks?
They soon grew thin again, soft, transparent.
After a year he had not seen them again. Although occasionally he might swear to a face hidden within the upholstery, an eye rolling past a furniture leg, a dry mouth praying silently among the house plants filmed in a dark, furry dust.
After five years even the garbled whispering had stopped. He continued to watch over the house, intent on his obligation. And after preparing a blood kiss in the pale vacancy of his mouth, he was content to drink it himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment