Mammother Read online

  OTHER BOOKS

  BY ZACHARY SCHOMBURG

  Poetry

  The Book of Joshua (2014)

  Fjords, vol. 1 (2012)

  Scary, No Scary (2009)

  The Man Suit (2007)

  MAMMOTHER

  by Zachary Schomburg

  Copyright © 2017 by Zachary Schomburg

  Mammother was written while on artist residency at Château de Monthelon in France. http://www.monthelon.org/

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for review.

  Published by featherproof Books

  First edition

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942658

  Print ISBN 978-1-943888-10-8

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-943888-13-9

  Edited by: Tim Kinsella

  Cover Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs

  Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-DIG-fsa-8a28667]

  Design by: Zach Dodson

  Proofread by: Sam Axelrod

  CHARACTER LIST

  Mano Medium, son of Sisi Medium, factory worker, new barber and new butcher, creator of The Death Lessons.

  Pepe Let, son/apprentice of The Butcher, son of Mitzi Let.

  Sisi Medium, mother of Mano Medium. Lives in her bathtub.

  The Butcher, father of Pepe Let, husband of Mitzi Let.

  Mitzi Let, mother of Pepe Let, wife of The Butcher.

  Nana Pine, mother of Enid Pine, works in a strawberry field.

  Enid Pine, daughter of Nana Pine, factory worker, works in her mother’s strawberry field, suitor of Mano Medium.

  Inez Roar, wife of The Barber (original), wife of The Barber (third), mother of Zuzu Roar.

  Zuzu Roar, daughter of Inez Roar and The Barber (original), aka Bebé.

  Father Mothers, founder of Pie Time.

  Father Mothers II, son of Father Mothers, and father of Father Mothers III.

  Father Mothers III, priest of Lady Blood, creator of Lady Bods, aka Father Mothers, Red Mothers.

  Lil’ Jorge, young assistant of Father Mothers.

  The Foreman, brother of Vera Good, husband of June Good, the foreman of Pie Time beer and cigarette factory.

  June Good, wife of The Foreman, lover of Vera Good, the face of Pie Time, aka Mrs. Good.

  Vera Good, sister of The Foreman, lover of June Good (née Fair), founder of The Good House for Children and the Very Old, aka Ms. Good.

  Father Felipe, new priest of XO-sponsored The Hole.

  The Businessman, two men and one woman in charge of XO.

  The Lawyer, the lawyer for XO.

  The Landlord, the landlord for every home in Pie Time.

  The Builder, the builder.

  The Innkeeper, the innkeeper.

  The Bartender, the bartender.

  The Baker, father of Mary Minutes and Mimi Minutes.

  Mary Minutes, childhood friend of Enid Pine, factory worker, larger sister of Mimi Minutes, formerly conjoined.

  Mimi Minutes, childhood friend of Enid Pine, factory worker, smaller sister of Mary Minutes, formerly conjoined.

  The Barber (original), husband of Inez Roar, father of Zuzu Roar, original owner of the Black Square.

  The Barber (third), second husband of Inez Roar.

  The Florist, the florist of Pie Time, friend of Mano Medium.

  Roberto, childhood love of The Florist.

  The Butcher (third), the butcher at XO Market, suitor of Zuzu Roar.

  The Shoveler, father of Ernest and Ernesto Horn, husband of Lois Horn, inventor of the graveyard.

  Ernesto Horn, son of The Shoveler and Lois Horn, older brother of Ernesto Horn, first participant in The Death Lessons.

  Ernest Horn, son of The Shoveler and Lois Horn, younger brother of Ernesto Horn, first participant in The Death Lessons.

  Lois Horn, wife of The Shoveler, mother of Ernesto and Ernest Horn.

  Hera Horn, second wife of The Shoveler.

  Leda Horn, wife of Ernesto Horn.

  Lois Horn, daughter of Ernesto Horn and Leda Horn, identical triplet sister of Luis Horn and Luis Horn.

  Luis Horn, son of Ernesto Horn and Leda Horn, identical triplet brother of Lois Horn and Luis Horn.

  Luis Horn, son of Ernesto Horn and Leda Horn, identical triplet brother of Lois Horn and Luis Horn.

  Beulah Minx, wife of The Postman (original), original owner of the black poodle.

  The Postman (original), husband of Beulah Minx.

  The Humanitarians, brother and sister team of XO-trained humanitarians from Nun’s Hat.

  The Vuillemeyers, family of The Humanitarians from Nun’s Hat.

  Rona Rile, wife of Lana Rile, mother of Fran Rile.

  Lana Rile, wife of Rona Rile, mother of Fran Rile.

  Fran Rile, daughter of Rona Rile and Lana Rile.

  Irene Mire, sister of Mira Mire, oldest woman in Pie Time, lives at The Good House for Children and the Very Old.

  Mira Mire, sister of Irene Mire.

  Igor, boy who lives at The Good House for Children and the Very Old.

  “A line? A dot? Why not a bird?”

  -Yves Klein

  Table of Contents

  Pr.

  Part One

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Part Two

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Chapter 30.

  Chapter 31.

  Chapter 32.

  Chapter 33.

  Chapter 34.

  Chapter 35.

  Part Three

  Chapter 36.

  Chapter 37.

  Chapter 38.

  Chapter 39.

  Chapter 40.

  Chapter 41.

  Chapter 42.

  Chapter 43.

  Chapter 44.

  Chapter 45.

  Chapter 46.

  Chapter 47.

  Chapter 48.

  Chapter 49.

  Chapter 50.

  Chapter 51.

  Acknowledgments

  Pr.

  If you felt ready to die, wanted death bad enough, and had little enough to live for, The Reckoner would grant your wish and fall on you. It would crush your skeleton deep into the ground. No one in Pie Time would hear it fall, and no one would know when it stood itself back up. But it would always stand itself back up. The blood on its bark would wash away in the rain.

  In the early morning hours, after the worst day and night of his life, Mano trudged the long path through the woods toward The Reckoner from where he woke up, near the banks of The Cure. The Reckoner creaked like it was about to fall. Mano’s face was in his hands. His toes moved in his shoes. He anticipated its full weight on the back of his head. His skeleton creaked inside his body waiting. He moved his hands to his sides, and lifted his head. “Please, I’m ready to die, too.”

  He knew though that he would have to be patient. Sometimes it could take days for The Reckoner to make its decision.
He picked up a stick and chewed it like a horse. With half of his stick still unchewed, he wrote his name in the mud.

  Mano Medium.

  Mano was cloaked in his mother’s bed sheet. Half of a black cloud hovered above him, a piece of its end missing. The poodle at his feet was like his shadow.

  “Mano was a good boy.” Mano tried to speak in his mother’s voice. He tightened his throat and loosened his lips a little. But it didn’t sound right. He couldn’t remember exactly what her voice sounded like. He tried it again. “Pepe Let was a good boy.” That sounded a little closer, emphasizing the ooo in “good.” “Pepe Let was a good boy,” he said again, this time hitting the “was.”

  Mano was not ready to go back into town. He closed his eyes, and said Pepe’s name out loud again. He slowed it way down so it sounded like a creak.

  PART ONE

  1.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  Sisi Medium took a drag of her cigarette, and exhaled above the bathtub into the cloud. “On your birthday, you will become a man.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mano was afraid to become anything at all, much less a man.

  “So, are you ready?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m not ready.”

  She looked out the window. “What do you want?”

  “What do you mean, what do I want?”

  “For your birthday.”

  Sisi had never given her son a birthday gift before. She had no money. And she lived in her bathtub.

  Mano didn’t know how to answer his mother’s question. He had so few things that he didn’t know what things there were to want. “You mean...like a thing?”

  “Yeah, a thing. Don’t you like things?”

  “I love things.” Mano didn’t know if he did love things, but now for the first time, he thought that he might. He was sitting on the toilet. The toilet was a thing. But did he love it? He looked at the toilet like he loved it, and then it became true. “Like this toilet, ma’am. I love this toilet.”

  “I’m sure you do. But you know so few toilets.”

  Mano counted the toilets that he knew, but could only get to four.

  “Do you want another toilet for your birthday?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what is it you want?”

  Mano thought about all the things in the world and which of those things that he might want. Sisi waited, looking out the window at the top of the bare tree in the white sky. She always put her cigarette out by dipping it in her bathwater, making a quick sizzle. Then she’d pile it up like a dead body among the other butts in her glass ashtray.

  It’s High Time for a Pie Time.

  “Grab me a beer while you think.”

  Mano always made sure to keep the small refrigerator in the bathroom fully stocked with cold Pie Times. Every day he brought home a twelve pack and a pack of cigarettes from the Pie Time Factory, where it was his job on some days to help brew the beer, and on other days to help roll the cigarettes.

  He had his timing down just right for Sisi’s two breakfast beers. He’d retrieve the first one from her refrigerator, although she could reach it just fine on her own, and crack it open for her on the lip of the bathtub. He waited until she asked for it, like a good son. If he got it for her too soon, she’d say something like, “I don’t want a beer so early—are you crazy?” But when he waited for her to ask for it, she’d thank him, and then he’d go get ready for work. When he was done getting ready for work, he’d retrieve her second breakfast beer without waiting for her to ask for it. This was the key for her second beer. If he waited for her to ask for the second one, she’d say something like, “What does a lady have to do around here to get another beer?” But if he got her second one without asking, she’d say something like, “You’re such a good boy. You know your mama.”

  Outside Sisi’s bathroom window, Mano imagined a bird falling out of the tree and bouncing on the ground. Things that fly, he thought, must often die by falling. He cupped his hands like he wanted to feel the feeling of saving it.

  “How about a bird?”

  “You can’t have a bird,” Sisi said without turning her head from the window.

  “Why not?”

  “There are no such things as birds here.”

  The first thing Mano thought of to want was a thing that did not exist in Pie Time.

  “But is it a thing?”

  “I suppose it is a thing,” his mother said more quietly to herself now, “but it is nothing here.” Sisi lifted the chain of the drain with her good toe. Then she turned the hot water faucet with it. She had this way of resting her elbow on the lip of the bathtub and holding her can of beer in the air, letting it hang down between her ring finger and thumb, while she held her cigarette in the same hand between her middle finger and her index finger.

  The two of them lived together, alone, in a perfectly square house on the west edge of Pie Time. It had four square rooms. Each room had two doors so you could circle through the house continuously, room to room, without having to alter course. The house’s front door opened into the living room, where the furniture was green. Moving forward, like a clock, the next room was the bathroom, where his mother had been continuously soaking in the bathtub for nearly a decade. A little steam slipped out over the living room ceiling each time this door was opened. In the bathroom, the red wallpaper was buckling and dripping from the walls. It had a pattern of red ranunculuses on it. The room beyond the bathroom was the bedroom, where Mano slept alone in a bed beside a wooden chair and a brass lamp, always on call for his mother during the night, in case she woke up while soaking and called for him. Through the bedroom door was the kitchen: a white stove, a white sink in which he washed his body and face, and cold white tile floors. The only refrigerator was in the bathroom. When he walked a complete circle through the square of their house, it was like walking through the seasons of a whole year—the green spring of the living room, the hot red summer of the bathroom, the golden autumn where he slept, and the white cold winter of the kitchen. To be in a room was to be somewhere in a year. Like a clock, the only choice was to move forward, never backward, in time.

  So Mano always moved forward in time through the house. To get from his bedroom to his mother’s bathtub, he took the path through the kitchen, then the living room, which had a creaky wood floor. Each step sounded like the word eat. Eeeeeeeat, eeeat, eeeeeeeeat, eeeat. Walking through the living room made Mano feel incredibly heavy, despite how small he was. Feeling heavy made the house feel smaller, and faker, as if he was walking through the inside of a fake house.

  Mano could remember very few days from before his mother got in the bathtub. Mostly, he could only remember her in the bathtub, smoking Pie Time cigarettes, drinking Pie Time beers, about four times a day lifting the metal chain with her good toe to drain the water, and opening the valve on the faucet with the same toe to replace the old water with new water. The bathtub was her body. The tub was red like the ranunculus of the wallpaper, the kind of red that organs are. The bathtub was his mother’s lung.

  There must have been a very first lowering of her body when he was very young, like an initial offering, a giving up of something hard and sugary into the hot and limpid bath water, only then to dissolve into what is now a body saturated and quaggy. His mother’s skin was pulpy, bits of its flesh floating beneath the still grey surface like boiled pork. Had she known upon that first lowering how long she’d be soaking? If she did know then, he thought, then he’d feel even more abandoned, the burden of being orphaned somehow more unshakable than the burden of being left to feed and care for a sick mother. All those days that he could have had with a mother who lived on the outside of her bathtub.

  One of those very few first memories of Mano’s, before his mother lowered herself into the tub, was of walking along the banks of The Cure together until they came upon a launching dock for the dead. He remembered her sitting down to hang her feet into the water and telling him abou
t his father. She talked about Mano’s father uneasily, as if it was her duty.

  “Your father was a hunter,” she said.

  “How do you know?” young Mano asked.

  “He always wore a red plaid hunter’s cap, even indoors, even when he slept.” Sisi’s answer satisfied Mano. “He never took it off.”

  “What did he hunt?” asked Mano.

  “Mammoths,” she said. “He called himself The Mammother.”

  Mano liked the sound of that. “But I thought you said mammoths don’t exist.”

  “Mammoths don’t exist, you’re right.”

  “Like birds?”

  “Yes, like birds. But birds exist somewhere. Just not here. No one here knows about birds, but that doesn’t mean that birds don’t exist. Mammoths, on the other hand, exist nowhere.”

  “Then why didn’t my father just hunt birds?”

  Sisi laughed at Mano’s question, but really she was laughing at what she knew was his father’s answer to that question. “Well, because all great hunters can find birds. But only the greatest hunter can find something that doesn’t exist. Why bother spending your time looking for something that can be found? What remains once you’ve found it? Besides, what he wanted to find was a mammoth, not a bird.” Sisi took a drag of her cigarette, holding her warming can of Pie Time in the same hand. She moved her legs around in the water off the launching dock. She tried to think of a broader way of explaining such a silly concept. “It didn’t matter to your father what he could find, it only mattered to him what he wanted to find.”

  Mano nodded as if he understood. “There are no mammoths. But there was my father, The Mammother.”

  “Yes, indeed, there was The Mammother,” repeated Sisi with a sigh.

  Outside of Sisi’s bathtub was her radio, which sat on the top of the back of the toilet. At the top of every hour, the news report would come on, and she would light up another Pie Time. If Mano was there, of course, like a good son, he would light it for her. She liked to time it just right, lighting it up just as the announcer would say, It’s High Time for a Pie Time. And at that they’d both laugh. She’d crack open another can with a picture of a beautiful woman named June Good on it holding a pie that had been baked in an upside down golden crown. The radio seemed alive to Mano because the music came out of its silver speaker-mouth and silver knob-eyes. Looking out of the window above her bathtub, Sisi always remained so still, even when the music played. Mano sometimes thought about pushing the radio into the water, not because he wanted his mother to die, but because he was the only thing in his world that ever really moved.