The Mothers

This room was filled with mothers. They claimed they were no such thing. They were awful persistent. They would insist. One of them couldn’t help herself. She demanded to know our whereabouts the night before and the night before the night before… We called inside the room our female counterpart. She struck the mother sharply across the mouth. In other rooms, we took turns sharing the room with each other and with our female counterpart. In other rooms, we were alone inside the room. Some of the rooms were empty. Were any of the rooms filled with fathers? “Yes and no,” said our female counterpart. How come she knew more than we knew? We supposed she might be a father. She was never alone inside a room. How could we possibly know this? Just as how could we possibly know a room was empty without being inside the empty room? I was alone inside a room with our female counterpart. We shared the room. We sat on the room’s bare floor, blinking. She said, “Do you want me to strike you sharply across the mouth?” I leaned in close. To my surprise, she held me. “I am 40 years old,” I wept. “I know,” she said. “I know.” In other rooms, we attempted to perform for each other the role of a female counterpart. We lined up and struck each other sharply across the mouths. We lost track of our actual female counterpart. There was all this teeth and blood on the floor. Only the mothers understood what we were saying. Or so the mothers claimed.

The Monsters

We pointed to this other man and said, There he is, the monster. These other monsters—you were some of them—rioted towards him and did what monsters do. Afterward, we held a potluck. We planned a meal train for the family. We pounded on their door, demanding to know their dietary restrictions. The mother peeled out of the two-car garage, children in tow. She drove into the water, became a television movie. We were bored. Or the television’s rabbit ears were pointed the wrong direction. Or the aluminum foil wasn’t thick enough. We pointed to this other woman and said, There she is, the monster. She lowered her head. We put on the rabbit ears. She had left the babies in the backseat until they were glowing. She threw them into the water. The babies hissed. We held a potluck. We took turns peeling the dead skin off the babies. How grateful they were, and we were, for each other. They asked if we wanted to hold their ropes. We led them to the water, tied them to a post on the dock. We put our feet in the water. The water was still warm from when the babies were glowing. We asked them where their fathers were. In the two-car garage, the babies said, which had been half-converted into a woodshop. We found the fathers there, among heaps of scraps of wood, sharpening teeth.