Aaaiiieee!

Dust

When my mother died she left me her skulls.

It wasn’t a common thing in the early 60s for a father to gain custody of his child in a divorce, but my mother didn’t contest it. Nor did she make any pretense of hiding from the judge that she was a suicidal, manic-depressive alcoholic unable to take proper care of herself, let alone an infant son.

She survived her suicidal depressions, and all the unthinkable quantities of liquor, but it was the cigarettes that ultimately ended her life’s turmoil. I remember her as she was when I was a young boy. My father never forbade her from visiting; nevertheless, these occasions were infrequent. Christmas time, usually, although she was normally a week or two late.

Mother was beautiful then, very tall and slim. She looked much more like her lanky father, Dad told me, than her mother—who had been very petite. Mother had short dark hair, and eyes slanted cat-like; a pale feline green. And the cigarettes, always cigarettes, her wrist flopped back as one who doesn’t smoke might do if pretending to smoke. She smoked with flair, the cigarettes an artistic prop. She was an artist. Maybe the butts helped her stay in touch with that.

In the last five years of her life she began to call me, write, and then even visit again after I hadn’t seen her for nearly ten years. I visited her as well. She was shockingly ravaged. Her hair gray, her face deeply lined—made leathery from all the time she had spent out West; Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico. The heavy flesh above her eyes that had once made them sexily slanted now was just sagging and wrinkled; the green eyes once startlingly clear and sharp, even when she was drunk, now were like the greenish cataracts of an old dog.

As a boy I had been afraid of her…and I think she had been afraid of me. Now I felt some tenderness for her. She had stopped drinking at last, rid herself of at least that artistic prop or inspiration. But drink had done its damage and the cigarettes continued to, and my mother died at fifty-five.

She had been living in New England again the past seven years, in the house she had inherited after her parents died. Now I had inherited the house from her. And her art. And her skulls…

* * *

“Sorry to hear that your fiancée broke off with you, Jack,” said my mother’s best friend, David Foster.

“Thanks. It’s okay. I introduced her to Mother once. I got the impression she didn’t like her.”

David smiled. “She hated her on sight.”

I chuckled. “Oh, really? Did she say why?”

“Well…just that she was a fat, loud midget with a mustache. Sorry,” he said, but we were both laughing.

“Angela was not fat…she was…plush.”

“I’m just telling you what Annie said. I’m glad for her that you broke up while she was still alive; she was worried about you. She was just afraid to say it.”

David owned a small shop here in Eastborough which sold South Western art, Native American jewelry, and pottery and such; I was surprised that this trendy sort of store could still survive with the economy gone so sour. And were Yuppies still buying the stuff when Navajo patterns were turning up on tacky shower curtains and rubber welcome mats? Apparently so, though at the moment their interest had seemed to shift to the Victorian…at least until that trickled down to the K-Mart crowd.

David had been Mother’s closest companion the last seven years of her life. He was a good-looking gay man with the likable combination of a boyish face and distinguished gray at the temples. I felt like I’d known him for years myself. Very funny, very kind to me, if a little catty. He liked to gossip, but his gossip about my mother was filled with obviously sincere endearment. David had met me at my mother’s house the first day that I came into possession of it, to point out the antiques and pieces of art Mother had willed to him before he took them away. I had told him this was not necessary; if Mother wanted him to have them I had no complaints, but I suppose he felt a little awkward about it. And I think he wanted to help show me around, as I had never spent much time in the house—certainly not exploring.

Preceding me into Mother’s studio, David asked, “Did she ever show you in here?”

“Yes, once. Briefly. She was making that at the time.” I pointed to a steer skull hanging on one wall of the large bedroom-turned-studio, which would have been brightly washed in sunlight had it not been so gray and rainy an afternoon. The skull was entirely covered in a mosaic of turquoise pebbles but for the horns; remarkably beautiful. Eagle feathers dangled from one horn. “I’m glad to see she finished it. The work she must have put into it.”

“God, yes. She’d done those before; I’ve sold a few at the store. A thousand a piece. But worth it.”

There were numerous cattle skulls on the plain white-painted walls. A row of them rested atop a work bench which spanned the length of the room. These had been painted a bleached white, and Indian-style designs had been rendered on the foreheads, feathers hung from rawhide thongs around the horns. “An assembly line over here, huh?” I said.

“She wanted me to pick those up,” David said reluctantly. “But she wanted you to have the others.”

“Oh, great.” I had moved to one side wall to examine a trio of hanging skulls, these far more unique and interesting than those made for David’s shop. One, horns and all, had been painted sky blue with fleecy clouds seeming to drift across it. Another was fire-engine red, and looked like something a Satanic cult might have ordered. Beside that, more disturbing, was a skull painted carefully to look like it still had skin on it—and a hide. The texture of hair was meticulous, and reminded me what a fine painter Mother had been, though she had apparently given that up as a means of expression in itself long before. Glass balls—Christmas bulbs?—had been glued into the eye sockets and painted with glossy paint to look like real eyes. They did, except that at some point one of them had shattered and the jagged shards of the glistening eyeball were grotesque. A fanged mouth for an eye.

“Your father always accused Annie of emulating Georgia O’Keefe too much. She did love her work, but Annie was her own artist with her own vision. Your father should have tried to understand her.”

I turned from the skulls to give him a look. “My mother cheated on my dad, you know. A lot. With his best friend. With his boss. Everyone where he worked knew it. Mother had a lot of problems, David.”

“I’m sorry, Jack…I know that. But she wasn’t evil. She never meant to harm you or your father. She only meant to harm herself.”

I didn’t pursue any more of David’s insights into my mother’s secret heart just then. I guess I wasn’t ready to dive into her life so fully yet; I wanted to test the waters carefully. Through her art seemed a good beginning. I found a scrapbook in a bureau in a corner of the studio and David came over when he saw what I’d discovered. Photographs, black and white enlargements, each filling one page. Mother had experimented in many mediums, as if in a desperate search for the right voice with which to express her soul. Had they all failed to release the demons inside her?

“Yew!” I said, in disgust. “She was certainly into cows, huh? Even rotting ones.”

“I know, but they’re almost beautiful, the way she shot them, aren’t they? The time of day, the light, the textures? I think she wanted to show that anything can be made to look beautiful.”

“As long as you can’t smell it, I guess.”

“And do you know what they are? These are some of those cows that are found killed mysteriously…the ones people think UFOs are experimenting on. Or Satanic cults are sacrificing.”

“Or Elvis is eating.”

David giggled and elbowed me. “I think the spooky stories were what compelled your mother most. She showed these once in a little gallery on Newbury Street, in Boston. They were received fairly well; the reviews are in another scrapbook. This was the last stuff she did out West, she said. She came back here right after.”

“Maybe she got too scared, huh? Maybe she was…onto something.” I smiled, closed the book. “I’m sure I’ve heard that they think it’s just disease killing them, and then scavengers eating certain parts of the cows so it just looks like they’re being operated on…their genitals carved out and so on.”

“Maybe Annie was doing it. Maybe she was a cow vampire, and fled back East when the Animal Rights people got on her trail.”

“I think that’s it. Mystery solved.”

* * *

David went home, taking all of his inheritance that he could carry in one load with him, leaving me to explore more minutely by myself. I remained in the studio to do this, my mother’s personality so ingrained here—if abstracted and in need of interpretation. I was almost jealous, resentful, that David knew her better than I. Though he could have been enlightening to me as I continued to explore, I was glad for the privacy. It had become so late in the day and so much darker that I finally put on one lamp and set it on the floor with me as I went through the packed lower drawers of the large bureau I had found the scrapbook in. After several hours of this the bones of my ass seemed ready to stab through my buttocks so I got up to stretch. It was night.

As I contemplated coffee my eyes fell on a closet I had dismissed earlier. Now I idly strolled to it, and slid it open.

Musty gloom. Paint-spattered smocks on hangers, some old coats. Boxes of books and newspapers stacked up. One box with its flaps closed. I reached to drag it out, expecting heaviness. It wasn’t filled with books; it slid out much too easily. I unfolded the flaps.

There was another steer skull in the box. What else? I thought. But it had only the base stumps of its horns and looked unpainted, in the murk of the room, except for a dark design on the forehead, so I lifted the skull out for examination.

There was nothing painted on the forehead, but rather something glued to it. Interesting. A kind of mixed-media sculpture? I carried the thing to the lamp and hunched down close to its intimate ruddy glow.

It wasn’t glued to the forehead, either, but embedded in it. Almost in the center, like a black glassy third eye. Spherical, with subtle grooves, curves and figures inscribed in it, apparently as designs. Lightly I brushed my fingers over the surface. I turned the skull over in my hands and peered inside it through the sharp-edged holes underneath. With the eye holes, nasal channel, and huge molars on the underside it looked like another face in itself, hidden inside a cow’s outer face. Through one eye socket I could see splintered breakage where the sphere had been driven straight through. Had Mother hammered the object into this skull?

I’d have to ask David about it; right now I needed that coffee. Much too early to retire just yet. I set the skull with the third eye down on the work bench, shut off the lamp, and closed the studio door behind me.

* * *

What was that commercial for, skin cream? Moisturizing lotion? And how often was it that the commercial said we shed half a million dead skin cells…every thirty seconds? Every second? A lot, fast, in any case. Good thing they regenerate or we’d just crumble away to dust, I thought. I remembered hearing, also, that much of the dust in homes—most of it?—consisted of these shed scales. And we inhaled this scurf, it settled in our food.

The dust was thick in my mother’s bedroom. She was no great housekeeper…but then, to be fair, she’d been very sick toward the end. Here she had lain wasting away, crumbling. She was, in effect, all around me as if her cremated ashes had been scattered like powder across the bureau, the book shelves, the mirror and window sills. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Back to senseless matter. I ran my finger through the dust on the bureau top, rubbed it between my fingers. A shudder went through me, and I wiped my hand on my jeans.

There was a nice smell in the bedroom, despite the dust. A light perfume, not cloying. Delicate, feminine, appealing. But the dust. It was almost as if I were afraid that by ingesting it I would be infecting myself with my mother’s cancer, latent in those flakes of cell matter. Or that, by inhaling the dust, I would be cannibalizing her.

I would have to dust in here, vacuum, but not tonight. And I would not sleep in here tonight, either. I went to the smaller guest room instead.

* * *

I was awakened by the smell of cigarette smoke.

For a moment I lay totally disoriented in the alien bed; it was almost a kind of startled, momentary panic. I had not yet moved in, really, had brought virtually none of my things from my apartment, and I figured I had freaked myself out by jumping into this.

The house’s burnt-in layer of cigarette stink was so much stronger this morning, sharp and immediate. I almost expected to find David in the house, but then I realized I had never seen him smoke. Leaving the guest room, I followed the smell to where it was strongest: my mother’s bedroom. Very concentrated there, much more so than I remembered it from the previous night, but I assumed that I must have become used to the smell after being in the house for so many hours, and waking up fresh to the odor had made it seem distinct again.

I stretched; my neck hurt from sleeping tense in that strange bed. Idly, I slid open the top drawer of my mother’s bureau. Underwear, in soft colors, both cotton and silky. The silky surprised me a little and I shut the drawer, embarrassed, opened another more toward the bottom.

I found several photo albums, and sat on the edge of the bed to open one of them in my lap.

Cracked photos of my mother as a little girl; those unsettling cat-direct eyes were unmistakable, and even more weird in a child. There were pictures of Mother with her parents. Her mother looked nothing like her but my grandfather was, as Dad had told me, tall and slender. In fact, I could see myself in him. I am tall and slim like he was…like my mother was.

Grandfather had been an alcoholic…and Dad had told me, a nasty one. He had beat his daughter, my small empty-faced grandmother obviously not stepping in for fear of similar treatment. I resented the woman for it, looking at her, but I thought I could actually see the fear in Grandmother’s eyes, in her shy smiles, and then I felt sorry for her.

It wasn’t hard to understand my mother after all, was it? Seeing her father’s dry, hard face brought it home to me. He had made his daughter like him. An alcoholic, filled with destructive anger. But where he had turned it outward, she had turned it inward. Maybe that was why she had let me go, and the thought felt so true to me: a realization. She had wanted me to leave so she would never be tempted to harm me.

Insanity is inherited in families like houses are. Not in the same way tallness is, but passed on nonetheless. She had wanted to remove me from that chain. And seeing how much I looked like her father, I was glad she had. It made me oddly afraid of myself for several moments, and I turned far ahead in the book.

Mother was in her late teens now, and her beauty dazzled me. I was really rooted there gaping. She sat in a low-cut black dress with some horny-looking side of beef in a soldier’s uniform at a club somewhere. Those eyes stared right into me, even at that moment, through decades. They saw me, they were so piercing and alive. And here was Mother standing on a beach, her eyes hidden behind big dark glasses but her smile carnal as she posed. She knew the power she was transferring onto that negative. She wore a black two-piece bathing suit, sexy for the 50s. Her breasts weren’t large and she wasn’t as curvy as they liked them then, but she was long and sleek.

The erection pressing against the spine of the album seemed to prod me out of a dream and I snapped the book shut, stood up from the bed abruptly. As I reached to place the book atop the bureau, I noticed an odd thing.

The bureau top was glossy and clean in the pale morning light. Last night the dust had been thick upon it; I had run my finger through it. I traced my finger along the bureau top now. Nothing. I turned to the mirror, previously filmed, then to a lamp shade that had looked cloaked in dust. Everything appeared clean. Had David or someone been in here after all, tidying up for my benefit? Maybe I had done it in my sleep. Right; and I had smoked while I did it, too. But I didn’t smoke, just like I didn’t drink. Bad habits of times past, that I had made it a point never to indulge in.

Maybe I had been mistaken about the dust last night. The light was different in quality now; the room had a different character. A bit, anyway. Maybe a breeze had flowed in from somewhere and blown the dust away.

Or maybe I was going insane.

* * *

When I left work that evening, I stopped at my apartment first to pick up a few things before proceeding on to Eastborough. At my mother’s house I made myself an early supper, afterwards deciding to go back to sorting through the art studio.

As soon as I had reached in and hit the light switch I saw the skull, and saw that it had changed.

It was the steer skull with the spherical object jammed into its forehead, and it was still on the work bench where I had left it…but it was not as I had left it. I had handled the thing closely, and I knew that last night it had only had stumps for horns. I knew this without question. But even if I had never seen the skull before, I would have known that no cow on earth ever had horns like those…

I came into the room to look at it. I didn’t, however, touch it.

The horns had grown, there was no doubt. There had been nothing glued on, or slipped over the stumps. The stumps wed smoothly into these new projections. They were much like a stag’s antlers, branching out into sharp curved fingers of bone. Also, I noticed in my dazed bewilderment, two projections had grown out from under the eye sockets, like a misplaced lesser set of antlers just coming in.

What in the name of God had Mother found out there in the desert? And what had I done to activate it? Left it on the table where a little sunlight had got onto it? I had touched the sphere last night. Had that done it?

I looked about me. David had taken his row of skulls but I moved to those others on the walls. Yes…they had been affected also. Not so profoundly, but a skull coated in glossy black with a purple vaginal flower painted on its forehead had begun to sprout thick ridges around the eye sockets—this growth cracking the paint. The white bone beneath showed through the gaps. And the skull tiled in turquoise: thick bony swelling in several areas had pushed the pebbles away from each other so that spaces showed between, and a number of stones had dropped to the floor.

I smelled cigarette smoke a half-second before I heard the voice behind me.

“My art seems to have a mind of its own.”

I wheeled around. I think I gasped comically.

A woman in a bathrobe leaned languidly in the threshold to the studio, her face in shadow. A cigarette head glowed orange as she inhaled with a crackle. When she drew the cigarette from her lips, she flopped her wrist back like one who pretends to smoke.

“Jesus Christ!” I bellowed. “Jesus Christ!” And I backed into the room until I nearly fell atop the work bench.

The woman stepped casually into the room. Into the lamp glow. I had expected gray hair, sagging flesh. But this woman was beautiful, maybe a few to five years older than my thirty. A sly cat smile, then smoke blowing out of gently puckered lips. And through the smoke, those eyes…

“Jesus Christ,” my mother repeated amusedly. “Hm. Well…Lazarus, maybe.”

I had never fainted in my life. I had never come close to fainting. I have never known a man who has fainted. But I fainted.

* * *

Perhaps it was she who willed me to faint. Hypnotized me with those eyes. And, now, had awakened me with them; for they hovered just above me when I opened my own.

She sat back a bit, smiling down at me. Mother’s hair was shortish and nearly black, just barely starting to thread with white, brushed back from her forehead. Her eyebrows were tweezed somewhat thin, but not overly so. She was just beginning to get bags under her eyes, and light crow’s feet, but these and the white threads gave her a handsome character. Her nose was long but in proportion to her longish face, her chin tapering to a point. Her lips were full and a dark pink against her white flesh.

They say you can’t tell that a person is disturbed, insane, dangerous simply by looking at them, but I think you can. When you see photos of serial killers, for instance, there is always something off in their faces—even in a good-looking man like Ted Bundy. There was something off in my mother’s light green eyes. Something mad. And mixed with that, there was pain. It was so obvious, so strong, it made me marvel to think Mother had survived another twenty years beyond this age. If I had blocked her smile with my hand the pain in her eyes would have been much more evident, but it was evident enough.

But I couldn’t block her smile with my hand, because I couldn’t move either hand. My wrists were bound to the posts framing the headboard of Mother’s bed.

I couldn’t see behind her just yet, but my ankles were obviously bound also. Together. Later I would see that a nylon cord around them extended across the room to the door knob. But I couldn’t see past Mother just yet, and I couldn’t move my lower body either, because she was sitting on top of me, astride my body, and Mother was completely naked.

Now that I was awake she began to rock back and forth on me, gently, as if in a rocking chair.

“Hi, Jacky,” she breathed both tenderly and seductively.

“Are you a ghost?” I managed. I was on the verge of tears from terror and from a boiling cloud of emotions too confused and immense for me to articulate today, let alone grasp at that moment.

“I suppose so. I think there are different kinds of ghosts, and some kinds might come into being this way. I know of at least one other.”

“Come into…being what way?”

Only a smile. Rocking. I was getting hard between her buttocks.

“Please…get off me,” I said in a watery voice.

“I don’t want to. And you don’t want me to, either.” She lifted a bit to slide her hand under her, and took hold of my erection. “Do you, Jacky?” It jerked in her fist as it flooded fully erect. She pointed it upwards and pushed its tip inside her. I cried out, raised my head to look. There was some resistance but when she withdrew and then pushed down on it again her lubrication guided me wholly inside in one smooth gulp; as if I had skewered her straight into the guts, it felt so deep. Her black wiry hair ground down against mine, and she let out a long moan like the warning growl of an animal.

I was in tears now, sobbing harshly, bucking. “Please! Please don’t…”

“Shh. Every boy wants this. No one is here to see. Every boy wants to go back to the womb.” Mother undulated her body on me, then bent forward low so that her small breasts hung down to point in my face, so white, the dark nipples just barely brushing my skin. One of them trailed through a tear. “Take it, Jack.” I blubbered and shook my head. “You want it. Taste it.”

I barked a loud sob. Even as I lifted my head again to suck the nipple into my mouth. And then I was licking it, sucking as much of the breast into my mouth as I could, tears coursing down my face and neck, lightly chewing on the tough nipple, switching hungrily to the other one and wanting to draw the whole breast into my mouth I was so ravenous and wishing I had my hands free and unexpectedly I came, arching my back, grunting loudly. She was hot inside and my sperm was hotter. I felt it shoot deep, as if falling away into another, infinite dimension hidden inside her. Then I fell back and only cried some more, turning my face away with eyes tightly shut. She would be gone when I opened them. She was only a dream.

But her voice sounded above me, as if to soothe my nightmares. “Shh, it’s all right. We have all night. We have as much time as you want with me.”

She leaned off me enough for me to slip wetly out of her, and I looked. She had taken a knife from the bedside table. Alarm flushed through me; it was some kind of buck knife, cruel-looking. But she unstraddled me and sat on the side of the bed to saw at the cord binding my feet to the door knob. It didn’t take much; the blade was so sharp. I watched the muscles shift slightly in her back as she worked, a beautiful white expanse of skin. There was a small brown mole on her back. A ghost with shifting muscles, a mole on its back. A wet vagina, and breasts that tasted of musky flesh…

Turning her head to smile at me over her shoulder, her hair in sexy disarray around her face, Mother said, “I didn’t mean to scare you this way, darling, but if I didn’t tie you up you would have run away before I could convince you to stay.”

She ran the flat of the blade over my thighs. I was careful not to move. “Next time you can tie me up…”

And I did.

* * *

For three days I called in sick at work. I think I told them I had a sinus infection.

We dragged the mattress off her bed and into the studio. We kept the shades down in the day. On the bare mattress we tangled like wrestlers, grinding the bones of our thin bodies together. I buried my face in the shadow of hair between her legs, so fervently that one might think I did indeed intend to crawl back into that place of my origin. I held her head down against my crotch, white-threaded black hair through my clenched fingers. She rode atop me and cried out in orgasm fiercely, digging claws into my breasts while jolts went through her entire frame. For a ghost, she definitely sweated. If she were only ectoplasm, then the reality of the entire universe was in question.

On the evening of our first day we lay together exhausted, not touching, chilly as the air cooled the sweat on our bodies. “How did you get here?” I asked her at last. Since the previous night, I hadn’t allowed myself to think clearly enough to vocalize anything other than gasps and groans.

“You wished me here. You rubbed the magic lamp, honey.”

“That ball. In the skull. I touched it…”

“It was your thoughts more than your touch.”

“So you’re an illusion the ball is making?”

“No. It remade me. It cloned me from what it could gather of me.”

God—I realized it. The dust. Skin cells…

“But what is it? Where’s it from?”

“I don’t know everything, but it’s a probe. It launched with a crew aboard it. They were just a few scraps of tissue that were to be automatically cloned when they reached their destination. Perhaps they were, and are out in the world somewhere. Perhaps they’re still trapped inside. But their computer resurrected me. It’s screwed up and thinks it’s doing its job. All this I know intuitively”

“And did you know this when you found it, or only since it remade you?”

“I’d seen it do this before, with someone else, seven years ago. Out West. Just from a hair between the pages of an old book. So I began to understand it then, and I know more now. But that’s all I know.”

“Why are you this age, though? Not fifty-five?”

My mother smiled, reached lazily to stroke my hair. “This is the age you best remember. You were ten. You thought I was beautiful. And you were looking at pictures of me the other day. You remembered me this way, very strongly. You brought me back. Your love. And your lust.”

“I never lusted for you.”

“Boys learn to love by lusting for their mothers; it’s the natural process.”

I sat up. “Bullshit. I missed you as my mother. I just wanted to have a mother…”

I gazed around the studio. Our loyal audience of death’s heads, those empty-eyed voyeurs. The transformation of the skulls was continuing. All had antlers like branches, gnarled and spreading, a bare birch forest ringing us. Four sets of antlers had grown from the skull with the sphere, these arms reaching the ceiling and spreading to either side impossibly. The cow’s own eye sockets had filled up with bone, leaving only that black cyclopean orb.

Mother gently took my arm, pulled me back down beside her. And we barely left the room for the two days that followed.

On the morning of the fourth day I awoke to see that the branches of the skulls surrounding us had reached and fused with each other, created a jagged white nest around us. Or a barrier, trapping us together. Digits of bone had stabbed into the plaster of ceiling and walls. It was as though we were hidden in the heart of some coral reef. Swallowed in some great skeleton. Would the ring close in on us, until at last we truly were trapped? Until we were crushed, ground in those white fangs?

Mother slept. My stomach grumbled hungrily but I ignored it. Sitting cross-legged, I pulled toward me a stack of scrapbooks I had been meaning to page through. More of Mother’s art photographs.

In the last book I found a series of enlargements that stunned me. They were of Mother naked…but older, in her late forties I guessed. Gray hair. Ass widening and breasts sagging. She was bound and gagged in one shot, sodomized in another. Her male partner in these photos was a man about her age, gray- haired, tall and lean and…and with horror, I realized it was my grandfather. My grandfather, in his forties, having sex with his daughter, in her forties…

She had told me that she had seen the sphere at work before. Seven years ago, out West. Another ghost like her. Her father…as she best remembered him. As she had subconsciously called him back. And now I understood my grandfather. I understood my mother. Even as I felt sick, I pitied her. And I pitied myself, in turn.

But it didn’t stop me from doing to her what grandfather had done, when she awakened…

Mother straddled me again; she liked that control of movement. But she also liked submission; just before this, she’d had me tie her and spank her bottom until it glowed. She rocked atop me now, green eyes drugged in her intensity.

“You missed me, darling. You gave me life as I gave you life. We understand each other. We’re alike. No one else understands us. We need each other. Don’t ever leave me, darling, I missed you, I missed you, I love you, oh fuck me, darling, fuck me…”

Mother leaned her breasts down to dangle in my face. Thinking this was her intention, I sucked at them, but she sat back up and I saw the buck knife in her fist. And I realized she meant to use it.

“No!” I blurted, thinking she intended to kill me; that I might be resurrected and be all the more like her.

Mother plunged the knife down into her own side and cried out as if in orgasm. Blood spattered my belly, then began to flow hot down her body—down mine.

“Fuck me, darling, cut me, fuck me, please…”

“Oh God!”

She raised herself off my erection, took hold of it, and guided me into her incision. She bore her weight down and I slid inside easily amid the lubrication of blood. Her guts were hot in there.

She pushed the knife into my hand. I tried to hurl it away but she closed her fist around mine. She was strong, or I was weak, and she made me thrust the blade into her navel. “Cut me, darling, hurt me, love me, please…” She was sobbing hysterically. Maybe it hurt, or maybe it was the madness. I was sobbing, and now vomiting. I wrestled with her, both of us so slick it would have been hard for another to know which of us had been stabbed. I managed to roll her onto her back and began to slide out of her but she pulled me atop her, legs clinched around me. She inserted me into the second incision. I could barely get in against the push of her intestines, which began to emerge like a blue baby crowning, but I made it, to the hilt, my penis a knife, and I realized then that I had fought to bury my penis in that wound—that she no longer had to force me…

She fellated me through a hole in her cheek. The first wound had healed without leaving a scar, the second was mostly healed, but I made new vaginas. One in her thigh so I could rub up against the bone within. The mattress was awash in blood, a pool in its center. The room smelled like a slaughterhouse must. There was vomit, and a heap of intestines but apparently she regenerated new ones inside, apparently she was immortal, and I heard the creak of the skulls around us as the bone Eden grew more lush.

“Slut!” a voice behind us raged. “God-damn whore!”

I whipped my head around. A man had come into the studio and he smashed himself a path through the bone foliage with his arms, unmindful of the lacerations the jagged branches tore in his flesh. He was naked, and his face was flushed red in fury, and I saw it was my grandfather.

“Bitch! Cheat on me, will you? Run from me, will you? Thought you could hide from me?”

Mother slipped out from under me, and I saw her face was slack with utter terror. All the cat-like confidence had fled her eyes, leaving only that fear I had seen ingrained in them. Hers was the face of a child, helpless to defend itself.

I rose with the knife as Grandfather made it through the barrier. He caught my lunge and swung me aside. He had meant for me to fall into the waiting talons of bone, to become impaled, but I caught myself and only gashed my shoulder.

“No, please, Daddy, please!” Mother wailed.

I tackled Grandfather from behind, reaching around to slam the blade of the buck knife into his chest as I did so. He only grunted, and flipped me off him onto my back. He grunted again as he yanked the knife out of him, and grinned down at me.

“You’ll pay for that one, boy.”

I saw Mother look to the doorway abruptly. Grandfather looked. I looked. A small woman had entered the room through the path Grandfather had smashed. She was naked, and about the age she had been in most of the pictures I had seen of her in the photo album that first night. It was my grandmother.

“Liz!” Grandfather hissed, as surprised as I was.

“Go back, John,” she said quietly.

“No! You go away!”

“I should have stopped you long ago, John. God forgive me…”

Grandmother came forward. Her husband swung the knife threateningly her way. Mother moaned fatalistically. Grandmother moved swiftly past her husband toward the work bench. We all understood what she was reaching for, and as Grandfather lunged to intercept her I tackled him yet again; around the legs this time. He almost fell, pin-wheeled his arms…

I didn’t see what Grandmother with her dead, empty face did when she reached that skull with the sphere in its forehead. I couldn’t see her around Grandfather’s legs. But I knew she had done something when the legs I held became weirdly soft, and then insubstantial…smoke in my embrace. Dust. I began to inhale it, choked, held my breath. The buck knife had dropped to the floor.

I pushed myself up on my hands and knees, facing toward Mother.

Where I had last seen her—cowering on the drenched mattress, that terror in her face—a cloud of dust now hung in the air. For a moment only it held a human outline, as if struggling to retain its integrity, a tormented figure of ash. I thought I saw its eyes, somehow, and I did see an arm. A hand, reaching out to me.

But then the cloud billowed outward, lost its form, swirled and dispersed and settled. Settled around me, on the floor, on the work bench, on the window sill. A sliver of sun showed around the window shade, and motes danced golden in its beam.

I wept. I glanced around me. Grandfather was gone. Grandmother had vanished. Already I heard the cracking and splintering of the bone orchard, as chunks began to break free and drop to the floor.

But the growths weren’t simply crumbling, I saw; they were undergoing some new metamorphosis. I saw a skull begin to climb down the wall off its hook. Its antlers moved stiffly like the legs of some great arthritic spider. It was the skull painted to look like it was covered in flesh and hair. But no, it wasn’t that one. It was covered in flesh and hair. One of its eyes was not a broken Christmas bulb. They were both intact. And they blinked.

I ran out of the room then. I saw no more. I found my long forgotten clothing, and my car keys. I heard sounds from the studio, great crashings. I fled outside, into the light, into the fresh air. I had escaped…

I didn’t see what the neighbors saw. No one believed that I knew nothing about it, but no crime was really committed. A few lawns were damaged. I paid for that when I sold the cows.

How had a small herd of cattle been contained inside that house? I couldn’t explain it to the police. I professed not to know. Though Mother’s blood had simply disappeared from my skin, I had been afraid of what the police would find inside…but when at last I had the courage to return to the house, to the studio, I saw that the mattress was dry and unstained—just very dusty.

There were no cattle skulls left in the studio. I collected up the scrapbooks. I would burn the one with the pictures of Grandfather and my mother. And I would sell the house.

I viewed the penned animals once before I sold them. I looked closely at each one of them, felt their foreheads for hard lumps protruding. I found none. Perhaps one day these beasts will be found dead, mutilated, when the owners of the sphere come looking for it. But perhaps it’s already been restored to them.

I couldn’t help but wonder, however fancifully, if the skulls of those cattle were painted black, and red, and blue like a desert sky, under the layers of skin and hair.

I’m better now. Fewer nightmares. I can smile at the people I work with.

But Mother was right, after all; your relationship with your parents does shape how you learn to love, and lust.

I don’t think I can ever have sex with a woman again.