No One Is Talking About This (16)
“Mamma mia,” she said to her sister’s stomach, and offered it a tiny chef’s kiss. She hoped, as an afterthought, and despite all her debasements, that English would still be intact when it came time for the baby to learn it.
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The fizzing black void that she saw—was it anything like the portal? Possibly. Both were dimensions where only one thing happened: you revised your understanding of reality, all the while floating in a sea of your own tears and piss. “I know what you’re going through,” she said silently to the baby, “but sometimes you’ll be scrolling along, and NASA will post a picture of the stars.”
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“My bud’s wife is pregnant too,” her brother said, sipping a gold inch of scotch with an air of meditation, his face covered with the requisite rusty pubes of his time. “A bad guy, has terrible internet poisoning. And the other day he says to me, Saw my daughter’s tits on the ultrasound. Looked pretty good! And I was like, Damn, dude, really? And he just gazed far off into the distance and said, I don’t know how to act. I’ve been this way so long, I don’t know how to be anymore.”
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The difference between her and her sister could be attributed to the fact that she came of age in the nineties, during the heyday of plaid and heroin, while her sister came of age in the 2000s, during the heyday of thongs and cocaine. That was when everything got a little chihuahua and started starring in its own show. That was when we saw the whole world’s waxed pussy getting out of a car, and said, more.
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“Remember this?” her sister said, and held up a screenshot of the opening of Paris Hilton’s sex tape, which had been dedicated to the memory of 9/11. “Ahahaha!” they all laughed together, the new and funnier way.
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The difference between her and her brother, though, could be attributed to the fact that he had gone to the war and stayed there for a very long time. Now whenever she stayed in the same house as him she had to carefully scrub out the tub every time he used it, so as not to contract the flesh-eating foot fungus he had brought back home with him, along with so much else she would never know—so that when he said the word merked, it sounded so much heavier than when her friends in the portal said it. Or Murica, or Freedom, or All Up in Them Guts.
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But he promised, he had promised, that when it all went to hell, he would carry both sisters into the woods over his shoulders, with him and his ragtag band of brothers who could track and skin and gut and build real fire. “We’ll go up near the Great Lakes, where they’ll still have water, and you won’t have to work, you can just look for nice rocks and function in a sort of . . . shaman capacity,” he had told her. She felt ready. Had she not recently cleaned possum blood off a woman’s face, while only screaming very slightly? She picked up her knife and fork and took another wild bite of her destiny.
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“What a cute little pair of panties,” her mother said as she emerged from the laundry room, holding up a pair of her brother’s military silkies, which were the bright trumpeting yellow of the DON’T TREAD ON ME flag and embroidered with the words NO STEP ON SNEK.
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Late at night, they gathered around the mandatory marble island to watch Sasquatch vids on her sister’s laptop, perhaps dreaming of their future in the woods together. In a landscape as still and crumpled as camouflage there was a sudden glitch, a pixelation in the leaves. A piece of the forest rose from a crouch, seeming to glance over his great, grizzled, secret-keeping shoulder. It was the Sasquatch, and as always at this point, the cameraman absolutely lost his shit. He never held steady, he never crept closer, he never zoomed in. When what he had been looking for his whole life revealed itself, he flung the camera away from him, as if it were on fire and as far as it would go.
“Did you see the Sasquatch, honey?” her sister asked, rubbing her still-flat belly, and all of them saw it then, that invisible flash between human trees.
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When they ran out of credible Sasquatch sightings, they turned to the greatest reality show of all time, Naked and Afraid. A man and a woman were dropped naked into the middle of the wilderness, and immediately two things happened. The woman started weaving palm fronds, and the man began to go insane from lack of meat. (This generally led to him eating some kind of dubious trout and having diarrhea in what the woman considered to be “their front yard.”) The whole thing would make a spectacular gender-reveal party, come to think of it. The mom and dad could appear stripped and mud-smeared before their guests in lushest suburbia, and if the baby was a girl? Palm fronds. If it was a boy? The dad could shit himself and weep.
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A miracle that new people just kept coming into the machine like pinballs—and we were the ones playing it, it was the nimbleness in our fingers that kept them going and the red score running higher. Her sister, five years younger, had broken her arm one afternoon while she was supposed to be babysitting. She stepped out of the room for a moment, and there was a scream like a black rip in the air; the fracture, shining with readiness, had come leaping out of the skin with a white ka-chink. Now a new body was knitting in the body that had broken on her watch, and it would trust her too. It had to. They would carry it on their backs into the woods.