Mustard Seed

This piece is an autofictional seed for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call. It inspired this other piece.

B is looking up—naked and seemingly split; gloried in the pouring gore, the waking scream replaced on their lips by pleading tremble—and Hank is certain that the Almighty is making some demand.

Out and over them, Hank purges: the stringy, flotsam consequence of a night drank to black. Splash from B’s tummy laughs against his cheeks. Undigested chunk and bile coat B’s agony corrugated abdomen. The drain is clogged with discharge—tatters of womb, and a mass of something they fear they’d recognized if either of them could clear their eyes enough to see.

Reverberant gag and bitter bite. B is making sounds again:

Little sounds. Tissue-thin whispers and gasps.

All this blood here now is an answered prayer. A hateful prayer, but a prayer nonetheless.

And though they’re both now fearing B will die—deluge settling to boil, tremor, and trickle—the future’s made absolute:

It’ll probably be the Quakers. They’ve talked about them before, knowing little else but that they are supposed to be quiet and kind.

It will be like this: like the pamphlet says, silence and the light. The silence will be outside, among all those who gather to listen in it. The light will be inside, and it will throw shadows, showing them darker for the very fact of its shining on that which is casting them. And B and Hank will come to breathe together, their hands laced tight, tight, tight…

They will push aside the snide thoughts, the layers of thick clay burying faith’s frail fossil. At the beginning they will bite their cheeks against the urge to laugh.

Because they’d talked about it once or twice, and B liked the idea of Quakers. B smiled that big smile they’ve got, and the two of them were probably smoking and drinking too much. B’d said, “That sounds really nice. They don’t have a preacher or anything?”

And Hank’d said, “No I don’t think so. They also believe they don’t always have to call God by His name…”

And whatever His name is, He’s barreling down on them and they know it. He’s taking something neither of them wanted—taking it cruel and making them pray for it.

Look:

Hank’s on his knees like he ought to be and there’s nothing immaculate in the tub. B’s trying to speak, but the words are hitch and blither. The mess no longer rises and neither of them look at the drain to see what they might recognize.

But God can’t make them cry. He can reach through time and destroy the whole of a future that was solid despite being unwished for, shine the light on everything that may cast shadows, but He cannot yet make them cry. Only give them cause to. Only render a sopping silence in which both of them can try to speak.

He’s made occasion this morning for their hands to find each other and hold fast against the slick.

***

When he was a child, he wanted an ant-farm.

And his parents said, “No, absolutely not! In the house, are you crazy? What are you thinking?”

So, he made the ants outside his pets.

There were two mounds that he found, large and noticeable, and he decided that it would be those two that he would love. One rose from the sand in the corner of the backyard, at the edge of where the lawn sunk to wetlands before the sump solidified into a viny bosk of pecan and pine. The other was a clay-loam lump that seemed to guard the grove, and it was the larger of the two.

On weekend mornings he would go out with a pellet gun and wake them. Three, four, maybe five rounds into the pristine hillface, and out the ants would pour—slow for the cold of their blood. They, so preoccupied with their lives in service of the Queen, the tunnels, the larvae. He had to speak to them in a language that they could understand. He had to let the light in. As recompense he’d drop into their flow a grasshopper from which he had torn the back legs. He imagined them thankful for the easy meal…

Soon, though, the ants stopped building their mounds back smooth, taking for granted that where he had put the holes, holes would appear again.

So, he took a shovel and loaf of stale bread and set them at war with each other:

He dug a trench between the hills, connecting them. In the trench he crumbled up the bread. Then with the pellet gun he again blasted the sides of both mounds. The slopes caved, totally destroyed, and all the ants spilled, searching for that which had laid for them so much waste and work. Soon, though, they found the trench and the bread.

They marched toward their plenty, set up their lines. If they could sing, they would have.

Somewhere in the middle of the long canal, they found each other.

They waged their war and never grew bored and the trench filled with their dead.

Dwindling numbers, and the battle slowed.

And then it rained and the trench was washed away and their mounds were made mud.

The child looked over them the day after the rain and saw that neither mound stirred. He poked and prodded with sticks, and even kicked with his boots—but neither mound stirred.

***

It will be good, for after their first Quaker meeting Hank and B will snuff out cigarettes they’ll only have smoked half-way.

B will say, “It doesn’t feel right, if we’re going to become religious again.”

And Hank will agree.

They’ll smile at each other, and Hank will ask, “Did you notice us breathing at the same time?”

And B will say, “How could I not.”

And then they will laugh and embrace before heading to the train they must take to get home. Walking hand in hand, Hank will produce a cigarette from his shirt pocket and mindlessly light it.

But now, his arm is shaking as he reaches for the faucet knob. The water comes cold, but B does little shrink away from it. They’re already tremulous and blue at the tips, all the warmth having burst.

They’d not taken easy to the pregnancy. Rising in the early mornings, their body didn’t want it any more than they, the two of them, did. From the get, that consuming moment of consummation which swallows all other possibilities, wherein the future’s made absolute and plans are threshed to chaff, B’s belly’d tear them from bed to shake and shatter over the toilet bowl.

For the first few weeks Hank’d rise to follow, a sprint through the apartment, no matter when he’d gotten home from work or how early in the morning it was or how hangover blind, feeling his way in the dark, all to drop next to B’s wracking hunch and ball up the crop of bob and bang and rub the sweat into their back.

Soon , though, B’d gnash their embarrassed, puke-flecked teeth and hiss, “Leave me alone!”

They’d not been hardly big enough to notice, but the little firm swell in their gut is warm. Hank’d been since the tearful start telling himself that that’s the magic about it, because it needed to be magic. That B’s belly was warm and something was growing itself there, had to be magic.

God was coming for them, one way or another.

So, all barriers broken now, water fills the tub and the slime rises. All that the red-black gives over to pink, and the stinking brown blooms green toward orange. Chunks macerate and flake. Hank takes the rag, the soap, and builds suds in the warming water.

The thing they fear they’ll recognize is barely there.

And, as Hank washes B’s chest and flanks, scrubs the oily thick of their curl-prairied mound, he presses his lips to their sweat and shock salted brow.

But B will ask, “What did you think of what that guy said?”

For there will have been only one person to have risen during their first meeting. He will be an older man, and they will come to learn in time that he joined the community as a conscientious objector to a war during his youth.

He will have risen, moved by the Spirit to deliver a message, to say to all gathered something saccharine. Something like, “It feels miraculous every time we’re all here together. That this world, with the violence and strife, the injustice and oppression everywhere, that this world could allow us to have this quiet together is a blessing. I cannot help but feel that we, all of us, have found some secret peace, that inner light and connection with God—even in all the horror and pain we can still all be here together, smiling and in prayer, in this quiet bliss. It is beautiful, you are all beautiful. God is good, and I love you…”

And Hank will say, “I don’t know… I wasn’t really listening…”