Moses Among The Rushes (June 20, 2009. Issue 6.)

Before the boy came over, the girl extracted the finest needle from her mother's tomato pincushion and carefully poked several holes through the condom wrapper. After the boy arrived, she laid herself out before him and opened her legs like a great bird extending its wings. After the boy had finished, she felt warm deep inside her body and her pulse quickened.

"Hold it," she said as he slid out of her, "hold the rubber."

The boy held the condom and pulled out. As he always did at these times, the boy looked down with a subtle fear coiled in his gut. The long tears were obvious.

"Oh Christ," the boy said.

He tore the condom off and threw it on the floor. It had let him down. "Oh Christ," he said again. Then, hopefully, "you're on the pill, right?"

The girl smiled. "Nope."

The boy looked at her strangely for a moment, then began to pick up his things. The girl said nothing. She watched the boy rush into his clothes - his shirt buttoned up two buttons too high, the tail hanging out of his fly like a lolling tongue - with the satisfied langor of a snake after a large meal.

The boy left quickly and the girl lay back on the bed, imagining she was a water moccasin filled not with a squirrel or a small shrew, but with a large part of the boy.

For a long time afterward the boy wore his torment like a new suit. In morning he'd wake to birds chattering outside his window or his mother rumbling down the stairs outside his bedroom door and he would get out of bed no differently than he had done on any other morning. But then it would fully hit him, the terrible weight of possibility, and he would sit back down. He thought back a while, thought of a time when there were only warm summer days and fishing down at the creek down behind his house, but found that the more he thought of good times the more he knew he had thrown away, so he stopped. He thought of the girl and found that the time before he met her seemed now like someone else's history.

There was very little the boy cared about up to that point, and he recognized the burning that flashed up the back of his neck from the times he had pulled the legs off the crane flies that whizzed above the creek. But now it was with him all the time, and when his mother would ask him what was wrong, he would say "Nothing. Not a thing, why?" too brightly, too easily. She would take this as a confirmation of her suspicion that the boy was suffering. The boy's father told the mother that maybe she was looking too hard at things and that maybe she should spend a little less time with the boy and a little more time with him.

"But a Mother knows," she would say, over and over when the lights were out and they were both lying in bed, and the father would sigh and roll over.

Life went on like it always had for the girl. At school she would stalk the halls, emboldened by her catch, her breasts gasping for escape from the tiny shirts she would squeeze them into. Once, her fifth period math teacher, a small grey woman, took her aside after class and asked her if she knew what decency was. The girl smiled toothily and asked if the teacher had seen her husband lately, knowing that he drowned a year before in the river that snaked around the outskirts of the town.

The teacher rushed to the principal's office, her chalk-lined cardigan flaring out behind her like a cape, and demanded the girl be suspended. The principal listened and offered a crumpled cardboard box of tissues when she started to cry.

"Kids are cruel, Marie," he said, curling his mouth around the syllables. "I've told you that several times. You are the adult here. Discipline her."

So, for a long week, the girl was forced to stay after school and copy out definitions from a battered Websters dictionary. The teacher couldn't bear to look at the girl, so she stayed in the staff room and chainsmoked for an hour until she would send the girl home.

By Wednesday the girl had arranged for boys to slip into the room after the teacher had gone.

And then she began to show.

Things began to change around her, then, subtle changes like the yellowing of paper. At school, the girl was doubly outcast. The boys now avoided her presence, understanding on some dark and primitive level that a pregnant girl transcended their realm, the world of schoolwork, stolen beer on the weekends and pickup football in the parking lot, and that the finger of accusation was quick and long. The girls would scorn and mock her, simultaneously fearing what she represented and secretly hating that she had gotten there before them.

The teacher regarded her with a sort of perverted glee, and would take pains to humiliate the girl by example in math class, asking the students to determine the probabilities of various birth defects, or express the percentage of miscarried babies from a certain group in the form of a fraction.

The girl found she did not care because she was full of the boy and she could feel the gift she had given herself growing inside her with every minute. Her breasts became tender and she would rub them idly when she was alone, committing every twinge to memory for comparison with the next day's pain.

At home, dinners were more silent than ever. The girl would sit at the table and spoon out dull green peas as her mother glared at her father, who would usually take a bite of his food and look away.

The boy carried on and time eroded the jagged edges of his worry like stones in a rushing river. The girl hadn't spoken to him in several months, and there were brief moments when he could see some light breaking through the blackness inside him.

In the spring, his father and uncle took him on a hunting trip, out into the pine barrens where they secreted themselves amongst the trees and waited for something warm and alive to pass by. The chill hadn't completely broken yet, and their breath erupted out of them as vapor.

After a short while, they had a small camouflaged blind set up amongst the skeleton trees and they all piled in together. The boy could smell the sourness under his arms and wished he had showered.

His father took out a battered pack of Marlboros and poked one in his mouth, then passed the pack to his brother. The uncle passed the pack to the boy and chuckled softly, and the boy's father nodded. The boy took one and put it between his lips, and the father lit all three on the same match. The smoke was heavy and pinched his lungs but he strained to hold the cough in his throat.

The uncle blew a thin trail of smoke out from his nostrils and smiled, his grey eyes crinkling at the corners. The boy nodded and took a gentle drag. It was a silent morning so the boy could faintly hear the tiny crackle as the the paper burned. Soon their shelter was filled with gauzy smoke and his father raised one corner of the canvas to let the air in.

They waited like this, silently huddled in their blind, three of them jockeying for a peek out through the clear vinyl square. They spoke in whispers, and the father told the boy about the first time his own father had taken him shooting.

After a long time, the boy had come close to drifting off and when his father roughly shook his shoulder, he jerked awake. His father pointed out the window at a large elk idly rubbing its side on a jagged stump. Spirals of steam poured from its nostrils and it chuffed contentedly.

The boy raised his gun and slowly slid it through one of the small openings in the side of the blind. His father put his mouth to the boys ear and told him to line everything up then exhale as he pulled the trigger. The boy could feel his father's hot breath in his ear as he aimed at the creature. They were quiet as death, and the boy felt a primitive calm come over him. There was nothing in him, then, but his breathing and his finger on the trigger. No room for the girl.

He drew a slow breath, then exhaled and squeezed the trigger. A giant wallop of sound clapped him on the ears and he shut his eyes. Then his father was out of the blind and his uncle grabbed the gun. The boy could hear his father whooping and hollering outside, a sound the boy never assumed his father was capable of, and then burst out of the blind into the light, his uncle laughing and slapping him on the back.

The elk lay on its side on the ground, its hind leg kicking lightly every now and again. His father took the boy's hand and placed it on the hole, which was slowly trickling thick, steaming blood. The boy's hands were freezing and he could feel the animal's heat under his fingers.

"You did good," his father said, and the boy could only just hear him over the ringing in his ears.

His uncle bent down to have a closer look, then sighed. "Of all the goddamn luck," he muttered.

His father looked at the uncle and readjusted his hat. "She carrying?"

The uncle nodded, and the boy's father shrugged his shoulders. "Boy's gotta learn sometime," he said.

The elk soon stopped breathing and the boy's father put a long knife in the boy's hand. He showed the boy how to cut the hide on the forelegs, how to strip the skin and begin dressing the beast. The boy made sloppy, brutal cuts, and when the time came to open the thing up, he was sweating and slicked to the elbows with hot blood.

"Now give that here," his father said, and took the knife back.

Quickly, without any particular reverence, his father opened the belly and pulled out the pale little creature. It took a moment for the boy to understand what he was seeing, but once he put the pieces together, he felt the crushing black curtain fall around him again and understood the gravity of what he had done with the girl, what it meant to have done it. The world sort of fell away, then turned to black.

The uncle caught the boy as he crumpled. "Did the same thing myself, first time I saw one," he said to the father, then slowly lowered the boy to the ground.

Some time later, in the summer, the girl stood at the sink washing dishes and felt a giant, agonizing roar flash through her. The plate she had been holding slipped from her hands and shattered on the floor. She heard her father curse from upstairs and hobbled out the door into the thick woods behind the house. Pain gnawed at her, and she felt what the boy had given her shift with tectonic might. She collapsed at the edge of the river and hauled her pants down. What came came slowly and for what seemed like longer than she ever knew possible, the girl lost herself in a wild world of pain as deep and endless as the sea the river flowed into. Pain turned her inside out, broke her and smeared what was left into the dirt of the riverbank. For an insane moment, she believed she would split down the middle. It ended in a torrid gush of matter and screaming new life. She looked at the wrinkled thing writhing in the jellied mass and fainted.

When she came to it was dark, and a swarm of magpies clotted the trees above her, shuffling and whickering their wings together as they watched the scene below. She remembered where she was and quickly turned her head, looking for the child. It was bone pale in the moonlight and tinier than she thought it would be. Its tiny fingers worked into fists and the girl started to cry. "I knew you were coming," she said. "I've been waiting for you for so long now."

The child moved around weakly and the girl sat up, reaching out for it. Her hands closed around the child's freezing body. She could feel it breathing. "I can't believe you're real," she said.

They sat like that for a long time, mother and child huddled together in the wilderness, with an audience of magpies watching them with their glassy eyes. When the child started crying, some of the birds shifted on the branches. It wailed and wailed until there was another sound and the birds flew from the trees.

The girl staggered in a few hours later, covered in blood and juice and pine needles, and collapsed in a kitchen chair. Her mother screamed.

"Moses," the girl said, nearly gone. "Baby Moses among the rushes."

And there was life in the river.