Our Designs

Men swarmed Mama like flies. They laid their wants in parts prone to decay, lingering long enough to birth something lively but ugly, something that took flight but sputtered to a statued existence. I was just a boy then. I didn’t understand these folks. I only knew when Mama needed her medicine.

One night, while she lay like corn syrup in bed after a hefty dose, I waited for the television’s static to lift. A knock at the door shook me. I opened it. A man dressed in black loomed, and an aroma of antiseptic and licorice followed.

“Is Luna home?” He asked.

“Yes.” His eyes, like a crow’s, choked the truth from me.

His unfinished granite gaze seemed to glide past me. The doctor’s bag in his hand swung like a pendulum. When I broke from this trance, I rushed upstairs to find him sitting beside Mama, combing her unwashed hair with fingers like ancient wands. His head cocked, first inspecting me the way an insect might, then absorbing the bland, plush facade among Mama’s pill bottles and dirty laundry.

“It’s time.”

Without saying another word, I felt compelled to approach, to gently unclasp his bag and begin laying out the instruments and parts that would bring Mama back to us.

“Good boy,” he cooed, as his hands expanded their influence over Mama’s tense soul.

The bag seemed to have no bottom, but I felt no reason to question this. I was focused on carefully setting each tool beside the last. The final one, being a handheld version of a scythe, I placed beside a collection of retractors, scalpels, tubing, and drill bits.

The stranger said, “We need to strap her down.”

Like a magician, pulling handkerchief after handkerchief, he unravelled a series of nylon straps from his bag. After we laid them across Mama, I yanked and strained under their weight and held my breath until, finally, she was secure. I gasped for air while the stranger buckled her down and fastened a bite block in her mouth. She was lucid, but we needed to take this precaution, he told me.

“It will get messy.”

“I understand,” I said.

Unlike all the other men I had known, this one seemed to promise the voice in my head peace. I had always wondered what that was like. So much so that I had spent many nights observing Mama and her lovers sleeping, cradling one another, while I fingered a steak knife in my back pocket.

“Go,” he sharply whispered when everything was in place.

I obeyed, but my curiosity, exploited by this stranger’s pull, married me to the edge of the doorframe. I observed like an animal examining a morning fog cloistered among wild grass. The man removed his black trenchcoat and carefully rolled up his sleeves. He then tied a surgeon’s mask over his head and then slid on a pair of surgical loupes.

The procedure began when he sliced Mama’s chest open with the scythe. It cut like a fresh blade caressing paper. I stood on my tiptoes, but I couldn’t quite see inside Mama.

He cracked her sternum. I could hear her ribs snap like single piano keys, punched one by one. He folded her flesh back. Her muscles glistened like the blubber of a gutted fish while he jabbed a variety of tubes inside her. Blood stained the bedding. Next, he dug deep, hollowing her out like a pumpkin, allowing the weight of her organs and intestines to slip between his fingers and into his bag. Our home stank raw.

Mama had been dying. I had done the best I could. Now the stranger was finishing her off, it felt like. I hated him. But I was relieved that Mama’s suffering might come to an end, so I loved this man, and part of me hoped he’d take me with him after he was done here.

He paused, his hands drenched in her, and spoke as though he could hear my thoughts.

“Enough. I’m trying to concentrate.”

“She’ll live,” he admitted later in the procedure. His eyes were still fixed on the bodily fluids travelling through the tubes from Mama into his bag. Or maybe it was the other way around?

“I’m improving her,” he claimed.

And so, he began the process of installing metal inside Mama. The gears were both large and small.

“They must be perfectly positioned,” he said, “so they may turn in a self-sustaining manner. But she must be wound up,” he looked at me, “like a music box.”

I nodded, “Yes, sir.”

As he weaved the cable and fine wires that would now make up her frame and nerves, he said, “In my bag.”

I quietly approached it, unsure if this was a trap, but I could feel the stranger inside my mind reassuring me to trust. I closed my eyes and reached deep into a primordial ooze of sorts, and felt until the curved, hard edge of something found me.

“There,” he sighed, folding Mama’s skin back, he soldered the gaping wound closed with the tip of his scythe.

“Come here. I’ll show you.”

I handed the man this small, simple gold key, and he hovered it over the place where Mama’s heart was no more. The flesh receded, and he gently pressed it in and turned. The taut system squeaked and whined. He had me make the final twist to know what it felt like to hit that insurmountable resistance, and then had me pull out. He guided my hand into my pocket.

“Don’t lose it,” he said, “She’ll need you forever because she won’t know how or why. She won’t believe it. And she will never remember who I was and what I did to her. Now sleep, son.”

And like before, I felt compelled by this stranger to do what he commanded without question, walking away from Mama and her blood-soaked room where this dark shadow hung over her, clasping his bag shut.

When I woke up the next morning in the same clothes I had worn the night before, I was convinced that all this had been a dream. I walked by Mama’s room. It was clean, and the bed was made. Even the pill bottles were gone. Then I heard a woman singing, and the radio playing, and I followed the sound to the kitchen, where Mama’s hips swayed as she plated a Belgian waffle, showered in amber light.

“Sit, sweetie!” She chimed.

I hesitated. She whacked the knife and fork against the counter.

“Now, mister!” Sloshing the plate toward the table

I sat. She set it down and smothered the waffle in butter and syrup. She smelled clean and sweet, brimming with low-fi laughter. But licorice and antiseptic hung in the air.

I asked, “Where is he?”

“Who?” Her confusion washed away sooner than it came. “Eat up, baby.”

I patted my pockets. I had the key. I knew what I’d need to do from here on out.