The Broodmother of Jericho

The ash falls like slow confetti on the dead, and every flake sticks to sweat. I scrape it out of my eyebrows with the back of a knuckle and keep moving down what used to be Maple Street. Somebody painted JERICHO LIVES in a drunk scrawl across the half-collapsed pawn shop. The paint ran in the rain months ago and now it just says JERICHO LIE, which feels more honest.

I carry a cracked thermos and two wire snares in my pack. A kitchen knife rides my hip in an old leather holster that used to hold a phone. The knife belonged to Mom before the change, before her knuckles split and her nails learned how to think for themselves. I keep it sharp out of respect and fear. Mostly fear.

Mara is waiting in the basement with Mom. My sister runs hot with fever and cold with chills and she has that hollow look around the eyes like the world is sucking her through. She is fifteen and irritated that the apocalypse did not have the decency to be interesting. She misses music and toothpaste with a flavor and she misses laughing without coughing up blood at the end of it. I would give her old world problems. Acne and geometry. The last time I said that out loud she rolled her eyes and said, I could do without the acne. The coughing is worse.

Hunter gangs cruise the city from time to time. They wear tires on their shoulders and chain mail made of bottle caps. They sell blood and teeth and things they pull off the dead. They sell the living too. They killed a boy from our block for no reason. Then they took his bones to make a wind chime, which I guess qualifies as a reason if you let rot be your logic.

We try not to be interesting enough to hunt. We do not light fires at night. We do not travel in groups that look like prey. We keep Mom quiet. That last part is the most work.

People in Jericho think mutation looks like movie monsters. They expect a lizard with a human face and a laugh that sounds like a blender. The truth is less dramatic and worse. Mutation looks like your mother learning to breathe through her skin and talk to the mold that lives in the walls. It looks like your mother looking at you with eyes full of you. It looks like your mother forgetting her own name and then remembering it in three voices at once. It looks like love that refuses to die, even when it should probably take a break.

I pass the old pharmacy on Maple and cut into the alley. The sun is a white coin you do not want in your pocket. My dosimeter clicks out of habit, battery dead for weeks. I still tap it with a finger like you wake a sleeping friend. The alley smells like cat pee and wet pennies. Something alive is watching from the oven of a dumpster. The eyes blink sideways. I keep walking.

There is a woman named Roane who trades out of the choir loft of Saint Thecla. She used to be a nurse. Now she is a practical witch. If you need a thing you show up with another thing and Roane decides whether your thing is worth her thing. Sometimes the thing she gives you is hope. Sometimes it is penicillin. Sometimes it is a story. Stories trade better than bullets here. Bullets are heavy in this city. Stories weigh nothing and make us forget the taste of the water.

I climb the church steps and my legs feel like old rope. The stained glass is mostly gone. Sun knifes into the sanctuary and hangs in a mess of dust and ash, everything gray, everything holy and ruined and still pretending it matters. Roane sits up in the loft with a scarf around her hair and a pair of surgical scissors in her hand like the world is a thread she might finally cut right. She watches me climb and does not smile.

“Drink?” she says, and hands me a dented bottle that used to be something sweet. The label says Lemon Splash. Inside tastes like copper and melted snow and a lemon that made a bad choice. I take two careful sips. My body hums for more like a needy appliance.

“How bad?” she says.

“Not good.” I should dress it in better words. I am tired of that. “She is worse.”

“Your sister needs calories,” Roane says, businesslike. “And rest. And something to quiet her lungs, if the lungs are the problem. If it is marrow, that is a different song.”

“Mom is… louder,” I say. I hear it as soon as I say it. It sounds like I am talking about the radio.

Roane leans forward. “You keeping her in the basement?”

“For now.”

“Smell travels,” she says. “Sound does too, but smell gets to places sound is scared of. The gangs have dogs. The dogs are not right anymore, but a nose is a nose.”

“I know.” I look at my hands and see the life I am carrying in them and the life I am not. “I need pills. Anything for fever. And something for the cough. And iodine, if you have it.”

“I have what I have,” she says. She reaches into a crate that used to hold hymnals and pulls out a handful of brown glass bottles with labels that are almost lies. She sets aside a little jar that says Thyroid and a cardboard box that says Children’s Nighttime Relief in the voice of a cartoon moon. “I will trade you for snares and the thermos and the knife.”

“You can have the snares and the thermos,” I say. “Not the knife.”

Her look is a needle threaded with patience. “We all pay.”

“You will get my hand before you get the knife,” I say. “And that will make holding scissors tricky.”

Roane considers me for a long breath. She does not deal in fairness. Fairness went down with the power grid. She deals in a kind of mercy that wears boots. “Bring me scavenged IV lines. Clear ones. Not yellowed. I will take the snares and the thermos now. I will give you the cough syrup and aspirin and the iodine. You bring the lines or you bring me news about the gangs. Not gossip. Movement.”

I nod. News is cheaper than veins, and I like having both of ours intact. She wraps the pills and bottle in a page torn from the Book of Ruth. I wonder what Ruth would think of Jericho. Probably that it does not deserve a wall.

On my way home I take the long path that runs behind the basketball courts. The hoops are bent down like bare trees. The paint on the free throw line bubbled in the heat and froze that way, little blister hills. A pack of something slinks along the far fence, quick and low. Not dogs. Maybe people. Maybe neither. The sun burns through the clouds and lights up the dust like glitter. The city looks like a thousand weddings all at once, and every bride is a ghost.

The basement door sticks. Mara lifted the rug onto the stoop to dry it and the wood warped in the sun. I shoulder it closed and try to make my steps casual on the stairs. If Mom thinks I am nervous she will become nervous to match. She mirrors moods like a good mother, just with more teeth.

Mara lies on the pallet under a set of old license plates that we nailed into a patchwork above her head. She watches the door with fever eyes. The cough waits behind her tongue, polite and deadly. She used to smile with all the innocence left in America. Now her smile is a fragile thing I do not ask for. She holds her chin up like a little soldier. It hurts to see.

“You took forever,” she says. It is almost playful, so it must be practice.

“Never again will you be feverbored,” I say, and rattle the bottles like a magician. “I have the good stuff. Lemon Splash and fanfiction.”

“Fanfiction?” Her mouth twitches. “Does it have kissing?”

“Only if we get desperate.” I kneel and check that her skin is not a bonfire. It is only a stove on simmer. Progress, maybe. I shake two aspirin into my palm and pretend I do not see the tremor. “Drink this. Do not look at the label. It lies.”

She eyes the Children’s Nighttime Relief like it might confess something. “I trust it,” she says, then coughs. The cough doubles her over. It wrings her like a towel. She looks at me through tears and says nothing about how much it hurts. I love her for that and I hate the world more.

Mom is in the corner, behind a curtain we made from a sheet and a guilt we did not know how to shake. The sheet keeps nothing in and nothing out. It makes a theater out of a sickroom. I step around it and she lifts her face to me. That face is still the shape of Mom if you squint through memory. The eyes are too wide now. The whites have more map in them. Her hair is something else entirely, fine like moss and alive in a way hair should not be alive, breathing a little. When she speaks, her mouth is the only part that feels old.

“Richard,” she says. She says my name correctly. That is not every day. Sometimes I am Bud or Little Man or Charlie. Hearing my name is like getting a letter that found its way through.

“I brought you water,” I say, and kneel to lift the cup to her. She drinks without spilling. The tongue is too long for the mouth and too nimble and I pretend not to notice. My chest does a hopeful ache.

Mara watches from her pallet with her chin on her wrist. Her eyebrows are drawn together. She loves Mom and she is afraid of Mom. Both truths eat from the same bowl. When the gangs are in the neighborhood we turn the radio up loud, which means we sit closer to Mom and listen to the rustling conversations happening in her skin. That is what passes for music here. The city hums and Mom hums back. A chorus in mildew.

“You smell like the church,” Mom says. “Candle soot and old wood and blood that tried to be wine.”

“Roane still hustles,” I say. “She says if we keep you here we need to keep you quiet.”

Mom tilts her head. The hair sighs in each strand like grass behaving under wind. “She hears only with her ears.”

“Dogs smell,” I say.

“Dogs always smelled,” Mom says, and smiles in a way that hurts. “You were a baby who drew them. You smelled like hot bread and milk and lazy afternoons. I took you to the park and the dogs came from everywhere. Old men laughed. Women asked your name. A bulldog licked your whole head. You hated it and then you loved it. You were small enough for all kinds of forgiveness.”

Her hand comes up and I brace out of habit. It lands light on my jaw. Her palm is warm and the skin is not skin. It is something that learned skin’s costume. There is a familiarity in the wrongness. She has been my mother longer than she has been a miracle of rot. Love makes the wrong part of you nod along anyway.

At night the city talks. It talks in the walls and the pipes and the vents. The bomb did a number on nerves. It spread nerves where nerves did not belong. The rats learned tricks and then forgot morals. The soil hums like a throat saying grace. Mom rests against the cinderblock and closes her eyes and the muscles in the corners of her mouth flex along to whatever song the brick is singing. Sometimes she sings back. The words are not words, but the cadence is lullaby. That is how the building sleeps. I do not sleep. I watch the stairs and listen for dogs.

Around midnight I hear boots in the alley. Not just one pair. I put a hand on Mara’s shoulder and she comes awake without a sound. She is good at this. I reach for Mom without looking. Her hand finds mine. Her grip is stronger than it should be. The boots pass and return, pass and return, like men walking a perimeter. I picture the plate above us that says New Jersey and the one that says Alabama. If bullets ever learn to read those plates, I hope they hate New Jersey more.

When the boots go away I go check the back window. A half moon stares without romance. Something scratches at the basement hatch and sniffs. It whines in a throat that had other plans. The sniffing is methodical. It maps us. The whine dies and the scratching stops. The something leaves. I do not stand up again for a long time.

At sunup I run water in the sink and it comes brown. I fill the thermos I do not own anymore and set it aside to settle. I boil a pot over the little stove that eats fuel like hope and set a cloth over the cup to catch the floating grit. When I come back to the pallet, Mara is looking at the ceiling like it contains a message only she can see.

“I heard it again,” she says.

“What did you hear?” I already know the answer.

“The singing.”

I look at Mom. Mom is awake and pretending to be asleep. Her mouth holds the soft line of a lie told for love. My jaw aches with all the things I do not want to say.

“Sometimes the pipes sing,” I say. “They do that in old buildings.”

“It knew my name.”

I set the cup down a little too loud. Mom flinches and recovers. I look at my sister and try to make a joke land in a place without gravity. “I told the pipes your name,” I say. “We are all very close.”

Mara watches me with the tired eyes of a child who has learned exactly when the adult is lying. She picks up the cup and stares into the brown like it might explain itself. “It did not sound human,” she says softly.

“Most of what lives here is not,” I say, and pull the blanket up over her shoulders. “Drink. It will taste like regret. That means it is clean.”

We eat a stew that is beans and whatever those were that fell in the snare. The meat is fine enough if you do not think about it. I keep my head out of the trap. Mom eats last. She is picky now. She likes food that hummed recently. The stew only hums when I hold the bowl close enough for my heart to fake it.

Around noon the air changes. Jericho air always feels like static waiting for a finger. This feels worse. It feels like a hand on the back of your neck that is not there when you turn. I do not need to check the alley to know the gangs are back. I do anyway. Habit makes the dumbest sense.

They came in on three bikes and a truck that used to deliver bread. The truck has a battering ram welded to the front in the shape of a goat head. They think that is clever. Men ride in the bed with poles and hooks and a net like they are going after a shark. Their leader stands on the roof of the cab and holds a pipe like a scepter. He wears a stole that used to belong to a priest. He calls himself Pastor Gage. He was a night manager at a hardware store before the lights turned off. Now he blesses violence with Bible words and a grin full of teeth he polished with other people’s salt. The men with him chant a line I did not want to hear again.

“Find the broodmother,” they say. “Find the brood.”

The world tilts. My hand finds the knife.

I can leave. The thought is a clean wound. I can take Mara and we can run. We can leave Mom. We can be terrible in a way that keeps us breathing. The part of me that wants to live sits up and listens. The part of me that is a son stares at the wall and tries to hear its own voice.

Mara is pale. The fever went down and took her color for company. She sits up and coughs into the blanket. Mom hums something in her throat that soothes the cough. Mom looks at me without blinking. We are out of the long versions of this conversation.

“They are looking for me,” she says. Her voice is sanded smooth by something bigger than breath. “Again.”

“How do they know you are here?” My voice has too many bones in it.

“They do not,” she says. “They will find me. That is what they do.”

“Then we go,” I say. “We move now.”

“If you move now you die in the street,” Mom says, gentle as someone describing the wrong turn you are about to take. “You will be meat for dogs who learned envy.”

“Then we wait.” I feel like a badly trained dog who barely remembers the trick. I turn to Mara. “Pack light. We will run at dusk. They eat at dusk and they brag at dusk and they get sloppy.”

Mara nods and moves slow. Her hands shake. She looks at Mom. The air between them holds more past than I want to drag through another day.

“Richard,” Mom says, and draws my name out like a prayer that does not care about God. “There is another way.”

I do not want to do the game where we pretend we will not say the thing we are going to say. “No.”

“You seen the rats,” Mom says. “You seen how the vines do what the city asks. It is not blight. It is a chorus. There is a song in the dust and in the pipe water and in the bones of the buildings. I can teach your sister the melody.”

“You want to make her like you,” I say. “You want to put your… your… in her.”

“I want her to live,” Mom says, and for a second the old mother face comes up from under the new mother face like a candle rises through a lump of wax. “You think I do not know what I look like. You think I do not hear my skin. I do. I know what I am and I know what I am not. I am not a fever. I am not a tumor. I am a language the city learned and then taught to me. I can teach it to her.”

“She is a child,” I say, and that sounds ridiculous because we are all children now and that is why we die.

“She is a child who wants to breathe,” Mom says. “She is a child who does not want to cough until there is nothing left to cough. This is not you losing her. This is you not losing her the small way. If you refuse, you will lose her the small way and the large way too.”

The basement walls listen hard. I want to shout at them to mind their own business. The chanting outside gets louder and gone is not close enough to be useful. I look at Mara. She has been listening. She has been listening for weeks.

“Will it hurt?” she asks.

Mom shakes her head. “You will feel a hand on your back. It will not be mine. It will be yours, older.”

More boots. The goat head grinds against the corner of our building and scrapes stone loose. The gang lights a flare. The red light fills our little theater like blood rising in a jar. I look at the window again and see there is no later that is not now.

“Do it,” Mara whispers. “If it means I keep breathing.”

I cannot say yes. If I say yes, I will never stop saying yes to things no one should say yes to. Also I cannot say no. I hand my voice to the knife. I go to the curtain and hold it back and sit beside my mother and touch her shoulder. Her shoulder hums like a hive that loves me. I set the knife between my knees and hold Mara’s hand and say nothing. The choice happens without words.

Mom reaches up. Her fingers are slender and wrong and I am a child again for the length of one heartbeat. She touches Mara’s throat and traces a curve along the collarbone. She leans forward and whispers something into Mara’s mouth. The first breath was stolen from the world. The second breath has to be taught. My sister takes it. She takes the gift like a girl takes a secret, with both hands.

The gangs smash in the building next door. Screams rise like steam. The flare light flickers and makes our little space pulse. Mom closes her eyes. The air turns cooler. My own lungs remember a feeling they felt when I was seven and hid under a blanket in a thunderstorm. Not fear. That other thing. The hush before the strike. Mom lays her palm on the floor and the floor answers. The cinderblock under us carries her voice to the walls. The walls carry it to the pipes. The pipes carry it to the guts of the city. The city clears its throat.

Mara inhales and something clicks in her chest like a lock you have been turning for years and only now found the right direction. Her cough rises to meet it and then decides to skip the fight. She exhaled and does not bleed. Her pupils widen and then narrow and then widen again. Her skin flushes a new pink that is not pretty but it is alive. For the first time in months, she looks like a thing that is not dying today.

The door above us explodes inward. The goat head appears in the stairwell like a god that got bored with symbolism and wants to try smashing. Pastor Gage laughs from the new hole in our ceiling. The men at his back snarl like men and dogs both. He has the net. He looks at my mother and smiles like payday.

“Broodmother,” he says, with all the sacred in his mouth that he can pretend. “I came to tithe.”

Mom does not look at him. She looks at me, then at Mara. The hair along her scalp rises like grass before a storm. She stands up without using her hands. The sheet falls and the act is over and we are what we are. Pastor Gage steps down and points and the men move as if their bones speak to each other.

I stand up with the knife and I do not stand up alone. The walls shift in the corner. Something with too many legs slides out from between the water heater and the shelf with the jars of screws. It is all cartilage and purpose. The vines that live along the floor in the crack by the drain lift their heads to see the show. The concrete knows where the seams are. It swells at the right ones. The house itself seems to take offense in a way I have been waiting for since I was a kid and Dad never came home.

Pastor Gage realizes too late that he is in a city that has not forgiven men like him. He lunges with the net. The net catches my shoulder and the hook on the pole opens my skin from clavicle to biceps. The pain is white and holy. I do not drop the knife. I slam into his ribs and we go down on the stairs. The men come and then cannot, because the vines get greedy and something under the steps takes their ankles. The world is suddenly a mouth.

Mom is singing. It is not a human melody. My teeth ache. My eyes leak. The men who are not men anymore lose the part of them that could tell one voice from another and run toward hers. If you want to understand power, watch who stops pretending they have any. Pastor Gage is strong and quick and mean, but he is a tourist in the body of a church. My old knife finds the soft between his ribs and his choked breath tastes like iodine and old paint. He dies the way everyone dies here, surprised to discover the city owns the deed.

The others do not stop. They will not. The net drapes over the water heater like an idiot spiderweb. A man swings the hook and the hook sings a little note when it hits the pipe. The pipe answers with steam that whips his mouth into a rictus of astonishment. He falls back into something faithful and unseen that puts its hands on his face and teaches him a lesson about touching things that are not his. The vines drink. The rats arrived as if the show had a marquee. They pour through insulation and grate like a thought. They carry knives in their mouths. Everyone has learned the trick with knives.

Mara stands beside me with her hair sticking to her forehead and her eyes too clear. She breathes without struggling. She does not cough. She does not fall. She watches my mother and she watches the men and she watches me. I watch her watching and feel something tear quietly behind my sternum. Relief is an amputation.

By the time we climb into the street the flare has died and the ash falls lazy around us. The truck sits at a dumb angle, front axle twisted, goat head buried in brick. The men who rode in the back are gone. The poles and hooks lie on the ground like snakes that forgot how to behave. The sky looks clean at the horizon in a way that lies. Our building breathes. It pulls cooler air through the broken windows and exhales warm from every crack. I say thank you under my breath because manners are free again.

We leave. We carry what we can because it is not much. We go east through the parking lot with the map of oil stains and past the elementary school with the swing that only squeaks in two of the five directions. We aim for the old market hall where the roof fell in but the basement kept secrets about root cellars and water taps. We move in a staggered line. I stay in front because I am still pretending to be able to stop things. Mara walks behind me without wobbling. Mom moves last and every time her foot meets the ground, the ground reacts.

At the market hall we find more change waiting for us. There is a smell that is not rot and not ozone and not the chalk of long dead. It is the smell of new bread without wheat. It is the smell of a bandaged wound not because it is hidden, but because it is healing the way it wants to. Roane is there on the steps. She looks at us and looks behind us and then looks at the city.

“I heard it,” she says. “Up through the ladder in the rectory. The pitch went through my bones. I knew where to go.”

“You brought anyone?” I ask.

“Only the dead,” she says. “They do not eat much.”

Mara sits on the curb and rubs her throat like she cannot believe it belongs to her again. She looks at me and tries to smile and I fail to meet her halfway. I am happy and I am not. I have learned that both can sit on the same porch and insult each other.

Roane kneels in front of Mom and speaks to her in a language that sounds like the one Mom speaks when the pipes listen. The two of them have a talk that has been waiting. Roane is not surprised by the hair or the breath or the way Mom’s throat thrums when she is quiet. Roane has been ignoring the math for months and finally has the chalk to write it.

“You did not tell me you were this far along,” Roane says.

“I did not tell me either,” Mom says, and something like a laugh slips out and shakes the dust. “It is not a clock. It is a tide.”

Roane nods. She looks at me. “The gangs will come again. Not today. Not tomorrow. Soon. They hunt in counties the way wolves hunt in woods. They believe in maps.”

“We move again,” I say. “We keep moving.”

Roane tilts her head. “Maybe. Maybe not. The city is not a lake you have to swim across. It is a living thing. It has organs. It has a spine. It has a mouth. It is learning to keep the things it loves.”

“You think it loves us,” I say, because sometimes I do not know how to keep my head out of the trap.

“I think it loves her,” she says, and nods at my mother. “And I think you come with her.”

We sleep in the market under the part of the roof that used to shelter the butcher stalls. The night is bright because the ash reflects moonlight like salt. I dream a dream where the walls of the city are ribs and we walk through them into a chest cavity that holds a heart big enough to house a thousand of us. I wake and hate that the dream stayed. I wake and hear singing. It is the pipes again, and it is not.

In the morning Mara does not cough. She eats two bowls of root soup and asks for a third. Her cheeks have color that is not fever. Her hands are steady. She says she feels tall and not because she grew. Mom hums while she sharpens the knife and the sound the knife makes is happy in the way a knife knows how to be happy. I try to be useful and fail. Every task feels like a child’s version of the real thing. I go to the doorway and stare at the street and pretend vigilance makes me valuable.

Three more days pass on the clock we pretend we still keep. On the fourth day a man walks up the middle of the road with his hands out like he is carrying something he cannot spill. He is alone. He wears a sweatshirt with JERICHO HIGH SCHOOL printed on the front and a hole through the O the size of a finger. He has the ruined face of a man who never expected to survive this long. He stops twenty feet away and I see he is shaking.

“I heard it,” he says. He points at the ground. “Under the mall. I heard it and I came because I had nowhere else to go.”

“You should go,” I say, which is the meanest thing I have said out loud in months.

He steps forward, then stops. “I do not want to hurt anyone,” he says.

“You do not get to want,” I say, and the words taste like Pastor Gage’s pipe.

Mara comes to the door. She looks at the man who is shaking. She touches the frame with her fingers and the wood settles like an animal that finally trusts the hand. Mom comes behind her and stands very still. I watch the air around them shift in a way my eyes do not know how to name.

“What did you hear?” Mom asks the man.

“A song,” he says. His eyes fill. He is embarrassed. “It told me not to die yet.”

Mom nods like a teacher who asked the question to hear the student say it. “Then do not.”

More come. Not a crowd, not yet. Two on the fifth day. Four on the sixth. Eight on the seventh, and I think about old stories and a week that ends in rest. It does not end in rest. It ends with a van at the far end of the street and a pair of binoculars and a rented hatred. It ends with the hunters again and this time with friends, or clients, or both. They roll in slow because they are not dumb enough to hurry. They set up at the intersection. They build a little shrine to the idea that we should be afraid of them.

The ones who came for the song do not run. They stand on the curb and watch the men with nets and poles and guns that shoot nails. They look at Mom like you look at someone who is still learning how much accidental power they had. I can feel the moment inside me that later I will call the hinge. The part where you pick the road and the road picks you back.

I walk into the street because I cannot stand the doorway anymore. The ash swirls around my ankles and my shirt sticks to my back and the knife pulls on my hip. I have never been the words I am about to say. I do not know who put them in me. Maybe the city did. Maybe Mom did. Maybe both wanted me for the same job.

“You came late,” I call to the men with the nets. I keep my voice easy. “The world ended months ago. The auditions are closed.”

Pastor Gage is not here, which means I put my knife in the right place. His replacement is a man with a face that wishes for a beard and a jaw that wants to be in charge. He smiles with lips that tried to learn kindness once and then forgot the lesson. He raises a hand and the men with the guns raise theirs.

“Where is she?” he says.

I think about lying. I want to so badly it makes a noise in my throat. Then I remember the moment with my mother and my sister. I remember the floor that answered. Lies feel like small tools. I need something larger.

“Everywhere,” I say.

He laughs and I taste blood in the back of my mouth. “Cute.”

Mom steps past me. The crowd behind her draws one slow breath together. Her hair lifts in a wind we do not feel. Mara stands behind Mom and puts her hand on the base of Mom’s spine like that is where a switch lives. Roane comes up beside me and says a prayer under her breath that no god recognizes and every wall does.

The man with the jaw waves his hand down. The trigger fingers squeeze. Nails fly. The air fills with a sound like a hive and a hurricane and a chapel with every bell broken. The nails hit nothing we care about and everything we do. They bury themselves in fresh-made stone. They swallow in vines that were not there yesterday. They thud into walls that grow thicker by the inch. The street buckles. The men stumble. The rear wheels of the truck sink and spin and then stop spinning because the ground has learned hunger.

You would think I would be afraid of the city when it does this. I am and I am not. It is not fireworks. It is citizenship. It is the moment the land remembers it has a vote.

The men turn to run and run nowhere because the alleys are not where the alleys were. The maps they used are boring and wrong. The vents breathe heat on them and then pull the heat away. The shadows move in front of them like guard dogs. Something large and soft and many-legged comes out of a sewer grate and holds their feet long enough for the vines to take a better hold. They scream. Screaming still means what it used to.

Mom’s song rises. It is too much for the throat. It is too much for the lungs. The city sings back through drainpipe and rebar and old bones in the wall. A hundred thousand tiny throats add their notes. This is a thing that should feel like collapse. It feels like a building.

When it is over there are fewer men on the street and the ones who remain lie on their backs and count clouds that do not exist. We do not kill them. We let the city decide. Some of them the city keeps. Some it makes leave. The ones who leave carry the new story. Stories trade better than bullets.

Night comes and we drag the truck into a position that blocks the intersection. The goat head looks more ridiculous here. It looks like someone who never understood a joke. We sit on the curb and drink Lemon Splash and plan. Roane draws a map with a stick in the ash. Mara listens with her head turned in a way that tells me she hears more than we say. Mom leans back against the wall and closes her eyes and for once looks like a woman resting at the end of a hard day. Not a queen. Not a monster. Not a prophet. A mother who got through dinner and bedtime and the part with the tooth brushing and the story. A mother who gets to breathe.

I go walking before dawn and the air is cool and the ash is thin. I make a circle around the block and feel something prick behind my knee. I scratch and my skin gives the wrong answer. It is nothing dramatic. It is a cluster of tiny pips under the surface, lighting up when my hand touches them. A diagram under the dermis. A little map. The first notes of a song.

I stand in the mouth of the alley and press my thumb into each little bump and watch the light answer. I think of Mara and the click in her chest. I think of Mom and the way the hair lifts like grass before a storm. I am slow, but I am not dumb. It is not contagious the way a cold is contagious. It is contagious the way language is contagious. The city is teaching its verbs. It is putting them in the mouths of people who will use them. It did not ask my permission. It asked for my attention.

I could be afraid. I am, in parts. The other parts are calm in a way that worries me. I think of Pastor Gage and the hole through his chest and the way his mouth moved when the knife went in. I think of the men with nets and the way their boots sounded in the alley when they were walking a perimeter. I think of the first time I heard Mom sing and how much I wanted to pretend nobody in the world was strong enough to make me like the sound. I think of all of that and then I think of my sister sleeping in a world that decided to like her back.

There is one thing I did not tell you. When the first pack came weeks ago, before the goat head and the nets and the new name on Pastor Gage’s pipe, I had a dream that the city wanted me to come upstairs. I stood at the top of the stairs and the light coming through the hole in the roof made a pattern on the floor like water. I walked into it with bare feet. The concrete under me felt warm and not from the sun. It felt like blood warmed it from within. I put both hands on the wall and it felt my hands and put a hand back. I should have been afraid. I felt relief that made me dizzy. Not because the city loved me. Because something finally did besides me. It had weight. It had teeth. It had the patience to wait me out.

You want a twist. Here you go. I used to think the hunters were different from me because they chased what they did not understand. I thought I was better because I protected it. Turns out protection and predation are siblings who share a bed. I am good at both. I feel it now. I taste it when the wind comes from the river and brings the smell of wet metal and old fire and something living that thinks I am worth its time.

People come to the market now in a line that does not end. They bring jars and wire and stories. They bring apologies no one asked for. They bring the dead and we put the dead in places the city wants them. We do not burn. We plant. We do not bless with words I do not believe. We bless with the proof that breath stays, sometimes in different rooms.

I wake early and walk the perimeter. I stand in alleys the hunters used to use and I listen to the pipes teach me names for things that did not need names before. I sharpen the knife because it is a promise I made to an old idea. I do not think I will need it often. The city has larger tools. I carry the knife anyway because love does not retire.

A boy from across town came yesterday with his mother. Her skin glittered in the sun like mica. Her eyes were two coins of the same mint. The boy held her hand and he did not look away when the light touched the part of her that learned how to be new. He asked me if I was in charge of this place. I said nobody was in charge and everyone was responsible. He squinted at that because it is a dumb sentence that is true. He nodded and asked if there would be school. I said yes. He asked who would teach. I said Mom would, and Roane would, and the pipes would, and the walls would, and sometimes I would, and sometimes he would. He said he did not like math. I said math liked him and he would get used to the attention.

When the next van comes down the street with men who want to rent hatred, I will meet it in the open. I will say the auditions are still closed. If that does not land, the street will shift and the vines will lift, and the pipes will sing, and I will step forward because I am good at the thing I never planned to be good at. I will protect, and if protection requires teeth, I will use teeth. The city will hum through my feet and I will hum back. We will pretend we chose each other, and maybe that is not a pretend at all.

It is not the end you wanted when you first heard the word Jericho. It is not walls falling down at the trumpet. It is walls learning how to bend so they do not need to break. It is a city that decided it would not be a graveyard even if it had all the right parts. It is my mother who teaches children to breathe with more lungs than the one they were born with. It is my sister laughing without coughing up blood at the end of it. It is me, a man who used to sharpen a knife for fear, who sharpens it now because the blade sings when it is ready and I like the sound.

The ash still falls. The bomb did what bombs do. It erased. It taught by subtraction. The rest of the lesson is ours. When the flakes land on my face I let them melt and I do not wipe the wet away. It feels like rain. It feels like blessing. It feels like a hand on my back that is not mine, and also is.