Thrust: A Novel

I would set us free from the word mother. May your body be yours again; may your blood belong to you again. Even to the dead mothers: may your body belong to whatever you might have become, had you not been strapped to the service of breeding.

And to the blossom of every girl ever born: May that violent rush of cosmic possibility in your body, between your legs, be let loose from reproduction. May you open yourself to the cosmos, creating new constellations. May it wreck the wrong world back to life.

The Lament of the Butcher’s Daughter

Mikael’s story — of the boy, and the woman on the sidewalk, and the life she held as hers escaped — made Lilly’s gut feel numb. The more he moved toward its inevitable conclusion, the heavier and hollower her own body seemed. She could almost feel what his next words would be, but she didn’t want them to be real.

As he narrated this story of a boy — as if some other boy were the matter — the fact of him sitting there in front of her receded. He was not a young man on the constant cusp of violence. He was not her lost brother. He was… possible again. His voice a storyteller’s. She needed the bathroom, but no way was she going now. She crossed one leg tightly over the other and kegeled and told herself, You will hold this in, no matter how much it hurts. You will hold this in if your eyes water an ocean.

Mikael looked different now as he spoke. He sat up and he used his hands. Lilly noticed how long his fingers were, how delicate his gestures. His hands were beautiful. His story began to make shapes in front of her. His voice traveling through time, or so it seemed.

“He picked the thing up and held it hard against his chest, like a ball. The baby girl. He’d caught a football exactly once in his life, almost by accident; the ball was meant for another boy, but he’d seen the physics in the air and reached up to snag it because he knew he could. Most of the time he’d spent around boys and balls involved getting hit in the skull, in the face, hit so hard in the chest that it knocked the wind out of him. He’d spent most of his physical education classes sitting on a stupid wooden bench alone, just him and his glasses, but now the coach yelled, Bring it to your chest, hard!

“And he did. With both arms, hard to his chest, he ran.

“In the furnace room, in the basement of his apartment building, the boy knew every hidden space: a million shadowy corners, tucked behind piles of things in storage. The room was as warm as a tub for hatching chickens, a device he’d seen in his science class. That was the thing: the warmth, and all the old things stored there, made the basement feel like a giant nest. And the sounds down there were cacophonous, one of his very favorite words. The furnace roared, and whatever it was connected to growled, and the pipes moaned and screeched, and just being at the bottom of things — all those floors above them, the cooking and cleaning and families and husbands yelling at wives and mothers yelling at children and women like Vera making their body songs all day and night — it felt like all that sound might hide them.

“He’d learned how to use an eyedropper to feed baby chicks or baby birds fallen from trees. He knew how to feed abandoned kittens or puppies, even a baby ferret once, with food he’d chewed in his mouth first. Mother eagles did this. It was called regurgitation, another favorite word — not for its meaning but for the syllables.

“And the best thing of all was: he knew how to read better than anyone in the entire school, possibly including his teachers, which meant he could find whatever he needed to know about the idea of mother. In fact, the more he thought about it — about resting the baby girl inside his coat and an old blanket he found, and then carefully laying her down in an old wooden box — the more he believed he had a purpose. For the first time in his stupid boy life.

“He stared at the girl as she lay there, in the box, cooing like a pigeon. Then his heart seized: How to make the box rock? He scanned the room, spotted an old bike leaning against the wall. If he brought his father’s hacksaw down, he might be able to cut a rim in half. He ran upstairs to retrieve some water and saltines, which he chewed up while walking back down to the basement. After letting her suck on a washcloth doused in water, he made a kind of mush of the water and saltines, and put a little at a time on the end of his finger for her to suck. He had so much to learn.