Little Forks in Little Fists
She always kept a knife against her hip—not the kind that flipped closed, but a kitchen knife, long and toothed. She wore it the way some women wore straight pins across pleats in the backs of their dresses or in their headscarves. She did this because the wearer of a weapon never bore its danger, because the partnership was too sacred, because she made the knife more human and it made her, in turn, more steely.
There in the kitchen with her ragtag band of boys (boys whom she had not stolen so much as borrowed), the contour of the handle hardly peeked above her belt. She wore loose skirts and many scarves despite the heat of Louisiana in September, and sometimes she’d gather fistfuls of the fabric and dab at the diamonds of sweat on her collarbone or beneath her chin. She tried to keep the apartment cool, but she couldn’t do much when the window in the kitchen was so low and wide. The boys loved her kitchen over all the other places in this apartment of hers: a small first-floor, its door nestled under a whining metal staircase. Not that it had much to love—just the door and its blue entry rug; the kitchen range; the table; the small patio; and the bedroom, the door to which she kept locked. They loved the kitchen because, of course, she cooked: spicy roasted chickpeas, fried asparagus, blueberry cake, chicken with peppers. The boys ate without discernment, wrapping their fists around their spoons and pressing their fingertips onto crumbs; they were each of them eleven or twelve, but in the yellow slants of window light on that kitchen table they ate like babies. She would ask them, “Do you have any room left in there?” and they would smile with their lips closed and their cheeks puffed out, and she would break them off more hunks of cake with the tip of her knife. Sometimes she wiped the blade on the edge of the tablecloth, and sometimes she licked it clean.
Today she used it to portion a chocolate pie, and as it caught the light from the window, the oldest of the boys, Cecil, asked why she carried it in her belt.
“I haven’t been carrying it for long,” she said. “Do you remember when I didn’t?”
The child next to her, Gary, nodded with vigor, his lips distended. Whenever he tried to talk, crumbs exploded from his mouth.
“A little while ago, some men who walk past here to get to work saw me on my patio,” she said. “They looked at me like I was made of glass. They could see through me, but I couldn’t see through them. Then they did it again a week later. And again. They said terrible things. I felt lonely, and exposed, and for nights I saw their leers when I closed my eyes in the dark. So I carry this to make me safe.”
“Does it help?” Cecil asked.
“I think about them all the time.” She put a small slice on her own plate. “There’s half a pie left. Do you have any more room in there?”
And of course they all did. In this kitchen, options needed no time for weighing—the choice was always the same. They would swallow anything she gave them, always and without question.
Here she was their mother, and so she loved them. She had found them one of the last times she left the apartment, at the supermarket; when she asked, they helped her carry her groceries home. Afterward she baked them scones and they left not a crumb on the tray. Their presence in the kitchen felt almost normal, like they were hers; she hadn’t been able to have any of her own, even years ago, when she was still married. The boys would come to her in the afternoons and return home before dark, before their own mothers might notice them missing. They would eat here and again at home, though she suspected they ate more ravenously and in more quantity here than they did elsewhere. These boys were the opposite of the men who had so intimidated her: they were energetic and small, and impressionable, and capable, and magical. The men were brutish and forceful and large. The boys were active and buoyant where her husband had been dispassionate, lifeless; they were alive where these men were dead. She understood how much these boys needed her, how far they would go if she needed them to.
She cleared her throat and the boys looked up from their plates. “I have something I’d like you to do,” she said as she had planned, and as she knew they would, they said yes.
#
By the next afternoon, they had done it.
The tops of the boys’ heads bobbed as they struggled past the window. Each boy had a body by the ankle and was tugging it forward in increments of inches. The sky outside was light, and even though the other three tenants in the apartments around hers wouldn’t be home for hours, she rushed to help the boys pull the bodies inside. They were heavy and awkward. Cecil had his man upside down, the face dragging sluggishly across the pavement, the pulling leg twisted halfway around so that the toes pointed up. Daren and Gary carried bodies less disfigured, but when they dragged them over the rug and the threshold, both began to tick curiously on the tile. Each of their heads, she found, was peppered with glass and sticks. What magnificent boys could have carried this off in the brightness of the afternoon?
Only her boys. She pictured them against the walls of the alley, the outlines of three boys, hot and flat like rolled steel against the brick, dark glints like swamp eddies where their eyes were and bright rows of teeth like jagged saws. And the men would pass in their hunched self-absorption, in their gruff invincible shells, and three fiery, silver imps would slip from the shadows behind them. The men would be strong, almost armored in their jackets and their boots, but not as quick as the boys, nor as tenacious. The boys would drag the men backward by their belts, would use their sharp nails or shards of bottles and would not stop pushing until they had broken through skin.
In the indoor light, she could see marks on the boys’ skin, where those bottles had burst in their hands, where branches had scratched them as they pulled them from the nearby trees. She imagined the event would look something like a molten flood, like a swarm of cockroaches or an overgrowth of kudzu. At some point the men would grow still and their hearts would stop. Beyond that they would just have to take the bodies back to her apartment; she didn’t live too far, just a block or so, and even then she had told them to take the back route through the trees. The moss was thick behind the complex, and likely no one would see.
She shut the kitchen door behind the boys but didn’t draw the blinds over the window. Even in the rain, or the dark, she never drew the blinds, more out of stubbornness than fear. Yes, she liked knowing when someone neared the apartment, but this was a show of dominance, a refusal to hide in this lonely apartment, a display of her generative powers: I take a pantry and make sustenance.
Naturally, then, her next move was to cook them. She fished her knife out from her belt and set it to work, kneeling over the first of the men sprawled on the kitchen floor. Gary sat in a chair to watch her, his knees drawn up to his chin, his hands grasping his ankles. Cecil and Daren sat on the table, Daren swinging his legs, Cecil crisscross. They watched, trancelike, as she filled an empty flour sack with parts she couldn’t use. One of the men had a stopwatch in his leather coat, and she pocketed it before depositing the coat in the sack. She put what she wanted in a large glass bowl she had placed next to her on the floor, each piece glistening wetly and as red as any of them had ever seen.
In the end she decided to make roast, with onions and carrots. The kitchen filled with the gaseous odor of the little oven and soon, behind the door, the meat started to crackle. Cecil, always the first to offer help, moved down from the table and began to clean the mess she’d made while butchering. Her hands were dry, but her arms and apron were red, and soon so were Cecil’s knees and palms. Daren slid to the floor after a while to help him. One of them started to hum. Gary remained in his chair, not yet broken from his reverie; he was still in the same position by the time the roast was done, and didn’t move until she set the pan down squarely in front of him. The daylight hadn’t yet receded, and their mothers wouldn’t be missing them for another hour or more. She took a big spoon and the knife—which she had rinsed off in the sink—and piled roast and vegetables into little bowls.
They watched her, poised in their chairs, waiting for her to seat herself. She waved her fingers at them.
“Eat,” she said. The boys began. Like always, they worked grubbily—“Little forks in little fists,” she often said to herself.
After a minute she sat, too, and ate. The meat was soft, and her teeth ripped through it like knives. The carrots were greasy and ambrosial. But more than the food made her giddy; she watched her boys dig farther into their bowls and she swelled with pride. These boys, her little angels in her kitchen, had cared enough about her to help her right the injustices done against her. They had become something wholly other to carry out their intentions. They had won so heartily. She felt a pressure in her skin like her love for them was pushing through, and it kept pushing, harder, harder, until something in her skin became hard, too—alligator hard, like the leather jackets the men had worn. The boys could feel it, too, like nails in their pockets.
“I feel hot,” Daren said.
Gary scratched at his face. “Did you get taller?” he asked.
Cecil took another bite, chewed slowly, and nodded as he swallowed. He looked strong, in a brutish, gnarled way unlike his sleek ghoulishness from a few hours earlier.
She, too, felt more energetic, more cocksure than usual. The natures of these men seemed to have caramelized along with their bodies. Her boys had become different under her watch, and she was so proud of them. Their mothers could never understand what had happened in the way she did. She felt like their mother; she felt like the mother of all mothers, and she needed them to know that.
“Boys,” she began to say, but Cecil spoke, too, and she quieted to hear him.
“I think this is from the men,” he said, and then he turned toward her. “Can this happen? Have you heard of this before?”
“Many times,” she lied. “It’s a common thing, boys.” She reminded herself that she incited all of this. “Do you have more room in there?”
They murmured their agreement, Gary the most emphatically.
As she spooned more meat from the pan, she said, “I think it’s time we talked. You love me, don’t you?”
Daren smiled warmly at her, carrot between his teeth.
“Good,” she said, “because I wanted to tell you that I am proud of you, more than even a mother could be. I consider myself something like a mother here. Do you feel that way about me?”
They had already dug into their second portions, but Cecil reached out his free hand and balled it around hers, a little fist holding on desperately. His hand felt hot and clammy, like noon in May after rain. On occasion she had seen Cecil with his biological mother, not holding her hand but walking far in front of her. She had seen Gary’s mother do the same; only reckless mothers would have their boys navigate this town alone.
“Then I want you to prove it to me,” she said.
The boys ate in silence, but they understood what she meant and resolved to do it. She told them to be as discreet as they had been that afternoon, and to come back after midnight. They agreed, of course. Each finished their bowl and she did not offer them a third. The sky was turning pink outside and surely their mothers would miss them. She turned them out and each walked west as nimble little sticks, but somehow bigger than that, stronger, each one glowing in the dimming daylight.
#
After midnight the last two of them knocked. Gary had already arrived a few minutes before, and the suitcase he had brought with him was dripping onto the tile. She opened the door, and standing on the rug were Daren and Cecil, each with a large bag over his shoulder. Daren had red smears down his shirt and at his collar and on the knees of his pants. Cecil had it smudged over his mouth and the backs of his hands. When she turned around to get a better look at Gary, he, too, was messier than she remembered him being—faint brown streaked across his arms and under his chin. He looked like he’d tried to clean himself up and hadn’t done it right. She hurried them in and, after pausing to think, brought the rug inside, too. It was freckled in purple, and she folded it in half and leaned it against the doorframe. None of the boys seemed in the least bit upset; if anything, they had a fierce, understanding look about them, most clearly in the glint behind their eyes and in the grim set of their mouths.
She didn’t need to imagine, this time, where they had hidden or how they had accomplished the murders. She understood when she looked in their faces, and even more when she opened the bags they had brought her. Daren set his on the floor and opened it on the crumpled body, smaller in death, her hair pasted to her face with the blood from the wounds on her face and neck. The dress she’d been wearing had torn on one shoulder and the strap of her bra was visible. When she unzipped Gary’s suitcase a backlog of dreck splashed to the floor. Inside was something more or less human, although so flayed her face was no longer recognizable. Cecil and Daren eyed their peer with something close to admiration. In Cecil’s bag, which thumped with finality onto the floor, were a series of parts. On second inspection she could see something like a bracelet hanging partway out of his pocket—he had already picked the body clean of valuables and had returned to the kitchen just the meat and the clothes the meat came in. They stood in soggy shoes in the middle of the kitchen, flashing in and out of the shadows of the lamps she had lit, flashing in and out of the shadows that they so easily were, their ghoulish lips curving at her in pride over what they’d done.
They were proud of themselves, and she was proud of them, as proud as she’d been that afternoon, except now as a mother of these special and capable boys. Now as a mother she would feed them as she always had.
“So what do we want? Stir-fry? Meatballs?”
She thought she saw them perk on the last option, so she set to it. She retrieved her knife from her waist and began on Daren’s bag. The boys started in on the others with knives and bowls they had found on the counter. They worked like that, humming softly, until the vibrations of their throats blended with the hiss of the lamps and the rhythmic sloshing of raw meat piling into glass bowls. It was a symphony of labor.
She washed her hands in the sink and reached for the grinding attachment on her mixer. “Boys,” she said, “you proved you can love me this far, and I don’t know what to say.”
The boys still hummed and continued the last of their cutting. Gary wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and both came away red and glistening. His shoulders creeped upward in the way boys moved when they extended effort and someone important noticed.
“How will we feel after this? Since we felt strong this afternoon?” she asked.
Cecil looked up from his station on the floor, and she could hear his spine crackle as he straightened for the first time in an hour. His eyes were soft and fierce. One corner of his mouth twitched into a sad smile, and his face looked older and fuller than she remembered it.
“Mother,” he said, “we…”
And she knew it. She had chosen to ignore it when they came in, had seen it on their faces and looked away. The boys had already eaten, and now they were digesting their mothers. They were more discerning, shrewder. They were taller and sadder. She had so instilled in them their vicious need for more that they had taken it upon themselves to act without her help. She was their mother, yes, because their mothers were gone, because she had raised them to what they were—but what was a mother who couldn’t cook like this? What was a mother who couldn’t tell her boys to eat, and to fill their bowls with more because they were so amazed by their first portions? What did it mean that they had absorbed their mothers before she had a chance to? She realized she had raised them here not so that she could be their mothers, but so that they would be their own.
Of course the boys had realized this, too. They had stopped their work and were looking at her strangely, their heads to the side like dogs. Cecil had already found his feet. Gary had frozen, his hand on the counter, half up and half sitting. They kept flickering, like candles, back and forth into glow. They were the sum total of everything they’d sought—strong like the men, shrewd like their mothers, nimble and dark like they had always been.
“I love you,” Daren said.
She believed him. But she had pushed these boys so far they didn’t need her, and she understood that they had understood, that moment, that the only way she benefitted them was as a ghost in their bellies. From her they would be able to desire intensely, to withstand loneliness better, to cook wonderful things. She told herself this as they smiled, sadly, at her from across the kitchen. Their teeth were bright and red. She had backed herself up against the oven door without knowing it. Her knife was too far away, by the sink, and besides, what good was a knife against steel?
The room grew darker and the lamps flickered, and she had to strain to see where each boy was. The boys were hard shapes around the room, inching forward like the warmth that follows the daylight from the window across the kitchen floor. They approached her, hotly, quietly, as if in mourning and in consolation.
Molly Beckwith received her BA from Mississippi State University and is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Pinch, Hayden’s Ferry Review Online, and Mid-American Review.
Photo credit: “Anata and Apenimon” by L. Noelle McLaughlin. McLaughlin is a ghostwriter for hire living in New Paltz, New York. Her short stories and poetry have been published worldwide. She blogs at poorhumanbeans.wordpress.com.