Nativity

Nativity

by Ragan Sutterfield

The hay smelled like urine, fresh and old, and we couldn't tell if it
was from the animals or us. But ammonia's a disinfectant and we didn't
worry too much because we were all too weak to go farther. It had been
three days since the giraffes walked through, necks bobbing, three days
since the elephants raged and I fucked a clown. The barn had been
supplied by Scott, Jason threw the party, and we all got high on the
County Sheriff's discount rack. First it was the weed-everything slowed
down so I could see it and enjoy the beautiful, the way the shadows
played on the ceiling and how everybody got this halo sheen around
their heads. Then the meth-my ears red and supersonic, the tinkle of my
cells almost unbearable as they crashed through dilated veins, my heart
fast like a gun shot and every beat coming with an echo. And then came
the suckers of who-knows-what that ripped with a twenty pipe organ
blast and blinding flash-big bang through the hole in my stomach where
my mother cut me loose. This was all more than I should have smoked,
dropped, taken, so I was left in this Coney Island barn for a night,
dazed for a day, and then that aching, dizzy pain where you're not sure
if its your body or the earth that's hurting.

I couldn't isolate anything-my head went everywhere and I became
all-the loft slats, the walls, the dust falling fast through the
sunlight. And I could feel other breaths rising and hear other murmurs
slurring and we were here, and there, and nowhere like amnesiac spirits
mixing in the ether. And so with a muscle-tightened push I tried to get
up and see the company, see the last dead sparks of the electric world
fading. But my head spun and staid refusing as my body rose, and my
muscles gave, elastic dropping, and I fell from my five-inch progress.
It was ten minutes with deep breaths, and then I tried again in baby
steps in a flex, push, and look. I could see someone close beside and
another body in a blur-ten feet and two worlds between us.

I hadn't noticed the hay until now, but it was announcing itself, every
needle an electric pulse in my myelin sheaths. All I wanted was to get
up and run, to rip off my clothes in the cool December air. I turned
and scratched and tried to move but my stomach sank and I could feel
everything in my body going up my throat- my blood mixed up and all my
arteries switching to veins and veins to arteries. I lay there, the
feeling passing into the open dust air, and light coming in the windows
falling like a stream on rocks over the body close beside. I turned my
head. Waves rippled. Body curves in the sunlight. Breasts and a stomach
rising swollen. I closed my eyes half down and looked hard through the
ultraviolet. And through a nose, eyes, and lips gasping hard, a face
began to come and slowly I saw Lisa-Lisa who was very near due and had
just shot herself to who-knows intravenously.

We had all known she was pregnant for a while, some of us for the whole
nine months-word spread fast so we gave her grade A shit to not fuck up
the kid. Quitting wasn't an option we could risk-the child got what the
mother needed. So the baby grew inside with heroin highs and no father.
The spirit only knows who "he" was because it could have been any of
us. But it wasn't her then and it wasn't us either. It was a lion on
the lioness or whatever the synapses fired in the trigger rhythms of
the chemical tissue, electric pulse brain. It could have been none of
us, she'd been taken to mother ships and back again; she'd even fucked
a god, raped like a Bullfinch myth. But regardless she was looking at
me with the sappy serene gaze of a heroin smile, eyes glazed and
moving, and her red hair falling down across her face. "Lisa," I tried
to say, but my mouth was thick with spit and my words got lost in the
saliva tangle.

I turned on my back, my ears ringing loud with a bell tower clash, but
Lisa's moan stopped the anvil for a while and set it on a new sound
that echoed, in the barn or brain I couldn't tell which. I looked over
again and she was somewhere on the Kansas prairie wandering in a
Codeine blue sunset, pain killer numb and world burning weakened.
Codeine's what I want when I go to hell and that Kansas prairie was
hell fire lit in a controlled burn-land clearing for the two-sprout
leaves of a new crop rising. The farmers were rough and
gathered-waiting and watching the wind with its fire breath. And in the
trucks big plastic water barrels stood ready to drench the dirt and
stop the smoke that was burning capillaries red in unshaded eyes. The
fire moved closer and the farmers fumbled, their shirtfronts opening
with dirty-nail callous-hands, and sweat beading on their chests. And
then there was a hiss and water spilt like Jonah coming out of the
mouth of the whale, and Lisa's dress was drenched, and the fire was all
around because even with downers she was screaming and ripping off her
burning clothes.

Then I came back. The barn spun and I realized that her water had
broken, spilling through the wooden loft, and the baby was coming
Christ-like. I had no idea how long she'd been in labor, but it looked
like the contractions were coming fast, muscles rising in a swell and
sinking in her screams. Anthony must of realized that too because I
could see him moving toward her on the other side, trembling and lost
somewhere between responsibility and acid dreams. I had to get up-my
muscles weak but tightening I pushed hard, with all my fever strength,
to a crouch by Lisa's side. "Fuck, her baby's coming!" Anthony screamed
panicked and he was up and I was down and there were at least a
thousand plateaus between us. I told him to go to house across the
street and punch 911 on the numbered keypad, explaining every motion,
because he was going too fast and his thoughts were shaded in a dust
cloud stirring. So, Anthony climbed down the rung latter loft and left
out the side barn door, light spilling across the floor like someone
dropped a bucket of the sun. I held Lisa's hand and told her to breathe
deep, slow breaths like a Cannabis pipe inhale.

Down in the corner of the barn a white lamb was eating from a feed bag
and I saw blood pouring from twelve wounds into twelve gold cups, and
the cows and chickens singing, "praise to the lamb" -each in it's own
tongue. "Dear lamb please let every one live," I prayed quick so no one
would hear. "Breathe deep." Her body bent quicker, vertebrae arching
up, and I knew it would be quick with world pain in her face, and I
realized that suffering started on the first day in a bloody birth
mess. "Breathe deep." She screamed and it seemed to echo individual
from every board of the grey weathered barn. I lifted up her dress like
I'd done before, but not with so much fear, because the baby was coming
and I knew I had to catch it. I held my hands there, ten minutes,
twenty minutes, held them until my shoulders were burning and my hands
were covered with blood and body fluid. "Breathe deep." Then I felt
something, and wet and crying I was holding a red wrinkled scream. I
stared down and I could see its first breath gasp, the air filling its
lungs no bigger than my fingers, and exhaled in the first conversion
CO2. The breath rose, gold with a diamond tinge, like an angel breath,
and I sucked deep to let it in.

Lisa had a little of that breath too because though it was small it
seemed to spread eternal till it touched every edge of the barn and she
was gasping hard. I reached down and felt its wet warm skin and I
thought I could see a smile on his divine and crying face. I smiled
back and cut with a buck knife-his body free from the stuff of his
mother. She was calm now and I lay the new birth in her arms. His
crying slowed and stopped and silence gathered all around and settled
like a holy presence on the mother and child-innocent. I could feel my
head clear in the calm and my thoughts begin to stream like pure
blessings as I looked on fresh life. And Lisa, with her worn face and
drugged and too tired body, shone with the virgin radiance of a mother
of all mothers. Slowly, with the baby in her left arm crook, she
unbuttoned her blouse and opened it and reached behind with no shame
and lay her breasts bare, white, and full. And against her skin, twenty
and too used, the minute old softness of the baby lay sleeping. The
baby on her right breast, I laid my face on the other, hearing her
mother beats, and the ambulance sirens spun outside, and life welled
glowing from the hay, and we were for that moment-beautiful, loving-the
holy family.