LINDY BILLER
Warm Milk
In my dream, I am making a scavenger hunt for my son, who is ten and too big for scavenger hunts. He has been too big for scavenger hunts since he was poppyseed sized, rooting around in my uterus for good soil. He always seemed so hungry—in real life, not in the dream. You’re losing weight, said my doctor, bemused, at my twelve-week appointment. What have you been eating? she said. I began to name the things I had fed my baby so far:
– Peanut butter
– Funfetti cake
– Hummus and pita chips
– Sliced bell peppers
– Fried onions rings
– Plums and other stone fruits
– Whole boxes of graham crackers
– Live mice
– Small terrestrial planets
Okay, the doctor said, okay, that’s good, keep doing that.
In my dream, I fold a piece of paper into sixteenths and draw something new on each square. A pigeon feather, a baby in a stroller, a glacier, a walnut. My son and I go outside, where the asteroid hangs in the same place we left it—glowing orange in the window of sky between our maple tree and our neighbor’s black walnut, slowly burning through the remaining lacework of atmosphere. Scientists expect the asteroid to hit within the week, or the month, or maybe in another fifty million years. Eventually it will get sick of hovering, watching, waiting. It will remember how to move forward. Or rather, down.
We won’t find a glacier, my son says. He steps over an earthworm that has stranded itself in the middle of the sidewalk after last night’s rain. Glaciers are too good at hiding, he says, you can’t find them if they don’t want to be found. He picks up the worm and eats it.
You’re right, I agree, we’ll have to look carefully.
I notice he’s brought his mittens, the ones I made from tiny sweaters. The sweaters weren’t his. I don’t know whose sweaters they were. I found them in a trash bag behind our building. At first they were normal-sized, but each time I touched one it shrank and shrank. The embroidery so delicate, so impossibly tiny. I cut the sweaters apart and stitched them back together in new, hand-shaped configurations. They were in the trash, I told myself, it’s no big deal, even though I knew someone would be coming back for her sweaters and would be upset not to find them.
But in the dream my son is here, he’s holding my hand, like he used to when he was ten in real life and his friends weren’t around. It seems safer not to think about the mittens or where they came from. I don’t regret making them. If we meet a glacier, I’ll have my skin to crawl into, and my son will have the mittens to warm his hands. They won’t fit him much longer, the way he’s been growing. He mows entire lawns with his teeth and the neighbors pay him extra. They are fascinated by the way he can unhinge his jaw. His father was a snake, I try to explain, an anaconda, but no one believes me except my doctor, who insists that he’ll grow into it.
Mom, are you even listening? my son asks.
I tell him no, and he looks so relieved it hurts. We begin to scavenge in earnest. We get down in the dirt like prehistoric humans, or kids under the age of four, or foxes in winter. Here, the walnut. There, a whole pigeon’s worth of dappled gray feathers (extra points, my son says excitedly) and there, a dead dog, which follows us, wagging its tail, until I stop to rub its matted white fur. The asteroid will kill us all soon, but still, I’d like to have a dog like this. (Why? my sister says bluntly, like she always does, why would you want a dog, why would you want another child, just for it to burn or freeze or starve or turn to dust? It’s a valid question and one that I answer like a 10-year-old, or like a mother, or like any other wild thing: because.)
My son is the one who spots the glacier, blending in with a white minivan.
I guess you were right, he says, head bowed against the lash of snow, feet slipping over compressed ice. My feet slip too, and we keep walking. Here is the acorn, cracked open by small hands. Here is the stroller, stuffed full of blankets and canned goods. There, on a green hill, is a whole field of bright, budding children, and people like me (like us) are wandering up and down the rows. The air smells like warm milk, the middle-of-the-night kind with nutmeg and honey stirred in. The asteroid seems lower, though I’m probably imagining it. My son notices the look on my face. Do you want to get inside? he offers, and peels back his jaw like the lid of a soup can.
No, I tell him. I’m sorry. No.
The plants, I mean the children, have wide crimson petals and concentric circles of sharp teeth and humming crowns made of bumblebees, which in my dream haven’t gone extinct yet. The children are all so hungry. I want to stop and feed them, but my son grabs my arm.
We need to keep moving, he tells me.
I believe him. And also I’m not so sure. The glacier is crying. She is looking at the asteroid. She is saying she’s never seen anything like it, she’s saying it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.
Lindy Biller grew up in Metro Detroit and now lives in Wisconsin. Her fiction has recently appeared at SmokeLong Quarterly, Okay Donkey, and Heavy Feather Review. She tweets at @lindymbiller.
Art by Ijeoma Anastasia Ntada