He helped Clara into her breeches. Because he was weak, she had to guide his hands as he moved the breeches up her emaciated thighs. The breeches were slickly red-black and veined like lungs. They flexed and formed to Clara’s thighs. Clara tucked the front and back of her long linen shirt into her breeches as Rafe pulled them up to her waist. The shirt was the only part not of the uniform, not belonging to the state, and not alive. But sometimes Rafe wondered about that, like he wondered if they’d ever be able to have sex again while not wearing their uniforms. Pulling down the flaps but keeping everything else buttoned and tied. The two uniforms and the composite living things they were made of administering as it propped them up. It belonged to the state.
He’d forgotten when the last time was that they’d had sex while not wearing their uniforms. Without it, his was shriveled, vestigial.
Rafe tied the tube-like garters around Clara’s calves, which were covered in trembling sheaths. The stockings were alive like the garters, breeches, and every other piece of the uniform. The garters were warm and full. Their ends tapered. Their sigh was a release of tension all at once, like a widow or widower’s at their own death, once everything was tied and done. He knotted both garters just below her knees.
They were in their son’s old bedroom.
Rafe fastened the buttons of her knee cuffs, and he fastened the buttons at her waist. The buttons were like knobs of bone. He helped the waistcoat over her, and by now, with so many elements of dress having been put on, her strength was returning enough to do most of the work. Rafe was flagging. Like walking to the outhouse in the dead of night, it took a lot to do these simple things while not wearing his uniform. But they had to sleep without them. There had to be a respite even though sleep belonged to the state, too. Weak and dizzy, his heart was a sick, uncertain thread.
The waistcoat he helped get on Clara had ridges and plating like a ribcage. There were strips of quilted musculature between the ridges.
Next went on the regimental coat, which displayed grown protrusions, living symbols of a bird clutching a worm. This indicated which unit of citizen soldiery Clara and Rafe belonged to. The back was slightly humped, where a rifle could detach. And then went on the various accessories like the ceremonial saber and the pocket bags. Those were all alive, too, corded with fleshy fibers and full of sap where they could be. The saber blade was bone, its off-white flashing through the holes of the scabbard’s skin. The hilt was a shoulder of meat.
The shoes and then the cap and face plate went on last, the shoes with their buckles like eyes—Rafe was certain by now that they could see—and the cap with the face plate, not quite a mask, with vague features that were a distortion of their own. The face plate extended down to the chin. It reminded Rafe of the head on that person who’d been a fisherman outside of marching hours that he’d seen washed up from drowning. Together, all of the uniform was like the separate components of a body, and every day there was more togetherness. Rafe knew well what lay at the end of that. Not just from seeing others march their last, but also from their son, his illness taking him sooner rather than later, and the stunted, not quite complete thing slinking away, the thing that sometimes came back to check in on them and listen to their conversations—or lack thereof—from hidden places. It reported back to the state. Stunted or not, it still had its uses.
There wasn’t a word in their language for a parent who had lost a child, and Rafe was glad for that.
Clara helped Rafe into his uniform much more easily.
In the small dining room, they breakfasted on cold corned beef hash from a can and grease-softened hardtack.
He knew that he could not support her. It would have to be the uniform that did that.
They were outside and in formation at 0800 before Rafe could finish licking the grease from his lips. Behind his rigid face plate, his tongue moved like a worm beneath a coffin lid. Clara was next to him in formation with the rest of the citizen soldiery. The state required everyone in at least pairs because it was beneficial, even those who weren’t married. Some who had no relationship other than what was required by law had come out of their wood and brick homes. All of the citizen soldiery wore variations of the same uniform, like people had different eyes, hair, and skin and had scars and faulty curvature of the spine or were flat footed or were muscular or tall and other variations. Sometimes you would see a uniform, like Oren’s who was a manager at the packaging facility, and think to yourself how their uniform had changed from what it was, worse or better for the wear. But you wouldn’t say that until later because saying it while in formation would’ve gotten you time in the stocks, probably.
Their squad leader performed roll call, something of a formality because their uniforms made it very hard to not be present and on time. Then the officers of their unit stepped away as the commanding officer gave his speech to the entire company. Hardly anyone could hear what he said as he trilled and jabbed the air on his portable wooden pedestal made of the same wood used for the gallows, inspired. Their uniforms all but interpreted for them.
Rafe could feel it working through him. Still. Just when you thought that would die down like their son had died, not in their arms, of course, but in the arms of the unknown and in the body of his uniform, it pulling him out of itself at the end like a bad spot on the fruit you got in your can. Just when you thought it was trying to peter out, it came back like a shot of strong spirits, or like a spiritual shot that missed the heart but struck the spine.
Rafe wanted to glance over and see if Clara was in a similar way, but they were pinned up in their uniforms and there’d be no way of knowing, not even once at home.
They didn’t talk.
The company commander gave way to the sergeant, who said a word or two on stage, and who then shouted the order to march. Their squad leaders echoed that command like the parrots Rafe had heard of but never seen that were supposed to live far beyond the sea.
They marched over cobblestones down the road and through the square. A criminal was hanging hogtied from the balcony of a building, his face dangling down foremost. His feet and hands were up behind him. After the march, when the children among the citizen soldiery were finished with that but still in uniform, they would report for this. The man would be lowered with the pulley and the children would administer to his punishment with sticks. Their sabers were ceremonial and not for that purpose, but sometimes they would use the pommel to administer punishment and that was overlooked. Rafe never liked these kinds of affairs, and he was certain that Clara didn’t either, but he understood how they kept the youth hardened. The youth were likely to get soft. Rafe had broken their son’s clay pots for this reason. It was a fine thing to make pots, they had their purpose, of course, but he’d seen through to the joy in Leo’s heart. It had to be rooted out, like that store that had sold little wooden animals—toys—when Rafe was a child had been rooted out, its owner hanged. Better to attend to it sooner rather than later, because once grown it could have dangerous consequences.
He wanted the regret to be diluted and absorbed. He wanted it taken from him.
Their unit marched with the rest of the company, out of the streets of the city and onto the butterscotch-colored land. The ground was hard. To repair themselves, their shoes were constantly changing.
They marched between the city and the sea. Each moment walked into the next. The ground touched their feet, and the sky touched their shoulders.
The road, a creamy indention in the land that curved around to the bay, was either caused from their daily ceremonial march or was the cause of the route they took. Rafe had never figured that out, but Clara had said, back when they were still talking, that the answer to that question might be the answer to why they marched. It may’ve been a question as important as the creation stories they heard other peoples had, somewhere far beyond the sea. In their daily march to the sea, which was every day of the year for as long as Rafe could remember, they would cover about twenty-four kilometers by the time they’d reached the sea and come back.
After about four kilometers, an hour of marching, the land dipped towards the water and the sky wheels came into view. These were long wooden poles stretching up towards the sun. Enemies of the state, Rafe wasn’t sure how they kept cropping up, were tied to these wheels at the tops of the poles, facing the sun. Many of these sky wheels still held their sun-crisped morsels, bodies not yet taken down. The birds had been done with some of them for weeks.
Then there was the forest on their right, always bone-stark and leafless, but still persisting like a bunch of upright corpses refusing to fall. The butterscotch land kept them going about like their uniforms kept them going, though Rafe refused to believe he and Clara were dead. There had to still be a world inside them, even if it had become atrophied.
A strange wind broke out. Rafe realized it was a murmur. It had fallen over their ranks. He stepped out of rhythm, afraid. He looked at Clara. Clara was unreadable beneath her face plate but he felt, when she leaned against him, dissonance. He saw in what direction her attention lay.
Something very large was in the water. It was as big as a whale. It was like a ship, one of those that were said to have guns. But the surface of it shined oddly in the daylight coming in through pained clouds. Its surface seemed more like skin than wood or metal.
It had a mouth full of teeth as big as rocks and horn-like protrusions that held cannons. There was the merest moment for Rafe to guess whether this was some new device of the state’s, to be unveiled now, as a surprise on their march.
The thing in the water rocked, fired, and the butterscotch land rumbled around them. Flame and heat erupted.
The order came down the line. Their uniforms anticipated. They were already sprinting for whatever protection the dead forest could offer.
Another vessel surfaced and rolled up the beach. It parked and opened. Things poured out. Rafe couldn’t see them clearly. His uniform kept Rafe’s sights mostly ahead. The order had been given. Its attention was focused on getting them into the woods. He thought to find Clara, but the thought came too late, like a betrayal.
Another naval bombardment exploded around them. Rafe felt himself lifted as if by angels, not registering he was burning, the saying Remember that you must die not registering until he hit the second tree.
There, in the second tree, stuck between two branches facing the sky, Rafe had enough wits about him to understand that he had been torn in half. Without his uniform, he might not have been as aware. But the uniform propped him up. He and the uniform were both roughly halved.
He was up there facing the sun. Bullets of smaller arms whizzed and platted between the artillery explosions. Screams, naked, drilled into his ears.
He faced the sky as boots pounded and guns—whether those that could detach from the humped backs of their own uniforms or those of the enemy—cracked and artillery rocked the land.
He and the uniform lingered into the night. The moon was big, and he couldn’t see all of it.
Battle rolled off elsewhere like a storm cloud. A group of people built a fire beneath Rafe while he hung in half above them in a tree. His people or another, he couldn’t be sure.
They began to laugh and sing songs. They couldn’t have been his. But it was the same language. Dissenters? Those who had somehow kept out of their uniforms?
Rafe felt very alone near those people below, and he wondered where his wife was and whether she was alright. He knew their son was already diluted, absorbed into the state, but his thoughts drifted a lot to Leo, too. The loneliness wore him down. He’d always thought dying would get rid of that, but it made it much worse. It opened it up.
He came to understand, as a joyous shout and a wet ripping took place beneath him, that it was as big as the sky and there was an intelligence to it, cold-hearted like what crushed the clay pots of children and hanged toy makers. It coated your lips like grease.
The campfire below sent smoke into the sky. He could see the smoke. Gnats found wet spots along his body.
He thought maybe the living loneliness, like a living uniform, was up there with him. An exhausted, feverish laugh rolled through what remained. Maybe it was the state up there with him.
He heard them talking about livestock below.
Then they were conversing about a wounded woman. He heard them carrying something or someone into their camp. Clara? Was it her? But he knew that possibility was slim to none.
#
About a week and a half after the death of their son, when Clara and Rafe were eating dinner, slowly and feebly as they’d chosen to get out of their uniforms early that night, something thumped behind their hallway wall. It was a specific series of knocks. It was the same rhythm their son used to make when knocking on doors. Rafe had tolerated that almost music yet hadn’t understood how much of a difference it would make, little things like that. Those little things came together into a larger being.
It wasn’t the memory of their son, not that time.
Rafe’s hairs stood on end.
Resolution ousted the fear on Clara’s face. It was a rough transition. “Let’s see to it,” she said hoarsely. It was what they would’ve said had they been able to see to their son’s remains instead of his being absorbed into the butterscotch earth.
She grasped his hand and led him down the hall. It took much of their strength to get there.
They watched the stained and bruised wall. The thing behind it kicked.
They went and got Rafe’s tools he used for his carpenter job outside of marching hours. They cut it out of the wall. They took it out. It was premature, not quite grown from absorbing Leo over the years. Cradling it like a child, it reminded of when they’d baptized their infant in the butterscotch dirt. They’d left little Leo crying there long enough for at least one of the larvae to take root.
With the teeth of its face plate, it cut into Rafe’s forearm. He tolerated that, and he and Clara held it tighter between them, gathering up more pain. It still smelled like their son.
Some other places to find me: