Free Mother Box and Other Tales by Sarah Blackman

was only natural in a household of seven sons. Also, it had become increasingly clear that both she and her husband were local celebrities even outside the circle of their regular environs. She was the mother of very many children and in line at the bank or in the poultry section of the supermarket people would look at her, look away, look back at her with the furtive recognition usually reserved for television weather women or white-collar criminals vindicated by some tricky exigency of law. She had filled with a downy, comforting plushness at the breast but had kept her skinny haunches, her runner's calves. She had grown her hair long and it spilled over her breasts and hung into the freezer, glinting a purple-sort-of-russet in the harsh florescent lights, as she pressed the pimpled skin of the chicken breasts and watched their pale blood well and pool.
    Her husband, on the other hand, had declined precipitously in bodily health. Previously, he could be described as slender. Now he was gaunt, his chest almost concave, the skin around his lips blue in certain light as if he weren't getting enough oxygen with his breath. He too had grown his hair longer so that it brushed his jaw line, catching in his stubble, or formed a stubby queue when he pulled it back at his nape. The effect could not have been what he desired—he was a fan of Jeffersonian reason, a fan of the body, a fan of the stoic in both study and practice—but his clear tenuousness had done nothing to lessen his physical appeal. Now more than ever, she followed the lingering gazes of women andfound them attached to some part of her husband, his wrist or the small of his back, exposed as if by the chance of his movement to both the light and their scrutiny.
    The problem of the wedding was a considerable one for her. The colors her son and his bride had chosen were unflattering, the season dull and her role as mother-of-the-groom ill-defined. Her husband began to spend more and more time in his woodworking shop at the back of the house. He was making a wedding gift for the son—a clock fashioned entirely of native woods, the whirring gears, the chimes, the hollow clapper all hand carved by her husband who frequently cut himself with the sharp tools and came in to dinner wearing mitts of white gauze, bleeding through the gauze in patches. It was such a romantic gesture, she became suspicious. It seemed there must be some other kind of union involved, something more desirable and fleeting, but this turned out not to be the case. Even though it seemed her husband could never finish it in time, on the morning of the wedding he rose in a very quiet, silver pre-dawn and went out into his workshop. She too rose and made coffee and, sipping it, listened to the noise he was making—a syncopated clattering, a rising pitch—and watched his shadow move back and forth across the squares of light cast from his workshop windows over the ruin of their sons' childhood sandbox. When he emerged, the clock was mostly whole. It only lacked some of the fine-work which, if you had not seen his plans, you would not know to miss.
    Thus, later on the morning of the wedding, she and her husband met each other in their living room. There was the familiar couch, stained from their years of living on it, and there the end table. There the bookshelves and the entertainment center and the many many family pictures, both posed and candid, and the vase she had filled earlier that week with yellow tulips which had now bloomed past their breaking point, some sides drooping toexpose the waxy stamens standing dark against their yellow screen. If she looked through the French doors and down the hallway she could even see herself and her husband reflected in the hall mirror, standing together in complimentary grays next to the couch, her husband fiddling with his tie stud, the gaily wrapped gift-box which contained the clock sitting on the end table next to the lamp. Oh, but who were they? She felt so