Free Mother Box and Other Tales by Sarah Blackman Page B

floor. It was empty save for a coat tree hung about with scarves and hats, mittens stuck to its various knobs, and beside it a chair draped with heavy overcoats. Her husband handed her the box containing the clock and added his overcoat to the pile. It was by far the largest and overwhelmed the other coats, its soft grey wool spangled with melting snow like asphodel spangling a secret, luxuriant, ashen meadow. None of the rest of the coats is so beautiful, she thought. In fact, many of them were ugly and strange. Some of them were also very small—diminutive, doll-like coats with too many armholes and buttons fashioned from the carapaces of iridescent beetles. She lifted the hems of the many coats layer by layer. Some seemed to be stitched of leaves and rustled under her fingers and she realized the whole room was filled with rustling, as if a large crowd were talking very softly, each member of the crowd talking on and on, not necessarily to each other, not necessarily intending to be understood. “Hurry up,” her husband said. “We're late.”
    So she and her husband, dressed in beautiful outfits of complimentary gray, one of them, herself, carrying a gay gift box inside of which was a clock that had just that moment begun to tick, opened the wide double-doors at the far end of the foyer and stepped together into a great, vaulted hall. The hall had been set up like a chapel: rows of whitewashed pews down either sideof an aisle carpeted with lichens; garlands of feathers in reds and blacks and grays festooning the rafters; a smell in the air like thick, dark incense, like peat moss, like cold soil piled by the side of a hole. It was altogether a startling effect made worse by the fact that the other guests were already seated, all facing the dais at the end of the aisle on which stood six of her sons dressed in gray, the groomsmen, and one son in black who was today taking a bride. The bride herself was also there on the dais—oh, they were late indeed—and she seemed to have chosen an unusual dress. It was hard to see exactly what shape the dress was, it was so unusual. Hard to see, exactly, what shape the bride was even as she turned, rustling, her face covered by the billowing veil—a hoary veil, crackling, vertiginous—to face her and her husband as they stood together in the doorway. The rustling sound increased and the guests swiveled around in their seats to look.
    “What are you thinking?” she said to her husband. But it was altogether too late. The chapel was filled with variable shadows, the brilliant cold light dampened by flurries that clumped as they fell past the vaulted windows. Her husband's face wavered in and out of the shadows; drawn, bluing, extraordinary, she realized, but yet the same as all the other faces he had ever had in their lives together. She pictured her husband in his familiar settings, the easy muscle of his younger arm stretched up to grip the doorframe and the way he held his knife to press a bit of meat onto the prongs of his fork. Yes, even in her memories it was still this face—twitching, unsure what to do with its mouth—superimposed over each of the other possible faces as if someone had clipped it out and pasted it messily over the still scenes of their past.
    “I don't know,” she said, filling in the gap, but her husband paid her no mind. He stared around him: at the chapel, at the guests, stared at the bride, now advancing down the dais to welcome them, and at the groomsmen, his sons, the smallest andshyest raising one sleek paw to wave. He stared at their immaculate suits, their sharp immaculate heads, long brows, fine whiskers, the dear points of their ears and their bright eyes. He stared at their russet fur gleaming in the snow-light that poured through windows, the little puffs of breath that rose from their black muzzles, their sharp yellow teeth as they smiled, all of them, dear sons, smiled at their parents, happy to see them arriving at last, standing