Maya sobbed behind her. “Grandmother?” she whimpered, sounding disturbingly like a small girl. “Granma, is this really you?”
The old woman turned with a clockwork-like motion, and opened her arms to Maya. “How you have grown,” she said by way of greeting, and Vimbai did not know whether she should’ve held Maya back as she rushed into her undead grandmother’s embrace.
The vadzimu had made a pot of maté, and even thoughtfully filtered it through a cheesecloth (Vimbai did not even know they had any cheesecloth, let alone what to use one for). Vimbai made a small cry of relieved gratitude and poured herself a cup, for a moment abandoning the unpleasant thoughts that had been swirling in her mind all the way home. Was Maya’s grandmother really herself, just animated by energies better not to be contemplated, or was it just a sham, the wazimamoto disguised to assume a new form? And, most importantly and most impossibly, if they were to return Peb his tongue (another matter the feasibility of which Vimbai could not possibly assess), would it mean the destruction of Maya’s grandmother, be she real or illusory?
The vadzimu took the presence of another grandmother well. The two of them shook hands and engaged in some small talk about the best way of cleaning off residue from the inside of a coffee machine carafe, and Vimbai and Maya sat by the table, momentarily reduced to the age of twelve or thereabout, and drank their maté and listened.
Peb floated into the room, and Vimbai tensed as soon as he zeroed in on Maya’s grandmother. He hovered up to her and started crying—a terrible wordless yowling, like that of a cat.
“He wants what’s his,” said Vimbai’s grandmother, and reached for Maya’s, reassuring. “Don’t worry, dear. He can wait a bit longer.”
As Peb wailed and whined, demanding, Maya turned to Vimbai. “We can’t just give his tongue back to him, can we?”
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Vimbai said. “Look at him—he’s so little.”
Maya heaved a sigh. “This is my grandma you’re talking about.”
Vimbai patted her friend’s hand; it looked so alone and weak splayed on the Formica surface of the kitchen table that Vimbai felt like crying. “I know. But Peb . . . he’s been with us since the very beginning, remember? Sure, he looks weird and all, but he’s our friend, like Felix.”
Maya stroked some shallow cuts on the table surface, running her fingertips along their ragged ridges. Vimbai thought about the kitchen table back home—her parents’ house, which she still considered home, no matter how much the house in the dunes grew on her. That table bore no cuts or irregularities of any sort, its surface smooth and polished daily by a soft cloth—it was so soft, in fact, that little Vimbai used to sleep with this cloth after she managed to liberate it from the kitchen cupboards.
“Do you think it will hurt her?” Maya said. “If Peb gets his tongue back, will my grandma go back to being dead?”
“I don’t know,” Vimbai said. “Ask her.”
Maya gave her a tormented look. “I can’t. What if she says yes?”
“Then we get the man-fish and beat the fuck out of that slimy bastard,” Vimbai said and scowled, feeling rough and dangerous for once. “Then he would have to help us to sort things so that Peb gets his tongue back, and your grandmother can stay. Or at least—” Vimbai saw Maya’s face, and didn’t finish her sentence. There was too much hope mixed with fear in her dark eyes.
Maya drained her cup. The grandmothers had gotten acquainted by then, and chatted amiably, with Peb lolling and crying nearby, refusing to be ignored by the grandmothers.
“Grandma,” Maya called. “Will you survive if you give Peb his tongue back?”
“Which one is his tongue, child?” the grandma answered.
“Oh damn it,” Maya said. “We might need Felix again.”
Vimbai clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh, poor Felix! We left him all alone since last night!”
“Or longer,” Maya confirmed. “Plus, that universe of his was drained.”
“There’s still some floating on the surface outside,” Vimbai answered. “Maybe. Balshazaar poured it out. Let’s go check.”
“I would say that you’re talking crazy,” Maya said and stood, “if I wasn’t used to all of us talking crazy.”
On the porch, they stood a while, both surprised that the sun was so bright and large and real outside—and there were smells, familiar smells of the ocean and a new, coppery odor Vimbai could not immediately place. It didn’t matter though—she thought that they were spending so much time indoors, in the constantly growing, mutating house, in its musty smell and its fake sky painted over the ceiling; with its sheetrock ridges and furniture mountains, carpet lawns and meat windows.
“It’s nice to be outside,” Maya said.
Vimbai nodded. She stared at the water, choppy with small stubborn waves, solid and angry. The waves butted against the porch, and there was no trace of Felix’s remaining universe as far as the eye could see. “Damn it,” Vimbai said.
Maya kneeled on the porch, peering between the boards—it wasn’t too long ago, Vimbai remembered, that she imagined a nest of foxes under it, thought she observed a quick liquid movement of a long-tailed creature. “Look at this,” Maya said.
Vimbai kneeled next to her. The water was dark under the porch, and until Vimbai’s eyes adjusted to the shifts of light and shadow, to the narrow stripes of sunlight and sudden collapses of darkness, she wasn’t sure whether she was seeing just water, or something else. Soon enough her eyes grew sensitive enough to discern the nuances, and she sighed with relief as she recognized the dark oily substance trapped under the porch. “How do we get it out?”
“I think I know,” Maya said, and jumped to her feet. “You stay put, I’ll go get Felix.”
Felix was revived somewhat by the mention of his errant black hole, and he rushed outside, his lips, white as sheets, trembling with weakness and relief, a savage hope battling the familiar fears. He stuck his hands between the floorboards and wept as the thick oily fluid flowed up his pale arms and slopped over his neck and face and head, in an orgy of recognition and achieving completeness.
There were times, Vimbai thought, when things just came together—the constellations aligned and the world turned in such a way that the Coriolis forces of the world pushed all the disparate things and influences so that they came together in a beautiful swirl. Perhaps the house was too big to truly see that, but the kitchen was not—and Vimbai held her breath, wishing for this moment to stay with her as long as it could. There were Vimbai and Maya, standing by the sides of the screen door, their backs propping up the walls. They held hands in mutual support and anticipation, the jointed lock of their fingers hanging by the doorknob, as if it too was capable of admitting them somewhere else.
The grandmothers sat by the table, opposite each other, their eyes locked—one ghostly and one undead, but grandmothers nonetheless, and one could not help but love them, love them in ways one could not love one’s parents out of pride and embarrassment and too much baggage and adolescent arguments. Perhaps those resentments too would burn away in a clean spiritual fire, Vimbai thought; for now, grandmothers sufficed.
The horseshoe crabs Vimbai thought of as hers and Maya’s dogs were not in attendance, with the crabs being under the ocean and industriously pulling the house along, and the dogs temporarily exiled to the porch, where they squinted at the sun and panted with their tongues lolling; neither seemed to mind much at not being included in the ceremony.
And then there was Peb, floating grandly over the kitchen table, and Felix standing nearby, somewhat less pale, somewhat more animated ever since he managed to collect the remnants of the oily universe from under the porch and reattach them to his skull. It wasn’t anything like his old do—there was no magnificence left there, it was barely enough to cover his head with a thin film, but, as they all had observed in turn, it was better than nothing at all.
Felix swallowed a few times as he looked from Peb to Maya’s grandma and back. His Adam’s apple, suddenly large and fragile under the transparent skin like a porcelain egg, bobbed in rhythm with the swallowing. He licked his lips a few times. “Here goes,” he said, and dipped both hands into his hair. Both came away covered in what looked like tar but Vimbai guessed at the gooey space of his former universe, and squeezed Maya’s hand tighter.
Maya squeezed back. It was a bad time, Vimbai thought, but then again, is there ever a good time for anything? And just as Felix reached his stained fingers into Maya’s grandmother’s mouth, Vimbai whispered under her breath, I love you, looking straight ahead and addressing no one in particular.
She had been getting used to the otherworldly light shows; still, when Felix pulled out a writhing, rainbow colored fish, Vimbai gave a little gasp of surprise. The small thing flapped and strained against his fingers, ethereal, and for a moment Vimbai thought that Felix had extracted something he wasn’t supposed to. But Peb reached out with seven or eight of his limbs and grabbed the brightly colored appendage and stuffed it in his mouth. He smiled then, and babbled happily about the ethereal dimensions and the deepest chasm filled with molten sulfur and black iron.
