MATT BELL’S ORIGINAL:
Matt Bell’s “Kidd, Kier, Kimball” is found at Alice Blue here.
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THE REMIX:
WHEN OUR WORLD BECOMES A WORLD OF LEATHER
Another alligator rain falls, these alligators dumped from the complicated sky, alligators plummeting to pelt our valleys as we run from awning to awning, alligators collapsing home porches and alligators crumbling chapel steps. Along our way, we see every kind of reptile hissing upon the ground, all heavy with forgotten armor, and around them, their mud-planted eggs, as thin-walled as my wife’s uterus, that developing thing trapped inside her unsafe body.
Within it, within us both, sounds of trapped creatures, necessary to be loosed.
Inside the church, that last dry place, we give them voice from our lungs, beg them from our knees, clasp them between our hands wrapped in the rosaries gathered from this alligator buried town, this leather-slapped village. Above our heads, the blood-stained glass strains against the figures of alligators, the hissing of ancient reptiles, and we are at last reduced to mumbles. Exhausted of words, we move together to light a candle for each baby eaten, each fetus formed but soon devoured.
By now, this takes us all night long. This takes every minute of every night.
At dawn, we extinguish the flames so the candles will be there to relight tomorrow, and then again we pray: Oh lord, just once. Just once, deliver us a child not consumed from the beginning. Grant us a son not lousy with leather, not ruined by yellowed teeth or scuttling ancient claws. Give us a boy made for our world, not lost within the belly of the old, those foul acids, those crimson guts.
And what we would do.
And how we would do anything.
Our only answers are these silent histories, these sequenced promises written in stone, decorating each circling step from the vestibule to the altar, from the sacristy back to the last unburnt pews. Each station a terror trapped, or worse, a horror hope, too unbearable to believe, for perhaps this world is become now only the end of skin and hair, only the opposite of evolution. Inside my wife, perhaps there are only hisses, only those ancient monsters, born a million, million years before our warm blood, our beating hearts: Oh lord, will these yet again wander the earth? Might these now devour our kingdom? This ancient tide of alligators, so long dreamt in our present darkness? These babes, even now hatching and scuttling upon the earth, come at last to wash us from off its blood-soaked face.
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Remixer’s process: This was the first of the “alligator” remixes that I did. The idea for the remix came immediately (it was a revelation to me to actually inject alligators into these stories) and it was amusing to see how similar (in some ways) the end product is to any number of stories I’ve written. Now, the remix probably still exhibits many more hallmarks of a Matt Bell story than it does one of my stories, but it was interesting to see how little I actually had to transform from a distinctive original tale to feel comfortable within another writer’s skin.