Little Baby Faulkner

13

"Baby! The baby! I'll tell you about the baby!!"

Brooklyn is running upstairs, her side flank and breasts catching in the breeze, her nipples hardening, and l—looking between her legs, trying to catch a glimpse of her camel there—thought I could feel her pussy muscles tightening with every gaping strep.

Charisma said, "Come on!" and ran upstairs after her friend.

I followed quick behind and, there, at the bottom of the crib, was Brooklyn's baby.

"See? He's fine." Brooklyn poked around the crib flooring, never actually touching her baby. "This is one fine baby, actually." That was Brooklyn. "It's an Olympic baby, if you really want to know about it—that's what this baby is. A truly Olympic little gobstopper with an Olympic face, Olympic ass. Look at this baby's ass," Brooklyn continued, pulling down the baby's onesie, running her fingers between the baby's ass cheeks.

"So this baby's name is Faulkner?" I asked.

"This is Little Baby Faulkner. Born and bred right here in Ohio. I'm thinking of giving him an Ohio tattoo. My friend has a tattoo of Ohio right here," crazy Brooklyn said. She turns her wrist soft side up.

"Oh, really," I said. "Your friend has a tattoo of Ohio right here?" I showed her my wrist.

"Yeah," Brooklyn said, not catching my sarcasm. "Right here," she said again, flashing her eyes at me. "It's a dope little tat for a dope little boy."

"Have you..uh..read any Faulkner?"

"I saw a character named that in a book."

"What kind of book was it?"

"It was a book of names," Brooklyn said. "And this one—this page with Faulkner's name in it..it had a bustier of flowers on top of someone's gravestone..I think the gravestone was labeled Wilde?"

"As in Oscar—?"

"Yeah," Brooklyn interrupts me. "It was Oscar Wilde. But the baby name for that page was Faulkner. William Faulkner. And it had a picture of Faulkner as a baby and Little Baby Faulkner was posing for an 1800s-style photograph of him in black and white and his aunt or mother or whoever had taken his charge. And they were holding the charge's eyes open with long sticks, and their stomachs were giving forth their digestive materials after having been cut by the baby's sword—Little Baby Faulkner's swords—which was a special sword forged in the fires of Sauron by Elijah Wood and Elijah's total mission over the course of this movie is to slice Little Baby Faulkner from ass go mouth, slice him from here to here—are you following?"

"So..Oscar Wilde, Elijah Wood, and Little Baby Faulkner walk into a bar," I said.

"Do you want to hold him?" Charisma picked him up.

"No thanks."

"Sure?" Charisma danced his arms around in the air to try and tempt me.

"No..thanks. But I'm afraid I'll drop him."

"Here," Charisma said. "Hold him for a second." She dips him low and brings him in for a landing..in my arms.

I take the baby from her, hold him against my chest. Normally when I hold a baby I'm filled with this incredibly powerful instinct not to let anybody hurt this baby—like I'd lay down my own life to stop anyone from mistreating or endangering or killing this boo. This time when I held the Little Baby Faulkner, all I thought was: let's make sure I never have one of these.

Baby. Little. Faulkner. A kid of infinite heights. Of mix skill like Missy Elliot, lyrics like Eminem, you've held him in your hands just once and the universe lays down a highway link between us, flies my airplane into your toothless mouth, low-key cries coming from underneath this door—they're pretending this is the baby that dies but really there was one before, missing in the night, called the police and they came to the room containing that tiny boo, crushed him struggling with your hands smashing a pillow down above his lungs holding down! down! pressing my face into the pillow cloth my shortest lifetime given to me to learn—what?—not to smother kids—what it feels like to be smothered, in wordless existence, everything comes from that warm place, suited in my mother's womb, then flushed to between her legs—tight squeeze—and then to my prison home in this room—the baby room—smothered in a prison taken as a crib, then I died and came back as Little Baby Faulkner. Held in male arms for once, I'm supposed to be in here growing, shitting, eating, but really I wait all day for Brooklyn to return to me. My mom. My keeper and creator. But in this second life I can only recall hate (hating), ignorance (being ignored), and greed (fear) in densities greater than tolerable, second life, third: shooting me into space atop a Roman candle, switch off my seatbelt, and fly! Woo, ooh, ooh. I was merely stitched to those around me, family meaning nothing here except, who is this man holding me now, rocking from side to side, singing me the song of his heart. (I can feel his future better than he—from his acorn to the tree.) I know his own depths better than he will for another 15 years—if he makes it that long. A carrier of "mental illness" (term indigenous to planet Earth), the worst kind, making it impossible to see clearly the valid intentions of his mother, father, sisters, brother, every boss among them seeming to wait to ring the cash register: I will use you as good as I can, while I can, for as long as I can, until (empty) you are useless to me and I will at that point throw you in my trash can.

This baby shocks! It smarts! It is super-charged electric crank caught on film I'll hallucinate him standing up tall and reigning down fire in our camp, everyone in this house (Grammy, Brooklyn, Baker, Wendy, me) every one of us lined up for our execution. Having come to it not just willingly but joyously. Joyously being shaken by every last adult in the room. There's Wendy—I'm not sure who that is but probably a friend of Charisma. Listen, Matthew, let me tell you a story. It's the story of how my previous incarnation came to be, on a dark night between the legs of Brooklyn and Rambuncto, before Rambuncto ever went to jail. Here is the story of my genesis, my destruction, and my rebirth:

Dark night sour. Rambuncto came over "to watch TV." This is before we moved to this house. Before we populated it with our living junk. Brooklyn (I) spread my legs on the couch and my puss invited Rambuncto in with his sense of smell, pheromones lifting off my puss like gasoline evaporating and Rambuncto felt his cock get rambunctious, go bo bumpa bump bump against the inside of his jeans and his first thought was not to do nothing, not to jerk off, but from some childhood belief that this situation was best resolved by fucking the nearest hole—Brooklyn on the couch—use her pussy as a masturbation rag doll—and he did, he fucked his last-life mom and she went through labor all as a result of Rambuncto having got off inside her, for his convenience, instead of jerking with a tissue, Rambuncto's urges combined with Brooklyn's willingness to go through labor for nine months with Rambuncto seed—it was what she did: what she was designed to do. Why wouldn't she get pregnant? Why wouldn't she have Rambuncto's baby? Brooklyn was a baby slave—all these bitches.

I was born at five and lived backward through 11 centuries of The Cat. Reborn here once—killed by suffocation—then twice as my current incarnation named me Little Baby Faulkner (the title of this book you read) and I assumed I was being raised to be the next great Faulkner, a writer of such caliber there has never been such a Faulkner before or after. Raised to believe that teachers such as you..or Charisma's friend Wendy..would present yourselves as teachers to me and that your tutelage would drive wedges between what I had once learned and what I would in the future learn again.

However, none of this came to pass. I was taken to the bathroom (where you will soon go) and while there I was killed by my mother I was drown'd in the tub and my final moments caught on a pure audio app, raw sound, living through the light of your hearing me—and I will ask of you that you bring revenge down upon the head of my killer but you will end your tour with me back in your home in LA. We will never meet again. And my face will float when viewed backwards, falling up from the bottom of the bath tub (which isn't that deep—but deep enough to kill) my last moment scrawling for breath, filling my lungs with algae/water solution and the salmonella from plastic frogs and I imagine, in my tiny brain, that if swimming in the tub didn't kill me quickly, it would kill me slowly.

Baker took the baby from me—I had been rocking quite rapidly—she put Little Baby Faulkner back in his crib—laid him on his back and his arms and legs riddled like a beetle.

"I think we've had enough of that for now—Matt? Are you ok?"

I look from Baker to Brooklyn.

"That's some kind of baby you have there."

I meet Brooklyn's eyes and keep them there.

"He's electric," Brooklyn says.

"I noticed."

"Did he tell you about his past? About how he was reincarnated from his last presence as my first baby?"

"That's not all," I say. "He told me about something else. But I'm afraid to tell you."

"Let me guess. He told you about his future."

Brooklyn said this. And I said:

"Yeah. That's right. Did he tell you the same thing?"

"Yeah. A couple days ago. He said.."

"It's ok," I say.

"I know," Brooklyn said. "Freaky, yeah? A baby who uses electrical charges to tell his own mom that by the end of the week, she (I) will kill him, will drown him in the tub in the bathroom."

I noticed that the whole time we've been up here, Brooklyn had never once touched her baby.

Brooklyn read my eyes.

"I know," she says. "It's weird, right? I just can't bring myself to touch him, knowing he has less than 48 hours to live."