The Secrets of Life and Death

 by Brett Rutherford

That hothouse summer our science club,
armed with black powder and chemistry sets,
determined to plump the depth of nature.
Our rocket had failed to launch; the pipe
we used to test it turned cannon and blew
a small hole in Caruso’s garage. Some fluid
we made at random promised a Nobel prize
when we found it could eat through concrete,
but we failed to make it a second time.
Heads full of science-fiction visions,
we knew that alien blobs throbbed
and ate flesh, that evil brains from space
could replace those of our parents and teachers,
that tendril and tentacle could spring
out of a test-tube or a cracked meteor.

I had everything at hand. Once I had seen
a clay-man Golem rise out of hillside;
had held in my hand a still-hot meteor
that on my desk, unsplit, promised
something unknown to the Periodic Table;
once a dead cat had tasted lightning,
too soon, too fast, and charred to ash
in our hill-top eyrie laboratory; once I
had read Faust and found a stone,
egg-shaped, and in my hand,
as assured as a magician’s wand,
I felt ready in my eleven years
to master the secrets of life and death.

We came close with the Boron Monster.
We watched in quiet horror as on
the microscope slides the compound
of boric acid and other substances frothed up,
bubbled, and died away, leaving behind
the very image of cell walls. If carbon
was the root of life, then why not Boron?
The slides we took to school sure fooled
the earnest science teachers. “Alive!”
he said, “or recently alive, anyway!”
Some shied away from making more
of the pasty-white Boron blob. “What if
it got inside you?” Dave withered to ask.
“What if it started replacing your parts
with more of itself? What if it wants
to eat everything it comes upon?”

That night the Boron Monster went up
and over the edge of the basement counter.
Its white trail led to the drain-hole.
We watched. We listened. Three boys
all swore they heard it gurgling
between their houses’ drainpipes,
but then it oozed away to nothing,
another rainbow slurry in Jacob’s Creek.
None of us mentioned it again.

And then, one day, I found the Book
as Tim and I explored the unallowed
corners of my parents’ bedroom.
Far back beneath the bed it lay,
with tattered and yellowed edges.
At first glance, nothing. All it said
was “Marriage Manual.” Opened,
it reveal the coiled horrors of anatomy.

Tim recoiled and shut the book.
“Some kind of sick science fiction,”
he hazarded. I grabbed it, opened it again.
The sight of giant penis, cross-sectioned
and labeled like a butcher’s chop-guide,
was bad enough, but there as well,
the stuff inside a woman’s body,
unthinkable! What could it all be for?

Near as I could tell, it had something to do
with babies and where they came from,
a subject I had never given a second thought,
except that, somehow, women became elephant-
sized, gave birth, and then returned
to their normal proportions. As we read,
and studied, and said out loud, the words,
it dawned on us that this was worse
than anything the Boron monster might do.

Somehow these alien beings escaped
from human bodies and fumbled about
in the beddings and on the forest floors
like dark and obscene funguses. Off went
the errant spermatozoa in one direction,
while ovaries unfertilized rolled off another,
like unshelled eggs a chicken had kicked aside.

I shuddered. They could be all around us,
hiding in blankets and dresser drawers,
curled up like spiders in the bath-tub,
waiting to plant themselves in anyone
foolish enough to lie still long enough.

One picture that showed a man
somehow atop a woman
made no sense at all to us.
We slammed the book shut.
I put it between Superman comics
and War of the Worlds for further study.

That night we sat
on DeSantis’s porch, all eyes
again on the Marriage Manual.
Young Albert explained the mechanics
of copulation. “No way!” we screamed,
hands crossed in horror before our eyes.
“That’s horrible,” Dave said.
“I will never do that to a woman.”

On our third perusal
of the forbidden book,
Tim came back in triumph.
“It’s not true! I asked my mother.
Babies are not made that way.
Men want to do all kinds of things
when they get alone with women.
She says she spends half the night
just fighting my father off, and now
she’s more than ready for a divorce.”

“Then where do babies come from?”

“She says when a woman wants a baby,
she goes to the family doctor
and he takes care of it.”

That seemed to settle the matter.
We could sleep soundly knowing
that clay gives rise to Golems,
that Boron monsters slough off
white powder like mummy skin,
and lonely spermatozoa search
for lost eggs in the treetops.