Son Stain

Once there was a mother who gave birth to a stain. Luckily, this was neither her first nor her last child, so she had enough incentive to keep going. At first, the woman tried apologizing for the stain and cleaning it up. But this proved impossible. Soon the stain had spread manywheres and would appear suddenly on walls of the city, on the clothes of entire families, even on art in the museums sometimes, where the cultured people would go to cluck and hiss. Eventually, the stain began to show up in the newspapers--and some of them were even foreign ones. It seemed spontaneous, the appearance of the stain, but the mother was sure it could all be traced back to her vagina. It's one thing to apologize to your family for giving birth to a stain, but it's quite another thing to walk up to a stranger sitting on a public bench and try to clean his or her newspaper of your child. It's more than a little awkward. So the woman was taken away to various asylums, which is what was done in those days to people who apologized too much. Eventually, she came to accept her child as a stain and even love him as a stain. While her children who were not stains prospered and spread throughout the world in more appropriate ways, they could not match the stain's ability to permeate all sorts of surfaces and appear in the most unexpected places. In fact, this got so confusing that after a certain point the mother no longer even knew if her child the stain was alive or dead. He had spread himself so thin and was wiped on so many surfaces that she could no longer hear him as a single voice. It had been years since he had spoken. (He had fallen into an apologetic silence at a very early age that soon became total.) So the mother began watching her son the way someone watches an abstract painting. You ask questions in your heart, but you don't really expect the painting to answer. And then the mother died, and surprisingly her will conveyed her wish to be buried with her child the stain. She expressed her firm belief that her son the stain was dead and that this was therefore allowable, not something a pharaoh would do and nothing which contravened the beliefs of her family's faith. So the family tried to honor her wishes, but the obstacles of course proved insurmountable. By this time, her son had spread everywhere. Her many daughters who were not stains sewed many pieces of diverse fabric and other materials their brother inhabited (tree bark, watercolors, wallets, taxidermied beasts) into a dress the size of a long city street. It was many diverse colors and many of its tchotchkes scintillated, but the dominant color of the dress was the blue of evening once evening has definitely decided to leave the earth. Had they attempted to fit their dead mother's body into this dress, it would have focused national and possibly even international attention on the family and added to their shame. They assumed their mother's intent in taking her son the stain to the grave was the opposite of a desire for attention. It was a form of apology for having given birth to a stain. It had been hard enough for the sisters gathering up pieces of their brother the stain (often they had had to haggle or wheedle or cozen to get those) so they decided to present the stain in public (the dress neatly covered the playing field of the largest local stadium) once and then be done with it forever--burn it. So they printed up little funerary notes on cards in a small black script that seemed to bring a dignified finality to the matter of their brother the stain. The mother was buried. The brother was exhibited. The great collage dress his mother could never wear was burned afterward in a private ceremony attended only by the family. And that was that. Or so the family thought. Of course, shortly thereafter many who had attended the funeral discovered stains on their clothing, their skin and even their minds. They would shove a stained child forward and speak the stain's name in anger. The family realized there would never be an end to apologizing and packed up everything portable they owned, left the country, and changed all their names, beginnings middles and ends. While this family eventually reached the end of its line and no longer exists in the world, the stain is alive and well. And I have just rubbed a little bit of it on you right now, while you were reading this. Because, really, a stain is family to everyone.