Company by Tamsyn Riddle
I wanted a girl and I needed one by morning. I called out to the wind: “Will someone give me a chance?” I was met only by silence.
“You are too much alone,” my sons said, meaning my home-making, my afternoons of silence by the stove. “You can’t bring a girl into the world alone.” But it was not true. I had four boys: a tall one, a smooth-scented one, one with thin light hair that I knew would one day turn against me. I had a boy who loved to fish, who was always putting his fingers in glasses of water. We built everything ourselves here, but it wasn’t for us, it was for the real estate agent to coo over. The boys thought of the real estate value and I thought of who would wear my old shoes, my old dresses.
The oldest boy questioned me the most. “We don’t have enough food for one more,” he said. He asked the others and they agreed, smearing their sauce around the edges of their plates like no one else could partake in this. I longed for someone who would reach to the back of my neck and comb my hair without needing to look me in the eye. Someone who knew how to deliver bad news. While the boys ran circles around an ear of corn that they’d cursed—outside, in the mud that their boots would swallow to spit back onto my white floors—I stood washing their plates and singing their favorite songs. I could never beckon them back inside.
The boys, bored, decided they wanted a machine. It could be any machine, the oldest said.
“We know where the machines are sold,” the second one said. “And where money comes from. And how to get it.”
My boys were so smart. All I really knew of money was small change set aside in a bowl by the door, ceramic shine in the moonlight.
“If we had a machine, we could produce something,” my boys said. “If we could produce something, we wouldn’t need another one of us.”
My boys wanted jobs. They wanted to sell numbers to businesses. I did not know what was sellable or not. “We’ll go to the store and see what we can find,” my son said, the middle one, leaving.
I used to rarely have time without them. We lived on the edge of what was once a farm, now our own. I tried to grow things and mostly made them die. Now when I saw my boys were all gone, I walked to the old stable, wanting some kind of company. I gathered all the objects around me. There was a stale old leaf, there was a gardening trowel, clumps of soil nearly falling to dust. When I bunched them together what I had in my hand looked like a foot, and I got the idea from there. I would just need to gather more objects. No one could tell me what my daughter would be made of: she would be mine before anyone else knew. She would be mine before she was anything else.
They didn’t find any kind of machine to make, only parts for a potential one. “The problem,” they said, “is all the useful machines have already been made. And all the new machines now are being made by those machines.”
They experimented with a machine that printed money, then learned that this was illegal. They made a machine that would feed the goats for them but its spindly arm got caught inside a hungry animal’s jaw, dropped to the ground like a stick. They decided to make a machine that would feed everyone all the time, but couldn’t find the right inputs. The eldest made a spreadsheet and showed me how much money they could make for the world, so much food turning into so many coins.
“We’ll need more food to put into the machine,” they told me. “Nuts, lots and lots of them. Can you grow nuts outside?”
The eldest offered to help me. We planted nuts in the cracked soil.
“We’ll have to act fast,” he said. “We’re outside of growing season.”
This he had learned from me. When he was little, I’d carried him with me through the fields where I’d tried to grow vegetables and named every name for him. I’d walked him up to every plant and put his face right beside them, so he could feel what it was to be alive and small and unspeaking but still part of everything. Now, he’d forgotten, and spoke only of parts. “One part water, two parts grain,” he would whisper to himself. “Or equal parts water, grain, and air?”
They were divided amongst themselves over whether to make only one food that could meet all needs, one excellent food, or many slightly different foods, one for each taste, each vitamin. There were four of them, so the arguments came up even. Two and two, or one and one and one and one. They never asked me to weigh in. “You’re so busy, mama,” the little one said, hugging my knees one day while I knuckled through the bread I was making. I hadn’t known he had noticed.
“We could use this,” the middle one said, eyeing my bread. “Imagine it multiplied by all the world.”
“What will you all eat?” I said. “I made this for the week. The yeast was on sale at the store, there’s probably none left.”
The boys laughed and laughed. Even the little one, his teeth not yet grown in. He’d started growing faster, I noticed, now he didn’t have to strain to reach the counter, take the last apple from a bowl I kept there and bite into it.
“Mama, once we make this machine, you won’t have to worry about making anything ever again,” he told me, spraying apple juice onto my face.
I didn’t want to question them. I took an apple and I went to the barn, which felt like my place, now: the hay scattered, the abandoned tools waiting for me. I put everything I could find together in a pile and I looked at it the way my boys were looking at my bread. They had a restless air, an unused air, one of wanting. “I need a daughter,” I said to the pile. And then there she was.
Her hair was made of hay, her skin dust-dotted. Her legs were long and made of metals, old spoons and lost car parts. She had the expression of a woman I knew, or every woman I knew. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“You can make something,” I said back.
My daughter was new to the world but also not. She hated the barn, complained about its smell. She walked through the house like it was hers, knowing where to find cutlery, how to turn on the stove. “I’m making soup,” she said, “do you want some?” When I said I was thirsty she knew where to find a glass, how to pour into it, she knew she didn’t even need to tell me what she’d done because I’d been waiting since before machines existed.
The boys were out of the house: I could see them, from afar, yelling between them about whether two foods could be the same food but different, their latest attempt at compromise. I braided my daughter’s straw hair and I told her secrets about life. “When I was young I was engaged to a man,” I said. “He asked me to marry him on our third date. At the time I thought it was too early, but maybe I was wrong, don’t you think? Nothing happens too early, in the end, does it?”
“You don’t love my father?” She said, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her she was fatherless, born from dirt and frustration.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
My sons hated her: I’d known this, but then maybe not, because hadn’t I prepared a family dinner to introduce her like a guest, hadn’t I brought them the best wine as if in apology? They saw my creation at the kitchen table eating with me when they came in, late, the food cooling on the countertop. “What is this?” The oldest said. The youngest went to my daughter’s lap like it was his seat, and she held him with her twig arms. The middle son shook his head.
“Mama, we have to get you more visitors,” he said. “You can’t be bringing things in the house like this.”
“I’m not a thing,” she said, in a measured voice. My girl: she was calm even under pressure, she fit right in. “I’m your sister.” A speck of dust flew from her mouth right into their prototype. At this, the eldest became angry. He began to look like a father: mine, his, anyone’s.
“You can’t be bringing dirt in here,” he said to me. “It’s bad for business.”
“It’s my house,” I said. “I own it.”
“We’ll buy it from you once our machine is working,” they said. “Can’t you see that? Why don’t you believe in our vision?”
My daughter started to tell them how beautiful their vision was, how bold, but they wouldn’t listen. They were, the four of them, hunched over their prototype machine, trying to extract a speck. Together they piled their hands around its machine mouth, fingernail on fingernail, trying to dig past each other. They’d all become the same size, I realized, the younger ones must have grown, or else the others had shrunk, their shared desires blurring them to the same size. (My fault, my fault.)
“I can stay in the barn,” their sister said, so low only I heard her: the boys registered the noise and assumed it was coming from their own creation. They bent their ears one after the other after the other after the other to catch the whisper they understood as malfunction. I looked to her in apology, but from the way her features were arranged and the way the light danced on her face, shadowed by all her brothers, I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or ecstatic, indifferent or angry. I put my hand on her metallic one, as apology, and trusted her to understand.
My boys were gone often and I hoarded what they left behind. They came back bearing products, soda cans they’d drunk to the last sip, materials that proved that materiality was still important, was begging to be harnessed. I told them I could make something useful out of these, maybe more so than their machine. I was thinking of a bed for their sister, whose skin was so solid a soft mattress wouldn’t do, not to mention that she lived in a barn. I didn’t mean it as a joke, but they laughed, and I took their laughter as proof they still needed me.
“We should have a girls’ night,” my daughter said. “We can paint our nails, watch movies.”
I was putting her off because she had neither nails nor eyes, because I didn’t want her to know how small I’d made her compared to her brothers. “Yes, darling,” I said. “And do face masks. And eat ice cream until our bellies hurt.”
“When?” she asked. I treated it as a hypothetical question, telling her about upcoming storms, her brothers’ busy schedules. Each time I visited her I brought only enough food for her small stomach, still growing. I thought this eating would help her gain in size, gain in her brothers’ esteem. Sometimes when she slept I played at making her grow faster, placing rocks and crumbs beside her in hopes that she’d take them on as her own. I yanked my arm hairs clean off myself to tie objects onto her, so she’d learn my size in her sleep.
But she began to cause problems for me, purposeful ones, stirring up crashing sounds in the barn to make me come to her. “What is that?” My sons would ask. When I tried to remind them of their sister, they busied themselves with machinery, or promised me inflated amounts of cash. “We will make the whole world’s stomachs long for abundance,” my eldest said. “Only the finest things.” There was something childlike in their fervor—they were all growing smaller, they cried easily, I often caught them looking at my arms like they longed to be held. I began to wonder if I could feed them alone, if they would need more hands to lift their food to their mouths as they busied themselves with all the talking. I promised this to my daughter, their needing of her, but not exactly: “soon, soon they will invite you in,” I swore.
I promised her that they were just busy with their work, so busy they were rude, so busy they were distrustful. I told her things they’d said to me just as proof. One day I brought a plate of plums, the last of the year, to my youngest. He turned me away, said, “Mom, you’re distracting us.”
When I told my daughter, she asked why we couldn’t eat the plums now, give ourselves what I gave her brothers. I had no rebuttal; I hadn’t thought of it. We cut the plums together into small star-shaped slices. We constructed a couch from hay to sit on. I didn’t let on to her that I found it scratchy under my legs, that she should, too.
It wasn’t long before my sons interrupted. They opened the doors slowly, all of them together, one arm over the other. They were calm, even reverent, I thought they were finally appreciating what I had done: brought them a distraction for myself, another of another of us. But their sister and I soon saw the real object of their attentions, the machine, rippling in through the cold. It had layers and layers of metal, smooth hardware, wires splayed like a challenge.
“Our prototype is ready,” they said. They insisted we all return to the kitchen, led me by hand to the table. They showed me how they fed it a seed and a smooth pancake emerged, a flat disk of grey that they insisted I eat.
It was too light in my hands, smelled of nothing. “It has all the required nutrients,” they said. “Even some of the non-required ones, the ones that bring joy.”
“That’s amazing,” my daughter said. “How does it work?”
“We added endorphins to it,” they said, their eyes on me, one after the other after the other, as if I had been the one speaking to them. But they knew she was there: when they got up to put their dishes in the sink, they dodged her chair, their eyes glued to the floor behind where she sat.
“We have the support of the local business chamber,” they continued.
“And how much are you going to sell it for?” I could see her poor tired back, made of junk, slumped against the chair, her eyes settling down to the floor. They refused to acknowledge her presence.
“I’m so hungry,” their sister said. And she snapped off the edge of their machine and put it in her hay-made mouth.
“You can’t do that,” one said.
“I just did.”
“You can’t,” another said, and another, and another. And I thought, still, that they were unthreatening, that they meant no harm; I thought my middle son was approaching for a hug when he leaned his arms toward the rest of her. I didn’t see what he’d done until I heard her cry, until I saw the metal and splintered wood and cracked plastic in his hands and saw that she was gone, disassembled, a mere pile once again.
“Just trust me,” he said, and he ignored my cries, too, the emptiness of the sound without her, one by one he fed her parts to the machine before us. “How could you,” I kept saying, looking at each, and they looked at him, and the youngest said, “I’m sorry, mama,” but he didn’t even say what for. The machine stuttered, refusing to cooperate.
“I don’t want you here,” I said, helplessly.
Then it began to whir. A furious noise emerged, my sons hunched over it, ignoring my words.
“Get out,” I said, my voice gutted by the noise, not loud enough to emerge. “Get out!”
My boys ignored me until they saw what had come out: another version of her, unfurling fast before their eyes. She was smaller than before, my girl, but seemed to grow quickly while she brushed herself off.
“You want us to leave?” The eldest asked me.
“Where would we go?” The youngest tugged at the end of my shirt, where he used to put his small fingers when he was too shy to speak to anyone but me. I looked at him now and couldn’t tell him apart from his brothers, could barely recognize him at all.
But the machine kept sputtering. The oldest had his hand deep inside its working, cursing the missing part, muttering to himself about where it might emerge from.
Then another of his sister came out, and another. They landed together and brushed each other off, one allowing the other to use an extra twig from her hip to make an extra finger. They didn’t look at me; they didn’t need to—they had each other now. Another came out, still more, I realized at the same time as her brothers that we were surrounded, and they were growing, getting taller, or just in volume, I couldn’t tell; soon I couldn’t tell where the boys ended and the daughters began, what was the machine and what was feeding it, what was eating and what was being eaten.
Tamsyn Riddle is a second-year student in Concordia University's Master of Arts in English- Creative Writing and an organizer with CREW, the Teaching and Research Assistant union. Her work has been published by This Magazine, Maybe Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal/ Tiohtià:ke with her anarchist roommates.