Authors: Blake Butler
The child, not yet a man himself, seemed somehow smearing in the absence of the father. His waking flesh was mostly gray. His thumbprints had the grain of gravel and against certain kinds of wood would give off sparks. The last time the mother had weighed the child the scale displayed all numerals she could not read.
The child’s veins would sometimes bloat and stiffen. He already had acquired all his teeth, more teeth than he should ever have at all, together. Every morning 1180 shaved a brand new mustache off her child’s top lip with the electric razor the father had left behind. He had taken the straight-edged other with him, perhaps a weapon—as well, he’d taken his legs and arms that 1180 had used to calm herself and spread herself and remember at all she was there, though he’d left the locking necklace he’d given her with her photo pasted inside. Sometimes now she would open up the necklace and see not herself but blackened paper, sometimes a tiny wedge of mirror, a scratch n sniff of stew.
Most evenings now 1180 slept with the child beside her in the night, along with the child’s dolls and caps and all his clothes, each of which she’d
fashioned from the crap that fell into the house among its yawnings, junk blown from the remains of other houses and small polished portions of the sky—this way gathered all together there’d be sufficient mass upon the bed to bruise in the mother an illusion as if there were still someone there beside.
Someone
is
there, she would say aloud inside herself repeating. This child. My child. My son. Person two-thou-sand-and-thir-ty, my nearest number.
The mother felt the creaming liquid in her whorl.
The men were coming up the stairs. The men were chanting.
The men were made of meat.
These were the decomposing years. There was air that made the moon go blue.
These were days of no new healing, days undone by knives.
1. SAFETY SCISSORS—First known to have turned on the students in a fourth grade art class in an aboveground bunker in Des Moines. The children had been assigned to design effigies of themselves. The teacher had put on a record of Christmas music, though it was not Christmas. The children had had their milk. Suddenly, the teacher reported, they began snipping at their faces. They gashed their hair in chunks. They slit their necks and spoke through the incision. By the teacher’s word—herself unharmed—the child’s eyes
were not there.
Said teacher serving 25 to life.
2. PINKING SHEARS—The effect of these on a length of bed sheet. The effect of these on a length of cheek. The effect of these on a length curtains, cream, bird wings, film, your mother.
Where were you? Why did you not answer when I called?
3. MOWER BLADES—At some point the earth was air and air was earth and through the earth the blades moved churning, routing tunnels, forming combs, combs in which the young lay rolled in wombs or chewing Crisco, moaning for the moon. These blades were the first that did not cut.
4. SHAVING RAZORS—They came for us in swarms. Through the strip malls, sung like bees, kissing at plate windows, scratching, making runes upon the arm, derouting feed tubes from mother’s babies through and through them, even sometimes making small men’s faces clean.
5.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT THESE BLADES CAME OFF OF—
They were so large. They fell from nowhere (we
can agree to call the sky nowhere…
I believe we can).
(Will you please help?
)
These blades landed on expressways. They crushed the green out of tall young forests that had begun re-growing in the raze.
They knocked the birds off branches and smeared their eggs into the ground. The blades sung with sound of vast incision. The blades filled the store aisles all swum in contained light. In these blades you could see some head reflected, though never quite the one you wear.
The other things that fell—not knives, but liquid—trash, or parts of people—of these things do not ask. There was nothing in this salt mound left to await, even in the most hopeful of the people.
Still, cuffed in the black, what could manage still made their way, all filled with hidden surfaces and blood miles.
There were a billion half-rebuilt homes stuffed in this era. Much of the new houses’ construction had been abandoned underway. The land had been annexed, named and numbered, priced, the dirt laced with wire, the trees with censors, streets with poly-buffered trash—a hundred-thousand megamansions lined by stained glass window big as other houses’ sides and encrusted with colors that did not quite exist, invented for this house alone—homes with yachts moored in the day room in case someone wished to feel suddenly at sea—
as on the water, I can sleep
—backcracked acts of magic performed in private parlors by computer on marble stage, under neon lights left blinking, blinking—rooms all gathered hard around a hole through which one could look down through the earth, see the shells and shelves it held encrusted, owned—
we own you—all of you are all of ours—
rooms each forever spun in spirals and injecting you with speech beyond
a skin—walls all old and stuffed with screaming, a cold reminder of who’d they’d held, what could have been inside them
—would be—was
—each instant held forever in awaiting for the next to press against it, push it down into the black catalog of the cells of the unseen.
I could go on at what these days were but the truth is I am tired. Would you even believe me if I did? I’ve spent enough years with my face arranged in books. I’ve read enough to crush my sternum. In each of the books are people talking, saying the same thing, their tongues slim and white and speckled with the words.
I don’t want to be here. I want to get older. I want to see my skin go folding over.
Someday I plan to die.
When I was 1, most nights the house would fill with teeth. They lined the walls and studded the ceiling fans. They would come down like rain and click around my bed. In my head they built a stutter. I couldn’t feel my hands yet but there was something then also in me—something gnawing, something come undone.
When I was 2, I licked the sun some. I could spread it open with my fingers. I could tell it what I wanted. I could float further than even that.
When I was 3, the world went flattened and we couldn’t find the streets. My arms felt made of tissue. Words woke up inside my head. I would speak them as if I meant to speak them—as if they’d always been all mine—sometimes their grain would cut my stomach—I felt I did not need the stomach—I felt OK.
When I was 4, I remember someone standing above me in the night.
When I was 5, each time I wore white I found myself slowed down. I could see the shapes run out of other’s mouths, and I could see their arms ahead of where they were. I could see their faces stretching white with wrinkle and the degrading hue stuck in their eyes.
When I was 6, I found the ground got softer if I rubbed it with my shin. There was a certain part of the backyard where I went straight through into a den. In the den there was a man seated upright in a chair and the man told me exactly what would happen.
When I was 7, I dreamt the names of every child I’d ever have. In the dark I scratched them on my forearms, all fifty thousand. When I woke up my skin was clean, though there were new bruises on my knees.
When I was 8, I ate a tree. It coming back out was the hard part. That year I saw only the turning weather burn through other people’s eyes. By now my knees had still not healed, and my blood behind them had turned purple.
When I was 9, I’d buy a new school notebook and get home to find it filled. Often with drawings of myself inside my mother, and often with someone else in me. When I would try to show my mother the pages all became one page.
When I was 10, I don’t remember.
When I was 11, I don’t remember.
When I was 12, I changed my name. I went by blather. I wouldn’t wink unless you knew. My hair went curled. My eyes changed shape. It was only in the dark that I could think.
When I was 13, I don’t remember.
When I was 14, I’d hide in bed so many days my skin would stick tight to the sheets—in the end it was the sleep that tore me open. It was soft sleep ate my brain. I met so many men in folds of nowhere—ones I’d found or fucked or scratched the skin on or ate or was ate by or swam with through the ground.
When I was 15, I found a ring and wore it on my thumb. Each day it got a little tighter. I lost one finger, then another. I didn’t want to quit the ring. It had my real name writ inside the band. I swallowed it with sugar.
When I was 16, I squirted my first baby as a cuff of creamy cud behind the house. I swear the child had eyes. I worked his girth over with my fingers in the gummy earth, already bubbling, and no matter how hard I packed and patted, I could hear the breathing in my teeth. I hid the patch with nettle. In the morning, the yard was swarmed.
When I was 17, my parents were carried off into the antbed on the hill. I clawed the dirt for hours and all I came back with was this rash. At night the
rash would rise up off me and hang above my body. I could hear it speaking in my sleep. I can hear it even now—and now—and now.
When I was 18, the house’s caulking swelled. The sky would disattach. It would come to curl around my throat. A little lake welled in my belly. Holes opened up inside the ground. I managed not to have them eat me, even when I went and threw myself on in—as if there were a magic sleeve of cellophane around me—as if I needed to go on. I did not need to go on.
When I was 19, the tone began.
When I was 20, I didn’t sleep at all—
such hours
—soon I learned to see the men hid in the eaves—the doors lodged in the séance—the stink.
When I was 21, I met the father—another man who swore he knew—knew what I had in me—knew what I would need. This is what he said. In the night his forehead hid the sky. I woke to blood spots on my pillow, in our oat bran, in the sink drain, but still I stood beside that man—I touched his hands and said the words—we were one then.
When I was 22, I don’t remember.
The mother now had given birth twenty-two times since the father’s exit five days prior. Each time the span between the births decreased. The pregnancies were swift and brutal. She expelled her paste in gush and crumbs. The warblings of her and the babies’ bodies both boomed through the empty rooms around them. Sometimes the mother felt she could have named the ancient human names of all the men that made her bigger, despite the blindfolds, the ice and biting—she could taste them in the branding of her flesh—a permanence mostly lost on the ejections.
Person 2030 had been 811’s, who like the mother had descended from two bodies rendered during DELETED ERA. This child—the only one of hers that had thus far survived behind its eyes, held in its cruddy back and black saliva—had been the reason the father left, she knew. Though he’d not expressed this so directly—he’d said nothing really, just been gone—she
could tell he’d despised the baby for shucking off his image, for already beginning to grow old. The air had seemed to buzz between them.
The other births after 2030’s were a different matter, following a similar structure to the system of her aging, if reversed—one for each year, young and coming, if all crammed into such a short amount of time—the same spiral cut procession seen in all things, of all things one after another—new infants bloating in her as if in instants, spooling ropes on ropes of breathing cells. She tried to hold them in but they came out.
The 2nd child had burst unfurling as a smudge of scum on the black summer pavement tile while the first child crawled through the whole house calling the father’s forgotten name, already gone. The stench had been horrendous, like endless fire. 1180 had washed with bleach and light for days and still could not forget. The curd left rashes on her face.
The 3rd child had been a trembling wash of chunks that would not stop running, squashed and ransacked in the eyes. It did have eyes, at least that. 1180 took to wearing diapers or standing over buckets until she stopped caring about the carpet.
The 4th child sluiced out while 1180 stood ironing a work shirt she knew 811 would never need to wear. Even if he returned there’d be no reason. Person 811’s place of employment had been converted into pyres. The church was eaten up with acid dust and some white substance. There were no words to call the evenings. And though the counted dead would never
end, the state had claimed use of the bodies to build a wall—a wall that would keep them, finally, protected. 1180 ironed anyway. She pressed her knuckles to the iron’s steaming eyes to make a memory.
The 5th child came out of the wrong hole during a shit.
The smell of the 6th child—
the mother despised herself for this
—reminded her of biscuit gravy, and that was all she’d eaten then for weeks.
The 7th child grew its voice first and still spoke inside her when she was most alone. The 7th child knew things about her and rose them on her skin in detailed dioramas. The 7th child was not a woman or a man.
The 8th child seemed to want to make it. This child had kept in place for two whole days. By the time it came out as stippled magma, one solid body seared to the lining from where it’d come. 1180 had swelled large as a window. It pulled and pulled at her until after some time in the sun room it did not.