Blake Butler - Scorch Atlas

TEETH

I felt it formed in chatter: voices borne in the enamel. The sky sent teeth from cougar, leopard, shark, snake, kitten, cow, human, bear, dog, alligator, crocodile, deer, rodent, camel, zebra, turtle, rabbit, horse, and wolf. And bigger things we hadn’t quite imagined, teeth that wouldn’t fit inside a car. The massive incisors bashed through buildings. They impaled people huddled in their dens. They clipped the ground and erupted waist-deep craters large enough in which one could lie down. In the light you could hardly stand to look for all the glinting, the masked back-rattle. You couldn’t step without incision. The aching stretched our gums. I told the young ones how some new fairy had dropped her payload in mid-flight. The children wouldn’t wink. At this point we’d lost ways of sentiment. Overhead there hung a thing that seemed to want us nowhere. I couldn’t help but want to stay under. I couldn’t remember anyone I’d ever met. The names of people once relations hid chipped, minor abrasions into my brain. I’d had a mother, I knew, and someone besides her. I’d had people who would talk. But these days were so overloaded, so crusted over and back-bent, I didn’t know what else to speak of when I spoke into the brusque remainder of my household, into the crooks that hadn’t yet been demolished. I touched my own teeth with my soft tongue and wondered how long before they’d be the ones that rained down and ripped us open.

Randall had a head the size of several persons’ heads — a vast seething bulb with rotten hair that shined under certain light. Several summers back he’d driven to a bigger city where smarter men removed a hunk out of his skull. They’d said the cyst grew from the wires hung above the house. Randall’s son hadn’t ended up so well off. The crap ate through the kid’s whole cerebrum. Radiation. Scrambled cells. One had to be mindful of these things in these days , the doctors said. Now, though, with the woman gone and the baby dead, Randall kept on living in that old house with the mold curtains where his guilt breathed in the walls. He lugged the kid’s tricycle all over, the handlebars shrieking with rust on account of how he even brought it in the bath.

The streets were ruined that evening as he sulked half-cocked among the light. There’d been a parade at 3:00 p.m. for the Governor’s next wedding, a celebration of his legal promise to a whore he’d got caught pants-down with by the paper — therein, stoned on flashbulbs, the elected had sworn the fraggy dyke his betrothed: all six foot four of her, thickly mustached, tattooed every inch. Like most days, though, Randall slept to dusk, so that by the time he got up and fit his pants on and cleaned the dead birds off the porch — those fuckers fell all hours due to, again, the power lines, another stunner in the long line of hell that kept him up — the crepe had been unraveled. The trombones pumped and champagne popped. The whole town seemed to have cleared out. There were no sedans, no street sweepers, no bastards out on the club porch, where most days by now they rallied barking, randy for date rape.

Randall headed on along the strip where wheel wells from parade floats scarred the dirt. Folks had tricked their cars into makeshift barges, spurting confetti and huge balloons. They’d built a twenty-foot high reproduction of the Governor out of mud and chicken wire, which for days had towered up into the sky outside the trailer known as City Hall — a multicolor monolith, in minor silhouette of god. Seeing such a thing made Randall wonder his own quadrupled replica might look like — zonked out eyes as tunnels, a skull so big it blotted out the sky. In school they’d called him Lump Skull, Fat Face.

They’d smeared his name on bathroom walls with shit. They’d made him stand profiled under the monkey bars so they could swing down from each end and kick his eyes. On and on in that way for years until one day in shop class he’d tried to stick his neck into the band saw. After that he’d been expelled, ripped from the rosters, which at first had seemed a gift — though at home things weren’t much different. Randall’s parents were good-looking and ashamed. At night they locked their room.

Randall hadn’t shuddered when the mold collapsed their bedroom ceiling. He could at last now, he thought, be alone.

Over time Randall had built up so much venom that he hadn’t shuddered when the mold collapsed their bedroom ceiling. He wore no expression over their twin coffins. He could at last now, he thought, be alone.

Thereafter, though, among the damp halls, the house hummed with the phantoms of those it’d claimed. In the squished air Randall could hear all three, the folks, the baby, taking turns shaking the ceiling, breaking lamps. He could hear them clawing inside his grubby mattress. However long he lay, there was no rest. Randall prayed soon the mold would pile in on him too, deep enough no one could dig him up.

In the dirt, Randall passed the skin and nail salon where on weekends he liked to watch the girls prance out with their new flesh. He hadn’t sniffed a woman since the dead child’s mother left to meet a man she’d met on a 1-900 party line. Randall imagined her in wider rooms now, bloated with new chub from further births. She likely had a lot of other people in her life.

There was no one in the P.O. None in the laundromat, the frazzled gravel lot.

When the road ended where the town did, Randall continued walking on. He slogged up the mulch ridge ruptured with ant dirt into the smidge of half-dead sun-damaged trees. The days were lasting longer lately. Instead of fourteen hours, the sun would stay for sixteen, twenty. Some nights night never came.

Randall trudged until his breath stung. He turned to look back from where he’d come. White spurs of lightning stung at certain roofs. Randall’s stomach threw itself against his inner meat. He sat down in dirt and stared.

In the light slurring behind him he watched the streets eject a thing that moved. He couldn’t tell for sure, at first: a shimmer, conjured cogs of spreading heat. He squinted through the stutter until it made a girl. She followed the hill the same way he had, approaching slow, but locked on course — as if she’d been sent to greet him, or he her, there in this absence.

Soon she stood right there beside, skin from skin by inches. Through clotted locks he saw her eyes slit flat over cheeks somehow newly bruised. He recognized the dress — a smock of several garish colors, picked to bits. He couldn’t tell if he smelled himself or her. She sat beside him, knee to knee.

“My father isn’t in the kitchen,” she said, blinkless. “He’s not in the whole house.”

Randall stood up and shook his head off. He stretched as if she wasn’t there. Above, the sky made bubble, blurred with humid grog. Several dozen black birds circled above the town in halo— no, not a halo —a living crust. In recent weeks he’d watched them swoop down and nip old women on the bonnet, their feathers chock with nit.

When he started back in for the city, the girl fell in behind, keeping close through the wrecked light until again they stood among street windows reflecting the outside on itself. The panes heat-warbled in their framework, the glass again becoming sand.

Every so often, the girl offered interjection, questions with no answers Randall knew—

Where are people?

Will they be back?

Why aren’t we also gone?

Who’s the trike for?

What has made your head so huge?

Randall walked in silence…’ so that the paragraph reads: ‘Randall walked in silence, squeezing the puckered plastic of his son’s tricycle’s handles-worn thin by his own fingers, not the child’s. He’d tried several times to ride it: his enormous knees and legs tangled alone among the metal in the night.