Blake Butler - Scorch Atlas

— My hair was six feet long. I sat wrapped inside it in the kitchen — a gown of deceased cells. Outside the kids from next door beat the house and brayed. Days before, I’d watched their father swan dive from their roof onto the lawn. Their father, the electrician, with the tumor on his cheek. Such grace as he held his hands together and aimed straight for the dirt — he knew already what was coming — he’d sensed the ruining air. Now his boys needed me for feeding; to comb the gnats out of their lashes. But I was so done in already. Even then I lacked most all.

— I still taste the songs I gave my baby. You could read his features through my casing. I coughed rheumy refrain between my soft teeth, my voice cragged as my dad’s had through years consuming Red Man and Listerine. He never spat. My eyes bugged with the brush of tongue to palate as I struggled with each note. To sing above the sound of outside. The insects make the most. You think you’d learn to overlook the flutter. The curdle of wallpaper. Ever smash a roach bug with a dictionary? Sometimes you hear them scream. A lady screams much different. I grew up in the South. My headache bred from years of scummy water and inhaled dust. The years of home a house holds aren’t in wood so much as air.

— Rick and I ate breakfast every morning for seven years without a blank. He made shrimp and grits with bacon and honey crumpets with black jam. They say O.J. is full of larvae but we drank it in great gulps. Sometimes still I feel them blooming in my throat. Rick would read out loud from the Bible with his mouth full of the grease. He used plastic forks for fear of electrocution. His gold-capped teeth would buzz. At night we slept back to back, kissing vertebrae, interlocked. You couldn’t convince me we’d but spent one life together. You couldn’t say he didn’t love our son, though he left while I was still engorged — a minor heartbeat matching mine; and the drumbeat of my abdomen as our small boy kicked and kicked, in want to puncture his poor mother’s waistline and emerge in time to watch the squall.

— Twin storm fences, wrecked. Top grade sod, uplifted. The soil turned pink and sponged. Roof puckered, pocked with bird shit. Concrete driveway cracked and scattered. We had a stone angel in the courtyard that’d already lost its arm. I saw that angel fly — lifted off in clean ascension to somewhere we would not see. Swimming pool infested. Lawnmower rusted. Paint on the Chevy hailed obscene. Hardwoods in the den and guest room warped, already rotting. Plumbing pushed up through the floor. Rocking chair run off with. Mildewed carpet. Roach parade. Can we claim instances of soft disease? I’ll show you rickets, nausea, itching. I reckon we can dicker. I’ll sign my name if I can recall the way it went.

— I often think of pastry. My joints creak when it drizzles. The windows have been painted over. I’d never kiss another man. The baby calm inside me, his kick stilled off to numb. Some evenings I walk the rows of houses and put my face against their glass, peering past the insides where some cold hours after dinner they’d sit around and stare. I found wax flowers in several kitchens and tied them through my hair. My brain is soggy. Mostly I just shed.

— Many times the sky comes open. The flap of heaven fixed there, fanning. Nothing. I’d sooner prefer sit here in the tub and run the water and watch it spill onto the tile. Thump my belly. Whisper to him. Wait for strumming. Something new. Feel my skin go older quicker, the wet running up my old folds. The smell of mold drawn in the water. Toothpaste dinner. Constant wake. My hair draped on my shoulders wet and shades darker, like a scarf. Sopping and sagging I trundle under, wondering how long it would take to prune my tired face unrecognizable.

— Thanks for your well wishing. I understand the want for jokes. My throat is ripping, clogged and cracked now. My back creaks when I think. I pray into my dirt most evenings for the urge to snicker again, green. You should see what’s become of our peach trees. The bloat. The blackened axis. The bow and bending of our city buildings. Slow roll of corrosion. If I had the nerve I’d build a guitar. I’d string it with my hair, white at age twenty. I’d play in rhythm with my stomach — the new roar that’s replaced our baby’s bump. The boggy burp’s best bass. Oh, what songs we’d make together, me and my doppelganger, cheek to cheek.

— I spend my evenings these days in the kitchen. I knit new clothes for our child. I learned to knit after the death of cable TV. I use colored wires ripped from dumb machines. I would have made him bonnets. A cape. A canopy above his crib. My lips would tickle the stubble on his under-neck once he was old. Tell your mother where you’ve been . Now that he’s quiet and the skies have settled shortly, I hold my grieving in the folds of my elbows, neck and knees. The way time robs in futures pissed. Sleep-rooms in pools up to your crown. I’d have liked to think me kinder, but the neighbor — I hear his kids beg and think: coffin nails . Sometimes I know they’re not even there. That their pounding is only more of my dumb pulse.

— In my loose teeth. In my knocking knees. With the stripe of morning across the yard; where the worms rise, where the earth spits up its dinner. This house grows older with me every night. How I’ll remember? In the burning. In the cloud rattle. Each time the roof thuds above me. Each time I wet my face in squirm. And there’s always all this paper — our receipts, shorthand and thank yous, birthday rhymes composed by strangers; notes and trash and mail unopened; photographs, if water-warped. Sometimes I recite my life aloud for hours. Sometimes I just don’t have the heart.

GLASS

The glass came first in early morning. I watched through the only safe storm window. The sound of sky come ripping — some sour music box, cranked to crack. The panes shattered on impact, each giving off a second spray. We watched the dead yards, already buried, now held under new refracted light. Glass over grave sites in display. Glass slit through awnings, billboard faces. The facemasks became more dire in the scatter, each inhale suspect, lined with slice. Glass specks embedded in our eyelids — count the new ranks of the blind. The glass came in many colors: some pure translucent, however tarnished; green and brown burst bottles; backed with silver as in mirrors; blue from Depression-era heirlooms; stained from the awe-stuck eaves of churches. The shriek of glass on glass peeled my skin. The screech of all things scorched around me. The brassy, tinkled detonation. Shards of wronged birds. Real birds impaled and writhing. Even the sun had hid its eye. We were several layers under now. We could not think of other times. We called truce and splayed our fingers. The sky would not forgive.

My first child splurged inside me. He ate what I ate — ate it all. There never was enough: my milk, my eggs and honey, my hunks of ham and strange things craved. I picked gnats out of the carpet; chewed through the shower curtain; swallowed blood. Baby hungry. Baby want. His teeth nicked in my linings. He tore my inner-skin, his nails already long and gleaming in the manner of what I used to shave my pits.