Blake Butler - Scorch Atlas

In the end his blood had run all black and made another pattern on the carpet.

We’d made these babies despite the way at night the sky seemed drooping; the way sometimes the air hung thick as mud; so many buildings everywhere gone tilted, smothered, sucked into the earth or slung with sludge.

The TV static made our house vibrate. My teeth rattled at my brain.

The children let me out around the time for dinner and brought me downstairs to milk. It’d been several years since I’d nursed but somehow my glands could still produce. At first it’d taken some coaxing, a pinch, a punch, a howl, but eventually they had me gushing. I fed them each one after another, oldest to youngest, one by one.

Joey came on voracious, always starving. His skin was turning yellow. He blamed me for our trouble finding food. He gripped my left breast like a baseball.

Tum — awkward and fumbly, just near an age he might have begun to dream of women — he took my nipple in his mouth with his arms crossed over his chest, eyes anywhere but on me.

The youngest, Johnson, was losing his baby teeth so his was the easiest to handle. His mouth was soft and loose and nuzzled my areola without pain. Sometimes, when the other brothers had run off, he even let me hold him in the parcel of my lap and coo and clasp and hum a song. He’d always been the momma’s boy beyond his brothers, the love-lump I could nudge.

That night, though, he couldn’t keep me down. He kept hacking my milk across the carpet. His eyes were puffy. His teeth seemed slanted. He batted at my neck with fury in his eyes.

“Stop it,” I said. “Be good.”

He bit my nipple and I bled.

After feeding, we went into the living room and my boys tied me to the sofa. They’d caught Dan on the escape— he hadn’t warned me even with a premonition — he’d slipped into the night . The bonds gripped tight across my forearms, causing flesh to web and redden. The TV went on screeching. Their pupils bulged in crystal puddles. The stinging waves of whir flooded and coursed all through my babies’ eyes. I watched them watch till they were giddy-tired and then they came to sit around me on the floor. They demanded I tell stories of the way things were before.

As always, I took off on my childhood — how in the mornings behind my father’s shed I’d walk until I couldn’t see anything around me but long grass; how I’d lay down in the grass and look up at the ceiling of the sky and imagine being lifted off into the wide white flat nothing, my hair fluttering around my head, a mask, and every thought of scratch or ache or shudder washed out of me into air.

They didn’t want to hear about that.

I went on about the circus— the time I saw a man remove his head —the zoo— where babies grew in cages —McDonald’s— god, their value meals, what now? — I told them about anything I could think of that had been good once — anything that made me sting.

“Shut up and talk about TV,” Tum said, slurring, his neck bulged fat with mold.

So I went on about my programs, before the channels all washed out. I told about our last game shows— men in mud suits, grappling for food —soap operas— stretched to ribbons, the women bright orange and super-sewn —the weather channel— fat with layers, so many minor screens embedded into that one page, so small you couldn’t see —the nightly news— I won’t even say —all the talk shows with people screaming who was whose daddy and eating pills and throwing fists.

This they liked. This made them rowdy. Tum clenched in fits and pinched my skin. The smaller two were crawling all against me. Joey bit into my wrists. They used their scissors on my hair and poked my stomach and threw glass against the wall. They blindfolded me and made me touch things and try to guess what they were — hot kettle, steak knife, razor, something pudding-soft about which they’d only giggle. With a gag and bag over my head, they spread me on the floor and fed again.

Through all of this I did my best to remain still. I thought of nothing. I was tired.

We were tired, I guess I mean.

Through the next days, locked in the bedroom, I began to try again — to try to wish or want, and yet in want of nothing, as there was nothing I could taste. The space inside the small room we’d once used for a nursery had grown engorged with dirt, the walls and carpet frittered full with raspy holes threaded by tapeworms and aphids, eating. I’d yank on wallpaper to let the looser dustings shake so there’d be something I could chew. My tongue took to the texture but my belly would not stop screaming, and the bug matter hung in gristle, my stomach so weak it couldn’t grind. I could feel my offspring moving elsewhere. I could feel the crawl behind my eyes.

The old ceiling sat around me. The new ceiling: a smudged sky. In the idea of those unbent stars still drooling — the false hope of short-lived water rain — I began to convince myself there would be something somewhere some time again. I had scars all up my forearms. Larvae in my hair. My teeth ached. And deeper, in my organs, something else I couldn’t put a name to. Other eyes behind my eyes.

When the sound of scissors filled my forehead, I swallowed air until they wore away. I would rock and lick the salt of my kneecaps and laugh aloud and remember math. I’d been good at that crap sometime. I counted days in further scratches on my forearms. I heard awful noises in the walls. Above the static, a high pitched squealing. The bang of hammers. Thump of weight. I called the boys for water. I called the boys to come. I called and called and called until my voice broke my throat.

Through the window, too small for my body, I saw they’d took to piling our books and baubles in the backyard. The kitchen curtains. Their baby blankets. Grandma’s afghan. They’d learned some kind of dance. Out of the wood Dan had used to build a treehouse, they’d made an altar, tall as me.

Over time the room got smaller. The air felt liquid. I fell thin.

In the eaves I sensed a groaning.

In the floor where once I’d held my babies one by one and hummed, set in the wood I found a mouth. A man’s mouth — warm and easy. I felt his gender in the bristle of his bridge and the texture of his breath. By taste I knew it wasn’t Dan — Dan’s mouth crammed with rotting molars and gold loam. I could not remember other men. Yet when I came near enough this man would whisper, his voice ruined and raspy, beehive flutter. He mostly said only one thing, a name, I think, though nothing held. He would repeat until the words became just words, until even what short sleep came for me was slurred. To shut him up I’d spit between them, what dry saliva I could manage, and the lips would shrivel, bring a hum. You could hear him suck for hours, my taste some nourishment, a fodder. But soon enough again the wishing, formed in hymn.

Finally I took the dirt that would have been my dinner and meshed the lips over to make the floor full flush and proper. Then the world again was hushed and far off. I began to teach myself the words I’d need when things returned: the yes and please and bless you . The ouch and why and I remember . I tried to find Dan’s voice in my head, but the sounds from outside and there in me brought a blur: the electric storms, the shaking, the bright nights, the itch, the rip. I continued to continue to try. I waited longer and the trying became a thing worn like a hairpin in my heart. Or more aptly like my fingernails — nearly an inch each by now, growing out of me some crudded yellow. In time I’d become sly and slouched enough to eat those goddamned slivers of myself. But before that I’d wish the mouth back. I’d lap the dirt and find a hole. One tiny nozzle down to nowhere, black no matter how loud into it I’d beg or bark or sing.