Blake Butler - Sky Saw

The other father did not blink. His enormous mouth opened and began spraying spittle and some stench — a crystalline wind that flapped 811’s hair on his own smaller head and tucked his skin back. The skin was runny. The massive mouth was open — hot, a window, some new door—811 inhaled the exhale and felt it harden in his intestines. The lights kept blinking. The walls were neon-gravy colored. In the dark the father moved toward himself.

Back where the house had been the mother began to rebuild the house with what things she could find or make. There was not much there of the remaining materials around the home’s indention that did not have the error of the tone all shattered in it, nor was the land right, and so she resorted to herself — to build the house out of the cells she’d carried in her blood and organs for this silent purpose through all those other years and other books. In the light around the gob of shit the house had stood upon and must stand upon again the ground groaned with a long low seam of all prior bodies’ groans condensed.

The mother used a slab of rock to shear some of her skin off and this became the house’s frame. The walls were thin and marbled and they wobbled on no breeze. The pockmarks or other frayed places on her size moaned wide and of a texture stung endlessly by wasps and poked by men and lathered over with chemicals aimed to keep her clean and calm her down inside the sighing night, becoming rooms and hallways on the air there. The mother spit into her hand and rubbed it hot and stroked it across clips of nothing to make windows, through which one could see out but not see in. She pressed them warm into the walls. She stood for sometime there outside in the reflection looking through it, believing each thing that might be needed into place.

Gaining pace now in burning sunlight, the mother forced herself to laugh. The sound became a bedroom, with air inside it she could breathe, and space to negotiate the catalogs of prior nights arranged in catalogs of deformed color representing…what? She could not remember. The forms were firm, though, and held mass. They buzzed around her body, waking sleep. The refracting air around the passing laughter became food, cells they would suck into their body in the mind of feeling pleasured, drawn with light. She plucked her wisdom teeth and fashioned clocks, each bent on counting every second gone here in the building held together, another she would never have again. She yanked her remaining hair out by the shallow roots and from these she made wires for the light, so that in the house she and the child could see each other coming, going. There would be places left to hide, places the light would not reach no matter how many devices the mother fashioned, any hour. From her eye she pulled a door, the front door that led into the house where here in coming days she would grow old with what was left of her by now. From gaps in her memory she made knobs with gears inside them that could turn to lock or to unlock. For keys to the keyholes she broke her index nails off, one for the child and one for her — she knew already if turned too hard they would break and there’d be no keys. The mother spoke into her hand and had each thing she needed. It was all right there, she found, if pulled in dark meat of her most tired parts.

The son paid no attention. His hair had grown out even more, enough to mask him from sun damage and from the buzzing remainder of the tone. He could not feel the button underneath his tongue — a button which, had it been pressed in at any minute, would have made the old house reappear in full, and they could have gone into the house in there and lived without a mind. All other days instead in simple presence of the unpressed button, consumed with all the other kinds of shit. He invoked himself in conversation, chucking long rocks at the unfinished Universal Roof, shouting for someone to come and touch his body, though at the mother’s touch he balked. The worms were writhing in him also and in his hair he wore the dust of the collapsed house and the ground did not like him alive. He breathed and breathed it. He watched his mother work stuffing dirt and moss between the new home’s walls of skin for insulation that would keep them warm or keep them cool, and would help to keep the sound there in or out around them, would pack them in and hold them nearer to each other.

When she was finished, cold and glowing, in the front door the mother carved their prior names, watched them sway away into the grain.

Inside the house it seemed the same house as the first one, the one the father had lived in alongside them there before, except for small facets such as the placement of light switches, hanging pictures. Some of the rooms had changed their shape from what a room is or seemed slightly off-sized in the day: a room shaped like a locket or a toothache or the waning of the moon.

As well, the air here was much colder — the mother’s mouth made plumes that hung and stuck around her face, firm bots of breath she could reach up and grab hold of. Her exhaust formed shapes like little crystalline rooms again inside them, smaller copies of the shapes that held the other air inside the house around them. She put each shape to her ear and listened. Inside she heard someone speaking and another person speaking back. She tried to believe the things she understood them saying. She tried to want it too, and tried to tell it. She watched each shape one after another dissolve all dry and frying in her palms.

With each breath the mother took what she had made and set it on the ground, while the son, coming behind her, crushed the mother’s breathing underneath his feet.

In the hall the mother found a calendar in which all the dates said the same day. On certain instances of that day someone had written things to do in what looked like her own hand:

JANUARY 1—CACKLE LESSONS

JANUARY 1—DON’T FORGET TO TURN THE CLOCK

JANUARY 1—HOLE DOCTOR APT., BRING KKKASSH!

JANUARY 1—WHO WAS AT THE WINDOW LAST NIGHT

JANUARY 1—WILL YOU QUIT EATING ALL THE CHALK

JANUARY 1—GOD THE WATER IS TOO HOT HERE

JANUARY 1—GROPE MOVIE

JANUARY 1—FILM YOURSELF STANDING ON A LADDER

JANUARY 1—CLIT PIERCING PROMISE

JANUARY 1—BRUNCH WITH GOD

JANUARY 1—LOOK BEHIND YOU

She ripped each page off as she read and ate it. She did not chew with teeth, but let her stomach have each unto itself, to swallow whole. A sheath of white bird feathers bloomed on her forearm and she brushed them loose with her thick nails. Her skin was watching.

I am getting tired of myself, the mother thought.

I am tired also, the son replied from a far room.

I am also very tired.

I would feel okay if you did not turn the page.

Why did you do that?

I told you I was tired.

You know how you and I are getting sicker.

I mean, it’s hilarious.

We won’t speak of this again.

In the new house the mother still found the door that held the stairwell, lodged like a razor in an apple. She had not built a stairwell for this new house, expressly. Someone was knocking on the door. The knocking made the whole house quiver like a fire. She touched the crack around the door. She traced its long shape with her knuckles. She felt a warmish crumbling kind of air there coming through. She felt the thing inside her eating. She felt her ribcage being toned on, nestled near to, giving birth to more of where she was again, every inch of her another child. She sneezed up a sofa and moved it over the door’s face. She went to bed, though inside her sleep she saw the door again, and behind the door again another door and it was snowing something.

The father wriggled in the father. In the light he moved through corridors of chub, black spasmed pockets of hid body caught and aging. He did not know what about his moving was what moved him, only that when he nudged his head another way he would shudder from one crux to another, the air slurring into squirmy clouds of pinkish liquid, scent of want. He often thought he heard someone other coming toward him from the other way in the larger body, down the long blond hall inside him where he’d wormed. A strumming presence, something heavy like the name of cream and crushing putty on the air. He tried to hurry forward through him in the slather, kicking, barking, forming new minutes in his flesh. He found he could not at all remember which way he should be headed, which way already he had been or if he’d ever moved at all. Each inch had new tunnels, some so immensely black there was no way.