Blake Butler - Sky Saw

BLINK

BLINK

The father felt his flooding body. The presence stuttered through him and turned hard, baking veins flexed chalky soft. The sound of the men he could not see but was breathing in and out all through him made him stutter. He could not make his arms cease flailing. They no longer felt like his arms. He held the arms out before him and saw the meat sucking up in pills, becoming bulbous and rectangled. He turned the arms upended, elbows clicking where they touched. On the underarms he pushed his flab up — slick skin brushed with gravity and sound. Hid in his skin there was a blade there — a long metal gleaming ash. This was his mind. He licked his finger and slicked the blade to glisten, felt flashbulbs going off between his teeth and up his trachea. He turned to face the glowing.

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

If meat was not meat it was the word. Spirit of mold growth in heating wet spots in the form of working age and rising mist. Plates were illuminated walls inside the house, took a glowing refraction, and the legs and went and went. When anybody touched a body, where he crashed his older hum, rising slightly felt it slip into the rhythm of the lungs, the ring finger itching flesh, a blank page. It bled all through the holes in us, called veins. It was more serious than light. It knew the names of people. Think of them.

Between the lips, the lips were smiling, and then another, larger leaves, thick and shining down the shaft of day the house was. It had always been like this and would. The hour held the body around the neck of it and stretched it thicker in a glowing from the crevice of the gathered body of the hair, the chests, nipples and lacrimal glands, fingers, elbows, dimples and anus, navel — each through a hole in where the home was built there were leaves from the beginning — older bones. The bodies continued the cycle of low friction, lobes on each blade from the hot meat as the long hall of any being was forced to continue in his body in the flinch — in a strong and lustrous prismatic shape, adorned with every inhalation — the camera flashing, baked in size — begging for every minute.

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

So, now late the father laughed. He felt as a force peeling, the cream that smelled every hour of your life. From the outside he looked like the same person as always, even less hair on his head, despite some version of the house of memory houses were all crammed in this decrepit body, where the sky founded its mend. What wormed itself upon the space and those among it was dry like paper and wide as light. In unpacked floods of fat beams old air moored upon each inch of the space from wall to wall. Though the endless glass setting the hall’s size from the outside kept all itch of real glow from coming in —whatever outside glow could be said to now remain —the hum of fluorescent drafts set in the overhead bled reams of multi-plaid and blood red in long coils slit rapt shadow on the lengths and widths. The light, though white, or whatever other called can be called clear, the very air, had set compressed now with many colors: the color splinted through the rubber and came split — black as triple bruises, as unslept skin, as the inside of the body when the eyes are closed, making sentences that ran on and on, that both collapsed upon themselves and vast exploded in the midst of their creation, as a sentence should. Each time a body breathed in again what came into him there was less of him around him left to be, while beyond the disappearing something wider held him in.

BLINK

The child and then the father in the mother’s house turned and found where where he’d felt the room there there were ten rooms, then there there were fifty, then then then fifty-thousand. Then came the colors, in reverse.

In the house around the mother the lights in the rooms blew open, each single bulb in slow procession split. With each the mother felt the light spreading on into her, wholly absorbed, her body rung with radiance and heat light. Inside her shape the mother found that she could both breathe and eat off of the liquid spurting there inside her and blurting from her body in the wash — she gave it off in bubbled grunts — liquid from her eyes and ears and nostrils, from her womb doors, from the condensed mesh of the many shrieking months she’d spent feeding food into herself to make more of her. Inside the liquid, further reams of film frames spooled in congregation. Her flesh had spread all through the room. It had no number. As well, the room had spread into the house, into the other rooms compacting, goggled with the eggs and all such what. As each room popped in convention with the tone, the mother felt the rooms appending to her — the house smeared and went on smearing, color for color in the wake of something warbling her body. The mother could not feel her systems. She could not feel her second self — the other presence having spread so wide and bulbous through and through her, it was now no longer there — it filled her lungs and slicked her back — it seeped among the walls into the house’s air vents, its air and piping, the countless knobs and halls and wet — it laced among the house’s wires, cracked the dust — it spread outside the house through hidden windows, coagulating in a cold wave over the ground — it washed thick over the spinning buildings, over the globulating earth, encombing trees hung gross with columned nits and colored sores bursting in the suspension with fat flowers and smeared up in the silver-gleaming jelly paste — over the crooked solar curtains and highest flight zones, annexed in field marks held in see-through lesions — among the weird glint of where the sun had sunk to lick the papered edge of the ex-sky burned and rubbled with stretchmarked brined designs of stuttered language — the waist on the skyhead pulling and panting, bored. In scream of beef and mutter pooling, the mother’s liquid lapped the sun with her whole mind, and changed its color with vibrating, packed to black and neon burst in white, and in the color, too, the tone surrounding and surrounded, the sound of every door opened and then closed and clicking locked — then reopened to blue bodies — barfing nodules — to the sound of people sleeping in their threads, and side by side to other bodies beyond numbers, sweating off their names — the sound of one word spoken all together creamed with beeping along hallways with no walls and walls with nowhere in between them — the sound of white rinds stretching, rings on fingers sinking in — the sound of all things burst humming, all notes and nothing — the sound of all things folded over when. The sound was in the liquid and the liquid in the sound — the brim so fat it seemed any instant when the bath would wake in rupture, rise to squash upon the frying night.

BLINK

There was a massive clap then. There was the gonging. The house walls ran with juicing fluid, blooming bulbs as they rained down. The room was all around the mother bulging color. Her hips and lips and eyes had spread so wide she seemed a portal or filled with blank. There was a stink there swaddled on her washing. It called the birds into her brain. They burst from bejeweled cocooning patterns encrusted on the walls, the air, her flesh. Their wings were metal. No one. What. Their language flew in all at once together in one chirping endless chain head-on into her. When now. They stuffed their way on down inside her face, through her throat and belly and her ass, and from each point thereon outward, while at her cusp the air around the mother’s liquid shone. Somewhere in the leak the leak was speaking. Its words weren’t words but numbers, coiled in wads. Curds of syntax made in old names. The speech made the house’s liquid cloudy. In the liquid there were eggs: one from each bird incubated and there laid into the mother’s open bruises and her blood, such swelling bite marks of the laying written on her massive lungs and tongue and gums and glands and hair and gait and back and lard.