Blake Butler: Sky Saw

Person 1180 watched the baby on the table rasping and gabbing at itself. She measured the stutter of the indention in the child’s cranium, which by now should have sealed. In the slick inch-width porthole for the child’s skull, 1180 sometimes saw things crawl in or out. Sometimes she’d put her eye to the knot and peer in. She saw nothing. She’d been squirted in the face. She kissed the hole and she wished into it. The children was growing faster than he should be, she thought: this other little man. She should not be able to distinguish hour to hour how he’d changed, the shape of his infancy already leaving his skin behind for other colors.

The mother had a resume of rancid husbands since her husband’s exit, a list she kept lodged in her chest, each one that much ouched over the other, aching one another out inside the nights of screeching and endless bleeding, burned from white to orange to red to brown to black to gold inside her mind. She could not recall any of these men’s numbers, nor the specific texture of their hands, though they were in her, all compounded and compounding. Each day the list grew longer one by one or two or ten. Each one she’d shown a new part of herself that they could take away and keep and keep inside them, or perhaps hang upon some wall, or maybe eat or smudge or overpower, somehow rip unto destroyed.

The child, not yet a man himself, seemed somehow smearing in the absence of the father. His waking flesh was mostly gray. His thumbprints had the grain of gravel and against certain kinds of wood would give off sparks. The last time the mother had weighed the child the scale displayed all numerals she could not read.

The child’s veins would sometimes bloat and stiffen. He already had acquired all his teeth, more teeth than he should ever have at all, together. Every morning 1180 shaved a brand new mustache off her child’s top lip with the electric razor the father had left behind. He had taken the straight-edged other with him, perhaps a weapon — as well, he’d taken his legs and arms that 1180 had used to calm herself and spread herself and remember at all she was there, though he’d left the locking necklace he’d given her with her photo pasted inside. Sometimes now she would open up the necklace and see not herself but blackened paper, sometimes a tiny wedge of mirror, a scratch n sniff of stew.

Most evenings now 1180 slept with the child beside her in the night, along with the child’s dolls and caps and all his clothes, each of which she’d fashioned from the crap that fell into the house among its yawnings, junk blown from the remains of other houses and small polished portions of the sky — this way gathered all together there’d be sufficient mass upon the bed to bruise in the mother an illusion as if there were still someone there beside.

Someone is there, she would say aloud inside herself repeating. This child. My child. My son. Person two-thou-sand-and-thir-ty, my nearest number.

The mother felt the creaming liquid in her whorl.

The men were coming up the stairs. The men were chanting.

The men were made of meat.

These were the decomposing years. There was air that made the moon go blue.

These were days of no new healing, days undone by knives.

1. SAFETY SCISSORS — First known to have turned on the students in a fourth grade art class in an aboveground bunker in Des Moines. The children had been assigned to design effigies of themselves. The teacher had put on a record of Christmas music, though it was not Christmas. The children had had their milk. Suddenly, the teacher reported, they began snipping at their faces. They gashed their hair in chunks. They slit their necks and spoke through the incision. By the teacher’s word — herself unharmed — the child’s eyes were not there. Said teacher serving 25 to life.

2. PINKING SHEARS — The effect of these on a length of bed sheet. The effect of these on a length of cheek. The effect of these on a length curtains, cream, bird wings, film, your mother. Where were you? Why did you not answer when I called?

3. MOWER BLADES — At some point the earth was air and air was earth and through the earth the blades moved churning, routing tunnels, forming combs, combs in which the young lay rolled in wombs or chewing Crisco, moaning for the moon. These blades were the first that did not cut.

4. SHAVING RAZORS — They came for us in swarms. Through the strip malls, sung like bees, kissing at plate windows, scratching, making runes upon the arm, derouting feed tubes from mother’s babies through and through them, even sometimes making small men’s faces clean.

5. I DON’T KNOW WHAT THESE BLADES CAME OFF OF— They were so large. They fell from nowhere (we can agree to call the sky nowhere…

I believe we can).

(Will you please help?

)

These blades landed on expressways. They crushed the green out of tall young forests that had begun re-growing in the raze. They knocked the birds off branches and smeared their eggs into the ground. The blades sung with sound of vast incision. The blades filled the store aisles all swum in contained light. In these blades you could see some head reflected, though never quite the one you wear.

The other things that fell — not knives, but liquid — trash, or parts of people — of these things do not ask. There was nothing in this salt mound left to await, even in the most hopeful of the people.

Still, cuffed in the black, what could manage still made their way, all filled with hidden surfaces and blood miles.

There were a billion half-rebuilt homes stuffed in this era. Much of the new houses’ construction had been abandoned underway. The land had been annexed, named and numbered, priced, the dirt laced with wire, the trees with censors, streets with poly-buffered trash — a hundred-thousand megamansions lined by stained glass window big as other houses’ sides and encrusted with colors that did not quite exist, invented for this house alone — homes with yachts moored in the day room in case someone wished to feel suddenly at sea— as on the water, I can sleep —backcracked acts of magic performed in private parlors by computer on marble stage, under neon lights left blinking, blinking — rooms all gathered hard around a hole through which one could look down through the earth, see the shells and shelves it held encrusted, owned— we own you — all of you are all of ours— rooms each forever spun in spirals and injecting you with speech beyond a skin — walls all old and stuffed with screaming, a cold reminder of who’d they’d held, what could have been inside them —would be — was —each instant held forever in awaiting for the next to press against it, push it down into the black catalog of the cells of the unseen.

I could go on at what these days were but the truth is I am tired. Would you even believe me if I did? I’ve spent enough years with my face arranged in books. I’ve read enough to crush my sternum. In each of the books are people talking, saying the same thing, their tongues slim and white and speckled with the words.

I don’t want to be here. I want to get older. I want to see my skin go folding over.

Someday I plan to die.

When I was 1, most nights the house would fill with teeth. They lined the walls and studded the ceiling fans. They would come down like rain and click around my bed. In my head they built a stutter. I couldn’t feel my hands yet but there was something then also in me — something gnawing, something come undone.

When I was 2, I licked the sun some. I could spread it open with my fingers. I could tell it what I wanted. I could float further than even that.

When I was 3, the world went flattened and we couldn’t find the streets. My arms felt made of tissue. Words woke up inside my head. I would speak them as if I meant to speak them — as if they’d always been all mine — sometimes their grain would cut my stomach — I felt I did not need the stomach — I felt OK.