Blake Butler: Sky Saw

The sky above the house began to blink — the tone surrounding as it stuttered as something again soft inside it came apart and lathered down on us in waves — old fires burning still in all the houses and phantoms fucking — the air all written full of what any evening left alone must do and always would.

Somewhere elsewhere hours or days later, she could not tell and did not think to try to, Person 1180 found herself inside a box. There held a long low light like the kind of light along a longer hallway, someone in a far room glowing with TV. Her skin was so thin that she was see-through, held inside her, her organs putty colored and dented in. Her blood curled through the corridors like tangled instruments between. There was language cut into the box above the mother’s face. She could not read. She had no idea how long she’d been inside the box, or how the box was any different from any hour held before or coming after. She could not remember her number or anything about any room. There was a rumble spinning through the flat panes. At some points, through glass, the mother saw some of the men who’d filled her up, or who she had seen inside their eyes how they had meant to. Some of the men were holding infants, and those were eating. What were they eating? Some of the men were exactly her. Each time she closed her eyes the box was still right there, its darkness burning.

Person 811 moved toward the polished wall. Tucked in the far corner there, under a small sheath of black protective plastic that burned his hand, he found a panel that instead of showing outward, opened in. Through the panel, he could see a bulging naked woman standing in another house. She was pretty, he thought, beyond the lesions. She was …

Person 811 stood with one hand spread at the glass panel over the woman, stroking with his thumb and his ring finger the raspy spread of where her body breathed. The woman’s eyes were closed and kept on closing — innumerable lids. Her gut was stacking up at each new instant with fat in fat like pyramids. An ageless dark rouged through her shape tracing her veins. His tips ached where he could not remember before that he’d touched her, and not the other way around. Other men before him had left their mark there on the glass from the same rubbing, though the father could not smell them or defer — he could only taste the itch of it.

Against the screen he laid his head and heard the shrieking.

Before I was born inside the mother I slept inside the wound for 37 years

There was a spot between the gloss and sill where I would settle in and suck the dust

My mother’s hull had many doors wedged in her knees and neck, her belly

You could slit the locks with one wet thought

I could not count the other women hid among the mother though they filled me turn by turn with sight

For a while I was the women too: I had husbands, blisters, monthly blood of those I had not nurtured

I had bumps all across my scalp, one for each of whom I’d wanted or would awake in wanting soon

I was the child

I as well often was the mother and the father, though they did not have my hands

Nor did I want what hands I had been given

When I slept I dreamt only ever of the Cone

The years went on like that for years

Sometimes what a year was would change in midst of counting

A month would pass and it’d been a week

An hour did it’s thing and it’d been twenty

The space of air outside my mother often filled with dogs

Or it would fill with larvae or with flowers

Some days other men or sounds of men

Inch by inch I watched the years that were not years sludge along under motor oil and ash

What white of wide machines among me scratching rooms and windows into all my eyes

Our hole of god

I heard the evenings counting down

What had been and always be had not yet happened

Inside the house my mother hung long reams of paper, which rats would rip down to use for dens

There were the walls we had repainted

One fresh coat for every layer of our flesh

For weeks while we were sleeping the skin would become costumes, helmets, rings on fingers, fat sacs, gloves and gowns, by lengths destroyed, unveiled

In these guises we would walk around and feel the world

Inside the fold I learned to read by staring at an afghan my mother’s mother hemmed from old clothes in her rivulets of sweat

The grunt of something peeling

Dadmeat

Money

I was already very old

I learned to write by pinching gristle in the cortex of my face to kill the instant as it happened

For each face I held for hours some nights there were several other faces I would feel behind the one I knew is mine

I did an eating in me

I shat me out again

I made out of my shit another chest

I made my skull inside the mother

I called it me

Then I forgot

I learned to read again the new tongues by counting money where it was placed against our frame

We were laid upon white tables

My mom and I and anybody else at all I had not ruined

I learned to laugh by buying land

The land outside my forming body was named by hours full of light

I loved this light’s age, from this distance

I did not need another way

I had just only pieced together my cerebrum and the gorehouses of my wanting one night when in the blood someone reached and took me by my arm

My joint slipped from its socket

The arm inside my arm went numb

Among me on the air my mother screamed as if she’d hit her head against some low ceiling

As if what was coming out was not how she’d expected or intended

And what was all this white foam

Why the putty on her nostrils

In the color of the Cone

It had always been this way already

I did not want to come out of her either

I was miles long and so was she

I knew all of what had been done in the Cone’s name and in my name by me and all the other men, where a man is also any woman, any summer, any inch

I did not want to see the me who I’d already been always awaiting

What one of me I’d let touch and rub my buttons in the middle of my grossness

I tried to use my nails, full grown already, to claw my way back to where I’d hid

Her soft tunnels streaked with rip and all those rooms there

It did not work

At least at last I left my itch imprinted on her insides, a gluey stamp on our last life

When I came out fully finally I found my mother held inside an axis above the floor

Her gut still hung fat once I had emerged as with me in it

All the bruises on her face

We did not touch

There was an air there cogitating

It is like this even now

Even now, I mean, there is still something here about the gleam about me I do not like

And still again

One thing about my birthing fingers is they came equipped with rings

No gems, just bands of plastic

When I make them spin they burn

My veins bulged as if hiding something solid in them

Look out the window

Who is there

Who is it inside me I can’t quite feel

As when my mother eats a sandwich — no bread no butter — dust

I can’t keep myself from snatching at it, after more growth

I can’t restrain the tremor in my life

My even longer nails now making marks to match the ones set inside her

Sets in sets of parallels unsized

My mother in the evenings walks room to room with her eyes closed, a necklace painted on her neck, a blistered dictionary

This house runs in all directions from itself

I can feel the walls tug in the kitchen, all air so stung with thinking, neon white

The night cut brighter now than wherever you are