Sky Saw

by Butler, Blake

  I have not in some time eaten dinner or laughed a little

  Hang on, there’s someone else that wants to talk

  Hi

  I am the child inside the child

  I have another child inside me

  That child has another child inside that child with another child inside it also

  I also am the mother and the father also and I also am the child around my child and etc.

  I’m exactly like the Cone but very different

  Like you but different

  So

  So inside one of all these children, in their lining, the lining of the lining, there is a cyst

  The cyst is made of cells of skins of other bodies in other years before my mind before I died

  Before all of anyone forever

  Inside the cyst there is a tumor & inside the tumor there is a clasp

  The clasp will scream and rattle when you touch it—it is yours too—it speaks a voice of many men

  The men are hungry, as you are hungry

  Do not be afraid

  Undo the clasp

  The fold will open

  Blood will be singing in the tone

  The sun inside the sun will bow

  Fold your arms into a gesture you remember

  Move into the fold

  The manner of your movement once in the there again depends on several factors I don’t have the compassion to explain

  Regardless, you will enter, and you will see the day

  You will begin

  Inside the fold locate the fold again

  This other fold can open also

  Move into this fold, too, when you find it

  If you find it

  And I believe you will

  Though you are relatively young

  And this might go on for many hours, or even winters

  Ages of dead sun

  By now you will feel a great exhaustion

  Something screaming in your wads for our life

  Inside the fold inside the fold you will see someone is waiting

  Many of us

  Endless people without their face

  People you held known once, all of them stuttered

  Soon there will be more

  Person 811 had gone so far into the fold of other air now he could see no way going back. He remembered the mirrored room and all the buzzing. He remembered putting his head one certain way against one mirror, in which his face there reddened, and then grew—the distance between him and himself there coming closer—what was this looming—and how as he came to touch his head against the mirror, he’d moved his eyes straight through his eyes. He even remembered the hot compressed feeling like something punched to tattoo flesh that seemed to metastasize all through his body each time while inside his eyes he blinked him through.

  What he did not remember was how he’d lost his way. From the mirrored room he’d come into a color: unprismatic, globbing, old. As he’d moved forward, sideways or simply down, the color seemed to change. When the room went hyper-red the air was liquid and he had to swim to save his breath. He’d slashed his thin arms through the lukewarm potion. He’d kicked until he found a wall—a flat clear wall that spread in all directions.

  Through the wall he saw a child—someone standing just outside the plastic skewed with eyes large as fifty fathers—eyes that grew into other space—rooms where he could see people he knew and had known, growing, eating, making fuck. He felt his body try to shout out through the pane to make it open, to thread himself into this once familiar air, but then the holes making the child’s eyes had blinked and fleshed in and moved away. In the place his voice had been inside him, then the water moved to fill his skin. The father felt caverns crumple in him. He felt his lungs expand. As he gasped the slipping liquid he found himself lodged in creamy whir—the blue of blues set ringed in more eyes—he felt them itch. The eyes were looking at a fire. A horrid burning, miles and miles, clot and cinder sticking to his wetness. He felt some massive eyelash cragged at his slits, his him in he here. The eye flipped shut and again open.

  BLINK

  The sound the blinking made inside him came like someone sawing on the air, like metal melting into metal—though on the outside of his body, had someone been there who could hear it, it sounded like no sound.

  The color changed again—his person with it. He spun around. There were all these versions of him crowded around, as far as he could see, some slouched, some sick or burning. They were all looking straight on into his mind, teeming hard for clear transparence in the ways he had seen himself become, ways in.

  He put his hands over his face and screamed for someone to come swimming up into himself and make him move, to fill his body with fresh flesh.

  BLINK

  He appeared inside a barking dog—this was the dog he’d heard out his house for every year he lived, every year, no matter which house, the same barking, the same evenings. In the dog he moved through its body as its barking, moved out of himself to hover over the dog’s skin, where he could see through saw not far-off window his own body sitting there inside the light, and just as his body began turning to look at him, his twin eyes spinning, He (in the barking) turned back to air and became inhaled into the same dog body once again.

  BLINK

  He burned inside the cracking meat on the black pan hot as some summer—a summer made of sound, in which the whole world had took to spinning faster, throwing bodies off it into no light—in the meat his body began releasing liquids he had had once imagined gone forever—sweat and shit and spittle, semen, tears—and with these his flesh was basted, charring his flesh into new flesh, into flesh he could not recognize himself in, though he could smell the frying of his panic, and he could sense the searing down into him of what he had been, and what he’d wanted to be, what he’d done. The blackened body was then eaten, administered into another body, flooded through a bloodstream, through certain organs, which transferred his person into heat—as heat he vibrated in vocal cords of the voice the body carried, which sounded like his own fully, he heard himself saying his name—

  BLINK

  He appeared in the background flat of a famous painting on a wall in room inside a mall somewhere now mostly buried under earth, buried and still there, the blood of all the past and future shoppers holding him in its pigments waiting to be painted in or painted over there again.

  BLINK

  Nothing.

  He was so soft.

  BLINK

  Hundreds of thousands of bodies copulating in piles of flour, candy, cash, grinding rinds and stumps of self against the next couple in the series splayed unwinding on a mask of sand and dirt spread wider than his eye could manage, there at their center, bellies bulging, and above them all at once, the shrieking field.

  BLINK

  He appeared in a billion forms of glass—in mason jars slick with men’s spit, standing over the father’s childhood bed as he lay sleeping—in the carved décor of some crushed carousel, its cracked crank music dead and waiting—in compacted eons of old light—glass in telescopic rifle lenses used to kill—glass in someone’s window flat and breathing, through which the person on the other side could not see. Each inch of glass refracted other of him into fifty and into each of those again, splitting hard down through his centers, and his centers’ centers, and the mink of days becoming something held. A hard rub in the teething. Him growing young

  BLINK

  BLINK

  BLINK

  In the blinking between blinking there was so much he could not count—so many small minutes, hours, he had taken in unknown, collared through his meat. Cold hours came on rolling.

  BLINK

  He washed up on a white sea where years before he’d taken his wife to dine in a high restaurant where the food was mostly grease. He’d spent so much money that evening so that they might remember one another in this way. They said into each other’s faces reams of quite specific words. They’d held their fingers into
signing poses. There were other people in the room. The mouths made sounds of spasms. The skin of sky above their heads was bending down. Then upon the sea again, without color, he fell out of himself to no remains. Instead, there on the black shore, was another dog, the same dog, though this dog now had no legs. The beach seemed turning unhorizontal. The dog rolled and grunted at him, tried to find a way to grunt himself along the sand. He watched the dog inch away from him, the water washing in over their heads.

  BLINK

  Someone was tinking on the glass.

  A cold eye rummaged in his sternum.

  Blowholes.

  BLINK

  He reappeared inside the house there with his wife—Person 1180—he recognized her—she did not know—he was just behind her, back to back, so that neither could quite see with eyes the form they felt—though they were touching—there was some kind of light flexed through his body—ah—a light went off and on again then—when she turned around he was not there.

  Who was that? he shouted into the air around him, fraught with black laughing, though where the words were there was sand, and each grain of the sand was him repeating each word we’d ever found, strings of syllables crammed between the Cone and its unending ending, the coming instant at which the words would close and there would be no more said beyond the blinking in the blinking in the blinking in the blinking in the…

  BLINK

  The father threw up in his hands.

  In the throw up, had he looked there, he would have found a map of all of where he’d been, but there was so much other crud covering it over, so much hair and wet and dark black eggs.

  Back in the house, Person 1180 appeared coiled on the carpet flexed and stuffed. She did not realize she’d been gone for several days—days which in the house did not last so long—in which a league of moths had stuffed down the chimney and now were building more space in their sleep—in which someone had come to the door and knocked and knocked and buzzed the bell in patterns and begged and cried into the keyhole.

  In her absence 1180 found the light the house held had brightened by degrees. She could see soil and crap and crystalline things crawling off in corners of the room she’d never noticed rounding out the space—new indentations in the hull. She felt years younger and a little dizzy. Her belly bulged larger than she remembered it’d last been. She was naked and had not been naked as she last recalled. She had been wearing a long blue gown as big as the whole house, stuffed all throughout it. There was something else inside her now. She pinched her chub and felt a lurch along the lining, murmuring like shafts. Her gush caked on her neck all full of speech.

  She took turns sitting in the seven chairs around the kitchen table looking for the one that held her well, the one that made her sit straight. Having found the perfect chair at last some evenings later she did not sleep or close her eyes. She held her smile. Inside her head she made calls to every old phone numbers she could still remember and breathed into every silent, paused machine.

  The mother could hear the baby screeching from upstairs as the tone’s latest long stroke dissolved around her. She kept trying to run to help her son but instead she felt her body going backwards. Several times she ran into the kitchen’s plate glass window, through which a mob of pure white dogs had gathered and were milking up a lather. She popped one of the panes out with her elbow on accident and immediately the dogs flew lapping at the fracture. On their breath she smelled her own breath but interlaced with blood. The child’s voice bruised the inner layer of the mother’s head. She closed her eyes.

  She had to imagine she was moving the wrong way to make herself go toward the child.

  Upstairs she found the baby had stretched and fattened, its belly bulged as if also pregnant, the skin stretched on its head an unlit bulb. Several birds had convened around the child and were pecking at his flesh—the same white birds from the stairwell, made of language, though she could no longer remember from where they’d come. She had no idea how birds had gotten inside the house and upstairs to the child as the nursery’s doors were locked, the windows held unshattered, sealed, the air vents blocked with grate and wire. From small holes in the birds a shrieking waffled in the white webbing of their muscle and their lard.

  She grabbed the axe Person 811 had hung over the bedside—their boy would be a fireperson someday, he swore—when the fire station opened up again—if it opened—it would—it would open—there always would be fire. She chopped and ripped among the air. She squawked back at the birds in their same voices, surprised at how authentic she could sound. She chased them out into the hallway. Their wings knocked divots on the walls. They shit behind themselves in long leagues, streaking wet white mountains into the mother’s hair that caught loose feathers like a skin. The stink made the mother see double, then double double, like a lyric. The room began unveiling. There were so many birds inside the house and always had been.

  She swung and swung the axe at all the air there hitting nothing. She threw it down and used her free arms then to scoop the birds down into her from the air, to press in clumps the thrumming meat against her thick chest, the milk inside her turning hard—the birds spreading out around the rind of her now from the outside speaking in.

  The mother returned some hours later to the bedroom to find the child grown even larger, heavy white. He’d sat up on the fat crib mattress, fresh with bloodburst. As she rushed forward in the room to smooth and touch him, the child moved his hands across his face as if to hide, but really hide—not the gamey crap-move the mother and her boy had not yet had the chance to play in fun, but truly, to make as if he wished he were not there—as if now he mistook the mother as well for one of the long, winged things that had come at him—as if there were some other place he could move into beyond the room behind his skin. She prayed into the child’s ears in the book’s language. She kissed his lips and called him son.

  She fed the baby frozen cream. He could not keep it down. He puked and puked it. She tried and tried and the baby’s eyes just went on caught with old spin. She wiped the child’s suddenly enormous forehead. In the child’s eyes she could see something moving even when the air between them blurred.

  Person 1180 carried the dish of regurgitated milk spew into the kitchen and stood with it there before the window. Having come up from the child, the chocolate sheen had turned a little moldy. My growing baby, she heard herself think. She stirred the sputum with her finger, felt something rising.

  She couldn’t crush her urge. She ate the pukey ice cream and felt it slide inside her. She threw it up again. She ate it down and threw it up again. She ate it down and threw it up again. Each time the color changed what it came back out as. Each time going in it had new flavor. She had been to college once. She’d kissed a man she’d seen on the TV. She put the ice cream inside the microwave and watched it melt in sputtered waves, watched it evaporate, become dust. Now the room felt very small.

  In the child’s head his cells were spinning—his pupils wide with what inside or outside him must arrive.

  Through the evening the mother slept hugging her chest. The child had stretched so much in several hours he fit a full man’s shape exactly. She’d tried to coddle the child, breastfeed him full of her again there through his now large mouth, but he refused to stay in bed. He still smelled like the birds. He paced the rooms downstairs and smoked long curls of his own hair—he ate the melting crap plastered behind the peeling wallpaper, his stomach snarled—he sometimes would walk along and on into the wall still there as if unseeing where the house had ended and he was held. The warts and ulcers already broiling up from his sternum would seize and pop in little rhythms.

  1180 felt afraid. She saw an age reflected in the full-sized infant’s eyes—hardly infant’s now—were they?—she could not relay contact. She did not know what had come into the son to make the scaffold of his creature.

  From some short distance, she would have surely mistaken him for 811—sometimes she did regardless—her body someti
mes burned. Through long afternoons she locked her door and stayed in the bed watching the ceiling—waiting that it might crack open and offer her a way. She licked the pictures taken of her and the gone man gushing together before the son, in that old air, then, and she stuck them to her body that they might sink in and reconvene.

  Through the vents and at the door crack she heard the child moving through the house. In his sudden, swollen body he’d grown violent. She heard him screeching into nothing, throwing chairs or cracking glass, and when the tones came—much louder now, more frequent—the son howled in texture harmonizing. In other silence, she heard him speak in his new gouging voice. The words bulged in strange syntax, like the book and birds and something other, a shape contained by false edges, beyond air. She could feel certain of her son’s words grow large and move to bang against the air around her, as if with arms. So much speech coming out of the child’s holes—words he’d be meant to distribute over time, which now needed catching up and phrasing. The house’s oxygen strained and clung. The syllables and slurring shook the small walls as 2030’s tongue and lips grew more and more into their own shape. Not knowing what they knew there, but speaking nonetheless.