Scorch Atlas

by Blake Butler

  - Quite. Well, you enjoy. (moves past the bed into the bathroom; sound of rummaging through drawers)

  - What’s going on?

  - I’m looking for my lighter. You’ll forget me in a minute.

  - Your lighter? You bought cigarettes?

  - I didn’t.

  - Give me one.

  - I said I didn’t buy any cigarettes.

  - Then why the lighter?

  - (long pause) It was Dad’s. I want to hold it. I need something. You’re not you.

  - You expect me to believe that? Why not just say it? I’m not what?

  - (slick metal sounds of an old hinge clicking) Here it is. (closes the drawer; moves through the bedroom back to the door again; glares at the bed) Night.

  - What’s the black crap you’ve got all over you? ___?

  - (door opens and door closes)

  - (does not say goodnight)

  Her left hand’s thumb flicked the metal wheel that ground and spit a flame into the nothing—the yellow neon tremble of fluid burning—the shimmer of incendiary air suffused with fume. The mother’s hand trembled just slightly. She’d always had small fingers, good for sewing, good for cleaning out one’s ears.

  The metal lighter really had belonged once to her father; in fact, he’d meant to take it with him. Eight years old, there, at the coffin, she’d slipped her hand into the gone man’s pockets, not understanding, maybe after money, maybe scent, the teeth, some something to remember. The lifeless head’s lips grinned—he could feel her rummaging around him, tickled. She’d found the lighter there over his heart, soft-brushed and gleaming, full of fluid. No one was looking. She’d hid it in her best dress, cold against her skin. The lighter was always cold.

  Sometimes now, thirty years later, she still felt the soft slur of something strumming when she smoked, as if it were her father’s smoky dead breath that ballooned behind her cheeks. She couldn’t even remember how he died.

  The mother held the lighted lighter in her son’s room again, inhaling the scum of the blackened walls with the tobacco smoke, the outlined spot on the floor where once there’d been a bed, where once on that bed she’d sat reading the child stories till he was old enough to read them back, cut from her voice.

  The mother took the lighter to the window. She went to press her face against the glass, to butt it hard and feel the impact, then remembered how the glass was no longer there—how it’d been cracked by heat or kicked out by men in flame-retardant coats to let water through. She felt her head go on out into the evening, into the cupped light overhead. There was no moon or streetlamps glowing, no trees still lit up in tall torches as when the backyard had caught ignition. Just long black and stagnant fields of air, the wind settled, calm again, under glass.

  The mother felt the lighter’s metal getting warm. She kept her fingers close against it. She sniffed the air inside the room that’d burned her son. She leaned against the window’s empty frame, the air so arid she could smell its quiver, a flux between here and there, surrounded.

  That night, instead of burning, the first rain in many months and miles poured on the night. The water poured as something above had come undone, a full urn busted and expulsing. It graced the nearby empty creek beds and the dead lawns, the ratty sprats of trampled fields. It pocked the long face of so much dried mud, in which so many other things were buried. It slicked the roofs from which now many had jumped, or dreamt it, or wished they really would.

  The rain did not announce itself. It came.

  It came through the open skylight window and drummed the father, who hadn’t slept yet but still had dreams: of a warm house he’d envisioned somewhere. He let the water spot his forehead, soak the pillow. He lay blinkless and unmoving while it glossed his cracked lips and tongue. He drank. He drank—and then he sat up, sat on the mattress and thought of words he’d never thought before.

  The water found the daughter in her bedroom, inside the swelling house, the old cells bumping, crimping the indenture of the closet where piled neck-deep with old clothes she’d begun to rise off of the floor.

  The water filtered through the dead son. It soaked through the warped lid of his casket—through his desiccating skin into his bones and through his dry veins. It filled the soil with mumble as from insects, as the stirrings of the house.

  It drenched the mother in her nightgown, through the already flooded gutters in the street. From nowhere and everywhere at once. It washed the soot clean from the mother’s cheeks. It slapped her hair and drenched the ashes. It ran in forked ways down her scratched skin—speaking—that this rain is some beginning—that this rain might never cease.

  GRAVEL

  The day the sky rained gravel I watched it drum my father’s car. A Corvette he’d spent years rebuilding. He liked to watch his face gleam in the hood. He kissed the key before ignition. He read the owner’s manual aloud. When he lost the strength to stand he left the car uncovered in the street. Each morning I took a Polaroid and we tacked it to his headboard—a panorama of slow ruin. After four years, the car’s wear matched the sallow skin of his sick head. He had me bring the smell of the old leather to him in plastic bags. He’d always said something was coming. He’d always said the world had no idea. Imagine him in bed on that gray day. Imagine him wishing he could drive at 80 through the downpour down to where the tide had begun to expel foam. Where the whales washed up half-rotten, their huge, soft heads brained by the hailing stone. The gravel piled up on the front lawn, covering the pets we’d already buried, one each year. I’d never been good at keeping things alive. On my own headboard I cut notches. The Corvette’s paint came off in yellow divots, my father’s hair loose on the pillow. His teeth were weak. He sucked a bottle. Soon the car’s roof caved. Imagine my father’s baby chipped to bits. Shit falling out of orbit. The scream of others down the street. Imagine the soapy loam covering the beach sand where for years he and I had fried. Where with our skin still raw and itching we’d fit our church clothes over our swimsuits. If I’d listened, in those soft days, I would have taken other pictures to show my children (the children I’ll never have). I’d flip through the photo album backwards and watch my father’s head grow full again—and me smaller, brighter eyed, head shook clean of later days. Imagine the endless pummel of our sore home. The sound of the bigger buildings bowing. How my father insisted I help him to the kitchen so he could see out to the street—where the car sat six feet under, smothered. The stink of the ocean through the glass. Imagine us there together. Imagine the billow of his eye. Imagine the way the hail slowed to let the sun through before it really started coming down.

  DAMAGE CLAIM QUESTIONNAIRE

  WHERE WERE YOU THAT EVENING?

  —My hair was six feet long. I sat wrapped inside it in the kitchen—a gown of deceased cells. Outside the kids from next door beat the house and brayed. Days before, I’d watched their father swan dive from their roof onto the lawn. Their father, the electrician, with the tumor on his cheek. Such grace as he held his hands together and aimed straight for the dirt—he knew already what was coming—he’d sensed the ruining air. Now his boys needed me for feeding; to comb the gnats out of their lashes. But I was so done in already. Even then I lacked most all.

  WHAT WAS HUMMING?

  —I still taste the songs I gave my baby. You could read his features through my casing. I coughed rheumy refrain between my soft teeth, my voice cragged as my dad’s had through years consuming Red Man and Listerine. He never spat. My eyes bugged with the brush of tongue to palate as I struggled with each note. To sing above the sound of outside. The insects make the most. You think you’d learn to overlook the flutter. The curdle of wallpaper. Ever smash a roach bug with a dictionary? Sometimes you hear them scream. A lady screams much different. I grew up in the South. My headache bred from years of scummy water and inhaled dust. The years of home a house holds aren’t in wood so much as air.

  HOW LONG HAVE YOU OWNED YOUR HOME?

  —Rick and I ate breakfast every
morning for seven years without a blank. He made shrimp and grits with bacon and honey crumpets with black jam. They say O.J. is full of larvae but we drank it in great gulps. Sometimes still I feel them blooming in my throat. Rick would read out loud from the Bible with his mouth full of the grease. He used plastic forks for fear of electrocution. His gold-capped teeth would buzz. At night we slept back to back, kissing vertebrae, interlocked. You couldn’t convince me we’d but spent one life together. You couldn’t say he didn’t love our son, though he left while I was still engorged—a minor heartbeat matching mine; and the drumbeat of my abdomen as our small boy kicked and kicked, in want to puncture his poor mother’s waistline and emerge in time to watch the squall.

  LIST THE ESTIMATED VALUE OF DAMAGE.

  —Twin storm fences, wrecked. Top grade sod, uplifted. The soil turned pink and sponged. Roof puckered, pocked with bird shit. Concrete driveway cracked and scattered. We had a stone angel in the courtyard that’d already lost its arm. I saw that angel fly—lifted off in clean ascension to somewhere we would not see. Swimming pool infested. Lawnmower rusted. Paint on the Chevy hailed obscene. Hardwoods in the den and guest room warped, already rotting. Plumbing pushed up through the floor. Rocking chair run off with. Mildewed carpet. Roach parade. Can we claim instances of soft disease? I’ll show you rickets, nausea, itching. I reckon we can dicker. I’ll sign my name if I can recall the way it went.

  HAVE YOU UNDERTAKEN METHODS TO PROTECT AGAINST FURTHER LOSS?

  —I often think of pastry. My joints creak when it drizzles. The windows have been painted over. I’d never kiss another man. The baby calm inside me, his kick stilled off to numb. Some evenings I walk the rows of houses and put my face against their glass, peering past the insides where some cold hours after dinner they’d sit around and stare. I found wax flowers in several kitchens and tied them through my hair. My brain is soggy. Mostly I just shed.

  CAN YOU STILL SMELL THE NIGHT?

  —Many times the sky comes open. The flap of heaven fixed there, fanning. Nothing. I’d sooner prefer sit here in the tub and run the water and watch it spill onto the tile. Thump my belly. Whisper to him. Wait for strumming. Something new. Feel my skin go older quicker, the wet running up my old folds. The smell of mold drawn in the water. Toothpaste dinner. Constant wake. My hair draped on my shoulders wet and shades darker, like a scarf. Sopping and sagging I trundle under, wondering how long it would take to prune my tired face unrecognizable.

  A JEW, A SHRINK AND AN ASSHOLE ALL WALK INTO A BAR…

  —Thanks for your well wishing. I understand the want for jokes. My throat is ripping, clogged and cracked now. My back creaks when I think. I pray into my dirt most evenings for the urge to snicker again, green. You should see what’s become of our peach trees. The bloat. The blackened axis. The bow and bending of our city buildings. Slow roll of corrosion. If I had the nerve I’d build a guitar. I’d string it with my hair, white at age twenty. I’d play in rhythm with my stomach—the new roar that’s replaced our baby’s bump. The boggy burp’s best bass. Oh, what songs we’d make together, me and my doppelganger, cheek to cheek.

  COULD YOU BE DOING SOMETHING MORE?

  —I spend my evenings these days in the kitchen. I knit new clothes for our child. I learned to knit after the death of cable TV. I use colored wires ripped from dumb machines. I would have made him bonnets. A cape. A canopy above his crib. My lips would tickle the stubble on his under-neck once he was old. Tell your mother where you’ve been. Now that he’s quiet and the skies have settled shortly, I hold my grieving in the folds of my elbows, neck and knees. The way time robs in futures pissed. Sleep-rooms in pools up to your crown. I’d have liked to think me kinder, but the neighbor—I hear his kids beg and think: coffin nails. Sometimes I know they’re not even there. That their pounding is only more of my dumb pulse.

  HOW WILL YOU REMEMBER?

  —In my loose teeth. In my knocking knees. With the stripe of morning across the yard; where the worms rise, where the earth spits up its dinner. This house grows older with me every night. How I’ll remember? In the burning. In the cloud rattle. Each time the roof thuds above me. Each time I wet my face in squirm. And there’s always all this paper—our receipts, shorthand and thank yous, birthday rhymes composed by strangers; notes and trash and mail unopened; photographs, if water-warped. Sometimes I recite my life aloud for hours. Sometimes I just don’t have the heart.

  GLASS

  The glass came first in early morning. I watched through the only safe storm window. The sound of sky come ripping—some sour music box, cranked to crack. The panes shattered on impact, each giving off a second spray. We watched the dead yards, already buried, now held under new refracted light. Glass over grave sites in display. Glass slit through awnings, billboard faces. The facemasks became more dire in the scatter, each inhale suspect, lined with slice. Glass specks embedded in our eyelids—count the new ranks of the blind. The glass came in many colors: some pure translucent, however tarnished; green and brown burst bottles; backed with silver as in mirrors; blue from Depression-era heirlooms; stained from the awe-stuck eaves of churches. The shriek of glass on glass peeled my skin. The screech of all things scorched around me. The brassy, tinkled detonation. Shards of wronged birds. Real birds impaled and writhing. Even the sun had hid its eye. We were several layers under now. We could not think of other times. We called truce and splayed our fingers. The sky would not forgive.

  WANT FOR WISH FOR NOWHERE

  My first child splurged inside me. He ate what I ate—ate it all. There never was enough: my milk, my eggs and honey, my hunks of ham and strange things craved. I picked gnats out of the carpet; chewed through the shower curtain; swallowed blood. Baby hungry. Baby want. His teeth nicked in my linings. He tore my inner-skin, his nails already long and gleaming in the manner of what I used to shave my pits.

  I would not contain him long.

  Soon my belly was my body. All my weight belonged to him. I stooped through the apartment, cords in my back clenched. I still lived alone in those days. The man who’d helped me make the baby had left to find his way into the television. Specks of skins of selves he’d been in other years still lay around me on the air; and, as such, I’d breathe him in. I pulled his long hair from the sink pipes. I swelled with child until I could not stand. Until I could not remember where I was or where I’d been, whenever. I’d find myself on the phone with no one. I’d find my fingers caked with grease and the window open, half-hung on the sill to jump.

  To keep my wits about me, I whispered to the child. Certain words called walls of color though my vision: where washed my day with yellow, ouch tickled green, tomorrow pink. Other terms caused lengthy tones to nestle in my ear, tympanic. Sometimes the ceiling would be caving. Other nights I couldn’t see.

  My hair began to fall out. My face stopped looking like my face.

  Then one night I felt something open in me. Then one night I knew: a window. A threshold gunning in my stomach. I felt several things collide.

  I crawled to the front door and out into the breezeway, where the air stung, where the porch lights had burnt away. The pods of moths still swarmed around them. You could see them strumming on the moon. The scummy husk of their glazed wing skin. The wooze. Trees had overgrown the stairs.

  I cooed, my belly bulging, my hope composed in newborn bone.

  I might have gone on alone forever.

  I’m still not sure who took me in.

  On the table, they cut me open. I observed from overhead. I watched them rip a seam straight up my middle. The curdle of my insides spread into the room—some kind of flesh-held flower. My eyes were open. My skin was white.

  The doctors supplanted my softer parts with metal. They affixed me with a mask. If there was sound, I could not hear it over the fluorescence; the churn of something in me, bruised, innate. Small raw spots clung among the corners of my phantom vision. I felt a gauze around my head. I kept pulling at it, my short breath shaking. I swam over myself.


  And from myself, from out of me, came my firstborn, came the boy.

  There he was. The him. The seedling.

  I watched him rise up from my gut.

  I watched in silence, vibrating slightly.

  I’d wanted so long for something somewhere.

  I did not expect to be called back down.

  The boy was very large. His skin was slick and bright and runny. The doctors strained to lift him out. There was squealing on the air.

  Back in my body, I saw ultraviolet. The room’s girders trembled. The gum.

  The walls folded and unfolded. I could not taste my tongue.

  The baby measured longer than a machete—his massive skull, ruined fruit. His chest and belly were splotched with something. His head of hair—blonde like Father’s—grew over his ears across his cheeks. It’d spread over his eyelids. I could see him. He could not see me.

  They took him somewhere else to clean him. I heard a whisper in my ear.

  I watched, half-spinning, while they sewed me up, a long rosebud in my gut, matching the one I had inside me. I could still feel the gap from where the boy had been. I waited for him there inside my arms.

  They did not bring him.

  They did not bring him.

  I screamed a sermon at the roof.

  I screamed for him to appear before me. For what I needed. In the itch.

  I suffered such a long stretch of expectation curdled in my yearning. The years and years of days unraveled. Everything at once seemed far away. Far and cold and small and wilting.