Scorch Atlas

by Blake Butler

  Finally I took the dirt that would have been my dinner and meshed the lips over to make the floor full flush and proper. Then the world again was hushed and far off. I began to teach myself the words I’d need when things returned: the yes and please and bless you. The ouch and why and I remember. I tried to find Dan’s voice in my head, but the sounds from outside and there in me brought a blur: the electric storms, the shaking, the bright nights, the itch, the rip. I continued to continue to try. I waited longer and the trying became a thing worn like a hairpin in my heart. Or more aptly like my fingernails—nearly an inch each by now, growing out of me some crudded yellow. In time I’d become sly and slouched enough to eat those goddamned slivers of myself. But before that I’d wish the mouth back. I’d lap the dirt and find a hole. One tiny nozzle down to nowhere, black no matter how loud into it I’d beg or bark or sing.

  In the yard now the trees were burning. Grass was burning. The sky was full of ruptured light. I stood with my face pressed against the picture window, my face obscured by the house’s bug-hung panes. I beat the door until my fists hurt. Through the vents I sniffed the ash. My stomach grappled, squealing high notes. They’d crushed my glasses. I couldn’t see. I rummaged in my purse for lint or crumbs to chew. My purse now a bag of crap—still I couldn’t let it go, this bag of who I’d been—I carried it with me waiting for some moment in which the world would blink: the cell phone towers long dead and voiceless; paper money blah; the car’s battery long excavated so the boys would have power for their TV.

  Wrapped in tissue, I found the tweezers I’d once used to tend Dan’s back. The skin across his shoulders, in those last years, had begun to grow a rind. The hairs came out blackened and endless, enough to knit a bed. In the evenings, while the boys slept, I’d had him lay down on the carpet in the foyer, and I’d straddle him as Mother, and I’d pick those damn things clean. I picked and picked and felt their popping. No matter how many came, I kept it up, while below me Dan squirmed and grumbled and said for this whole thing please to all be over.

  On the floor now I bit and winced and sucked the tweezer metal—felt something real—his taste.

  Somewhere later in some blackness I found my youngest up above me. At first it seemed he floated. His head was wet. He had black crap all around his mouth—something gunky, runny, rancid. He was breathing hard and sweating. I pulled him down and let him suck my breast and he was calmer then, designed. For several seconds he let me hold him curled in a J there on the carpet. I found his arms engraved with diagrams and runic symbols, long lines of creeping dot. His back was run with lumps and oozing. His hair matted, clogged with sore. He let me kiss him where it hurt. He let me say his name in certain ways. He let me come with him back downstairs into the kitchen, where I took ice and cleaned his face. I combed the crap out of his lashes. I put a cube inside his mouth. Through the window the backyard glowed. I heard the other boys out there chanting in some rhythm.

  The cords in Johnson’s neck pumped with flex. I could see his heartbeat, gushed and stuttered. I felt the tremor of his nostrils. He looked at me funny.

  “You’re not supposed to be out yet, Mommy,” he said, rasping. “We aren’t ready.” His eyes were glassy, boggled, flat.

  I rifled through my purse to find the photos tucked in the fake leather slits of my old wallet. I showed him a shot of us with some bald mall Santa. The fat man’s lap a wide seat for the boys, their faces unsmeared with these new days, their cheeks rose pink and full of breath. All this a month before the mall filled up with sludge and the sun went hyper-violet and the grass squirmed and the water swam inside itself. These other older days were ones I could remember. Whens to want.

  Johnson smudged a finger on the print.

  “Who is that one?” he said. He was pointing at himself.

  “That’s you, my dear, my darling,” I told him. “When you were just a tiny boy.”

  He looked confused. He pointed at the tanned and unblemished captured image of some younger husk of me.

  “Who is that one?”

  I felt my size.

  “That’s me. Your mother. Who loves you more than all. Who would give and give and give and give.”

  He took the photo from me, stumbling. His eyeballs jerked and spun. He wiped the grime from his mouth across his face. He looked at me. He was in there.

  “No,” he said. “You’re lying.”

  I told him how I’d never lie. How all I wanted was to have my boys together all around me, loving. He snorted through his nostrils. He looked into the slathered backyard with his brothers: the rash the steam the broiling. I felt the roof just slightly shift. Johnson looked at me again, something grunting, an idea hung between his lips. He kind of grinned to flash his teeth, the greening grubby things—they’d used their toothpaste on my eyes. One short, overtly hairy hand came up through the air to point.

  “Mommy?” he said. “You?”

  “Yes, yes me, my dear,” I said, breathing the moment. “My sweetest Johnson. My precious baby.”

  His whole head clouded. His soft skin bluing. He cricked his neck. He pinched his fingers deep back in his mouth, pulled something out, and ate it. He shook his head horrendous.

  “Not a baby,” he said. “I am fire. I know who you are now. I can smell everywhere you’ve been.”

  He reached and dug his nails into my arm. My blood bubbled in splotches. Johnson’s tongue was white. I felt something seeping sink all through me as he pulled me hard toward the back door, through the smudgy glass of which I could see now shapes moving in and at the light. Several massive crosses propped erect and glowing, crowed beneath the sky that seemed to open. What wasn’t burning lurched with insect, the grass and limbs and hills and neighbors’ houses washed in crease. The air itself was sweat. This was what had happened.

  I ripped my arm away from my youngest and fell back onto the cracking kitchen floor. I skittered to stand up as he watched me, still holding the photo crumpled in his hand. His eyes burst veined and raw. The smear of his etchings and bruises seemed to form a pattern. He shrieked out for his brothers. His tone was crystal, wounded as we were. The house around us shuddered

  I turned from my son.

  I ran out through the kitchen’s side door into the garage. My stomach swished, my knees gone goofy. The night was wrecked and drooping. The air was eaten through with smear holes. Large patches of blue mold hung on the burped crust of the moon—the moon that in recent months had grown smaller, sucked away by something much larger snuck behind it. The air was hot and made me sneeze. My blood. My blood. I ran into the forest half-blinded, thumbed by branches that made long scratches on my skin. I could hear the boys behind me. They whooped, calling out my maiden name. They put inflection in their voices to make it sound in trouble, hurt, causing a receding part of me to stir. I plugged my ears and thought of elsewhere. I thought of wrapping my arms around a younger Dan, my heart wet and drumming through my shirt.

  I ran until I couldn’t see.

  I ran until my brain was lather.

  I ran until I felt the bottom fall out of me, drumming, and tumbled facedown on the earth.

  Somewhere in the dead grass between the sanitation yard that’d once been a school lot and the rotten playground where Dan and I used to bring them through several summers, I knew I could not go on. I fell and scuffed my soft hands and rolled around with dirt. In this new dirt I still could not find the mouth—what had I become? My skin had opened up in several places, the center of me oozed. The smoke from our small house plumed in odd tufts on the horizon.

  I waited for the boys.

  I waited that they’d catch up and lift my body, carry me on their young backs to our home. To the small house where they’d grown up. Where I’d loved them and they’d eaten and we’d breathed. Such air we’d had together. The night was sticky. I was cold. Blood gushed down my forearms. Something throbbing at my forehead from all directions. All I could see was straight above me. Above and on and on and into nothing. I felt dumb
for having run. I felt weird warmth brimming in my eyes. My gone eyes. My warbled wanting. My boys needed me to feed. They needed something like the rest of us. They’d had no great chance to change. Such long, bombed days of wait and television. Such backward years; such years to come. I would get up in a moment. I’d go to them and say their names. I’d fill their mouths and kiss their earlobes. The days would wash. The boys would listen. The sky would come uncombed and gleaming. I could sense it. I could seem.

  STATIC

  The earth had learned to scratch its back. In massive columns same as what we’d seen on TV during our worse storms, stretched check-pattern, warbled spatter. As well, the sound of a billion needles wheedling, tearing their tips against the grain. Sometimes I could hear laugh tracks buried under the floorboards, wedged deep under the sod. Somewhere down there was my father. His knuckled rapped against the beams. I began to feel everything inside me at once humming. I felt my organs hiss alive: the static replicated in me. When my mouth opened, it came out. The vibration cracked my mirrors. It split the foundations of my soft skull. It made me giggle just a bit. I couldn’t keep a hold on as through the windows I saw the wide scrim that for years had nestled me into sleep—the gray/ white/black transmission from gone channels, wavelengths no one had thought to walk.

  THE GOWN FROM MOTHER’S STOMACH

  The mother ate thread and lace for four weeks so that her daughter would have a gown. She was tired of not being able to provide her daughter with the things many other girls took for granted. Their family was poor and the mother’s fingers ached with arthritis so she couldn’t bring herself to sew. Instead she chewed the bed sheets until they were soft enough to swallow. She bit the curtains and gnawed the pillow. With one wet finger she swiped the floor for dust. God will knit it in my womb like he did you, she murmured. When you wear it you will blind the world. She refused to listen to reason. She ate toilet tissue and sheets of paper and took medication that made her constipated. She stayed in bed instead of sitting for dinner. Carrots don’t make a dress, she croaked. Her stomach grew distended. She began having trouble standing up. Her hair fell out and she ate that too. She ripped the mattress and munched the down. She ate the clothing off her body. The father was always gone. He worked day and night to keep food the mother wasn’t eating on the table. When he did get home he was too tired to entertain the daughter’s pleas to make the mother stop. Such a tease, that woman, he said in his sleep, already gone. Such a card. Because her mother could no longer walk, the daughter spent the evenings by the bedside listening to rambles. The mother told about the time she’d seen a bear. A bear the size of several men, she said. There in the woods behind our house, when I was still a girl like you. The mother had stood in wonder watching while the bear ate a whole deer. It ate the deer’s cheeks, its eyes, its tongue, its pelt. It ate everything but the antlers. The mother had waited for the bear to leave so she could take the antlers home and wear them, but the bear had just gone on laying, stuffed, smothered in blood. The mother swore then—her eyes grew massive in the telling—the bear had spoken. It’d looked right at the mother’ and said, quite casual, My god, I was hungry. Its voice was gorgeous, deep and groaning. The mother could hardly move. I didn’t know bears could talk, she said finally, and the bear had said, Of course we can. It’s just that no one ever takes the time to hear. We are old and we are lonely and we have dreams you can’t imagine. Over the next six days the mother continued growing larger. Her eyes began to change. Her belly swelled to six times its normal size. Dark patchwork showed through her skin. Strange ridges on her abdomen in maps. Finally the daughter called a doctor. He came and looked and locked the door behind him. Through the wood the daughter could hear her mother moan. A wailing shook the walls. Some kind of grunt or bubble. The doctor emerged with bloody hands. He was sweating, sickly pale. He left without a bill. In the bedroom, the air stunk sweet with rotten melon. The gown lay draped over the footboard. It was soft and glistening, full of color—blue like the afghan that covered her parents’ bed—white like the spider’s webs hung from the ceiling—gray and orange like their two fat tabbies—green like the pine needles past the window—yellow and crimson like how the sun rose—gold like her mother’s blinkless eyes.

  The daughter wore the gown thereafter. It fit her every inch. It sung in certain lighting. She liked to suck the cuff against her tongue. There was a sour taste, a crackle. She could hear her mother murmur when she lay a certain way. The father, fraught by what he’d lost unknowing, began staying home all day. He stood in the kitchen and ate food for hours. He ate while crying, mad or mesmerized. He didn’t answer when the daughter spoke. Sometimes he shook or nodded, but mostly he just chewed. Most days the daughter took to walking as far from the house as she could manage. The gown made her want to breathe new air. She’d go until her feet hurt or until the sun went low. When it rained the gown absorbed the water. It guzzled her secret sweat. She got up earlier, patrolled. She wanted to see something like her mother had, like the bear, so that one day she’d have a story for a daughter. She saw many things that you or I would gape at—two-headed cattle, lakes of insect, larvae falling from the sky—all things to her now everyday. The earth was very tired. The daughter found nothing like a talking bear. She wondered if her mother had been lying or smeared with fever. At school the other children threw sharp rocks. They ripped the daughter’s gown and held their noses. The daughter quit her classes. She walked until her feet bled. Her father didn’t notice. Like the mother, he took on size. His jowls hung fat in ruined balloons. He called for the mother over mouthfuls. Her name was SARAH. The way it came out sounded like HELLO. The daughter couldn’t watch her father do the same thing her mother had. She decided to go on a long walk—longer than any other. She touched her father on the forehead and said goodbye. She walked up the long hill in her backyard where in winter she had sledded. It hadn’t been cold enough for snow in a long time but she could still remember the way her teeth rattled. She remembered losing the feeling in her body. Now every day was so warm. She swore she’d sweat an ocean. She walked through the forest well beyond dark. The gown buzzed in her ears. It buzzed louder the further from home she went. She kept going. She slept in nettles. She dreamt of sitting with her parents drinking tea and listening to her tell about all the things she would soon see. She dreamt of reversing time to watch her parents grow thinner, younger, while the earth grew new and clean. She walked by whim. She tread through water. She saw a thousand birds, saw lightning write the sky, the birds falling out in showers. The world was waning. The sky was chalk. She felt older every hour. She had no idea she’d come full circle to her backyard when she found the bear standing at a tree. It was huge, the way her mother had said, the size of several men. It was reaching after leaves. It sat up when it heard her. It looked into her eyes. Hello, bear, she said, rasping. It’s nice to finally meet you. The bear stood up and moved toward her, its long black claws big as her head. The collar of her dress had pulled so tight she found it hard to speak: What do you dream, bear? I will listen. She didn’t flinch as the bear came near and put its paw upon her head. It battered at her and she giggled. It pulled her to its chest. She didn’t feel her head pop open. She didn’t feel her heart squeeze wide. The bear dissembled her in pieces. The bear ate the entire girl. It ate her hair, her nails, her shoes and bonnet. It ate the gown and ate her eyes. Inside the bear the daughter could still see clearly. The bear’s teeth were mottled yellow. Inside its stomach, abalone pink. The color of the daughter became something soft—then something off, then something fuzzy, then something like the gown, immensely hued; then she became a strange fluorescence and she exited the bear—she spread across the wrecked earth and refracted through the ocean to split the sky: a neon ceiling over all things, a shade of something new, unnamed.

  TEETH

  I felt it formed in chatter: voices borne in the enamel. The sky sent teeth from cougar, leopard, shark, snake, kitten, cow, human, bear, dog, alligator, crocodile, deer, rod
ent, camel, zebra, turtle, rabbit, horse, and wolf. And bigger things we hadn’t quite imagined, teeth that wouldn’t fit inside a car. The massive incisors bashed through buildings. They impaled people huddled in their dens. They clipped the ground and erupted waist-deep craters large enough in which one could lie down. In the light you could hardly stand to look for all the glinting, the masked back-rattle. You couldn’t step without incision. The aching stretched our gums. I told the young ones how some new fairy had dropped her payload in mid-flight. The children wouldn’t wink. At this point we’d lost ways of sentiment. Overhead there hung a thing that seemed to want us nowhere. I couldn’t help but want to stay under. I couldn’t remember anyone I’d ever met. The names of people once relations hid chipped, minor abrasions into my brain. I’d had a mother, I knew, and someone besides her. I’d had people who would talk. But these days were so overloaded, so crusted over and back-bent, I didn’t know what else to speak of when I spoke into the brusque remainder of my household, into the crooks that hadn’t yet been demolished. I touched my own teeth with my soft tongue and wondered how long before they’d be the ones that rained down and ripped us open.

  SEABED

  Randall had a head the size of several persons’ heads—a vast seething bulb with rotten hair that shined under certain light. Several summers back he’d driven to a bigger city where smarter men removed a hunk out of his skull. They’d said the cyst grew from the wires hung above the house. Randall’s son hadn’t ended up so well off. The crap ate through the kid’s whole cerebrum. Radiation. Scrambled cells. One had to be mindful of these things in these days, the doctors said. Now, though, with the woman gone and the baby dead, Randall kept on living in that old house with the mold curtains where his guilt breathed in the walls. He lugged the kid’s tricycle all over, the handlebars shrieking with rust on account of how he even brought it in the bath.