by Blake Butler
This is a rowboat, long abandoned, rotten, mired in stagnant water.
This is the steeple, still uncovered—the high mark of the flood’s thread. Remember the copper swallow of communion, the tab pressed against the tongue. Remember trying to imagine how my father could stand the burn of every evening; how his throat must have been mottled from all he’d poured through there, I imagined. How he’d seen me come home through the front door in my Sunday suit and spat.
Imagine the ocean approaching overhead. Imagine waking up under dripping ceiling. The puddle plodding on the carpet, the water already having filled mostly up the stairs. My parents’ bedroom on the first floor. The coughing swallowed, calm. Remember my mother’s wet head in the bedroom, a hundred thousand thin blonde protein fingers spreading out as I swam down to kiss her face.
This is a quiet evening.
This—I’m not quite sure.
Imagine nowhere. Imagine nothing. A world all swollen and asleep.
These are the tips of the tallest trees—the funny firs up to their wrecked necks, spreading out distended undersea. See the new nests brimmed with egg. The mothers’ wings weak, flown for hours after food over the flat, shimmering face of endless water.
BLOOD
Though we refused to call it that—we swore not to acknowledge the innards of our fathers as they sprayed down in spectacle upon us—it woke us quickly from our visions. There was something familiar we could smell in the long glossy streams: nonstop pouring from overhead, some bottomless container. For some stretches the mesh of platelets formed sets of stairs. That week there was no sun, no moon, no dreaming, not even a word from the mouth of one neighbor or another as we waited for some end—hid and fumbling beneath only the earth’s face, wide and loamy, coagulating.
THE RUINED CHILD
They carried the child into the outside by his wrists and ankles, wriggling. His flesh had turned translucent. His mouth would often froth. They waded waist-deep into the sewage past the upended Mustang where neighbor Bill had tried to drive—the engine crusted over now, back wheels high in the air. The rain had wrecked the city, burst the sewers, drowned the roads. Downtown was underwater. Bill, like many others, had still believed in some way out. He’d spent hours out there with a lone rope trying to yank the Mustang free, his crazed face and muscles so stretched and shining it seemed he might burst open or combust. Finally it was the dogs that had gotten to him, mange-mottled packs of ex-pets combing the old neighborhood for blood. They’d ripped him limb from limb, to rib and tendon. Gnats made short work of the remainder.
The child’s first word had been rot. He’d been staring at his wrecked head in the mirror when he said it. He touched his reflection on the eyes. When the parents tried to take the shard away, he squealed and hugged the glass. He seemed pleased with his image, even after his body had begun to distort. Where once he’d had the father’s features, his skin expunged a short white rind. First in his crevices—armpits, nostrils, teeth holes, backs of knees—then the chest and cheeks and eyes. The parents tried so much to wash the gunk away—they tried soap, peroxide, bleach, hot water, rubbing, prayer—nothing made the child clean. The thick white mush became a second skin. It smelled of burnt rubber and stung the nose.
In the evenings, the dogs threw themselves against the house. The father had been able to keep them off for several days with a shotgun until they learned he had no bullets, then they chewed through the siding on the garage and got into what little food the father had scavenged from nearby abandoned houses. The dogs wolfed down everything in seconds that the father had been determined to make last.
With the floodwaters up to their chests, the parents stopped and held the infant boy above their heads. They wore rubber gloves to prevent their own infection. In the low light the child cast no shadow.
They were looking at each other then. The father opened his mouth to say something but did not. The mother opened her mouth to say something and also didn’t.
Together they held the child. They held him up until the blood moved into their shoulders and their arms began to shake. They lowered their son down slowly until they couldn’t help it. They laid their son down on the muck.
The baby floated. His head sat nuzzled in the algae on the lip, awaiting strange baptism. His cackle seemed almost a language. It made the father’s insides curl.
The father and the mother had been to service every Sunday for decades—until the pastor fell into spasm in midst of prayer—until the muck had lapped to cover even the steeple in its valley. All those wooden pews now underwater. All their prayers and hymns and paper money. The father remembered the taste of his dry mouth just before it filled with the copper lap of communion wine. His ass falling asleep beneath him during the sermon as he sat holding his son just so to keep the boy from screaming. He remembered the pleat of his khaki pants. Choke of his necktie. Squeak of loafer. The squelch of radio static on the drive home as his wife flipped from station to station each time a song she liked ended, searching for another amongst the noise.
The child’s second word had been nothing. He hadn’t had time yet to learn a third. The foam had begun to flake off of the carpet. He couldn’t keep food inside him, couldn’t see through swollen lids. The parents had gotten on their knees and begged to god to send an answer. They kissed the Bible, crossed their chests. They did not receive word.
As more time passed the child’s condition worsened. The boy’s hair was turning gray, then a mesh of colors. He sneezed several times a minute. He had to suck air through a tube. Things could not go on this way, the parents said to one another—their child was miserable and in pain. They felt his suffering in their stomachs, hot and dry and spreading out.
They’d come to a decision.
Among the muck the air was threaded, webbed like lettuce, grinding light. The father put his gloved hands across the child’s face. He inhaled and closed his eyes.
Back at home, still braised and reeling, the parents found the front windows busted—ones they’d thought too high for dogs to enter. The living room was shredded. The dogs had eaten the innards of the mattress where the parents had slept with the baby coddled between them before his infestation. The dogs had eaten the sack of half-green leaves the father had climbed several trees for, another makeshift dinner. They’d scratched the walls and shit all over the carpet.
The mother sat in the floor limp-limbed and wept in sips of stuttered air.
The father watched her, saying nothing. Something squirmed behind his eyes. He turned from her for the attic. The attic where he kept the rope. The stairs creaked beneath him as he clambered, his raw joints cracking, the wood old and rotting, giving out.
In the far back corner there, sitting upright on a bale of insulation, the father found the child returned from where they’d left him. The child’s eyes were red around the pupils, reflective in their centers. Though he no longer had the white rind, he’d swollen to twice his prior size—his head a bulbous, pulsing thing. The room stunk of rotten melon. The room seemed very small.
The mother and the father had had the child together after endless months of empty luck. The mother had suffered numerous miscarriages. They doctors said her womb was ripped, polluted. A common problem herein was how they termed it. The parents continued trying anyway. This was before the floods, but after the malls and movie theaters and markets had all closed. After the sky began changing color—neon pink, then white, then gold. People had been collapsing by the hundreds. The earth’s face was cracking, spitting open. Hordes of grasshoppers. Gobs of bees. But then this child—their hope, their glimmer—it appeared inside her made of light. The parents were so excited they couldn’t even pick a name. They spent hours on suggestions, thumbing phonebooks, testing the sound of certain syllables in their mouths, but nothing seemed quite to come together—nothing was their son.
Because no doctors’ doors were open, the father performed the delivery himself. He coached the mother through her hee-hee breathing, the grunt
and groan, the blather. Afterwards he couldn’t flush the memory of his wife’s brown blood all sputtered on his hands. There was still a spot on the carpet that stayed no matter how hard he tried to scrub it out.
The father knew this wasn’t actually the child now here before him in the attic—he’d watched the bubbling go still. It was some mirage, a function of his grief. He couldn’t keep himself from staring.
The ruined child opened up its runny mouth.
“One woe is past,” it quoted, its voice cragged and rotten, an old man’s. “And, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.” Smoke rose from its speckled gums as the words came. Spittle popping on its lips.
One woe? the father thought. More like ten thousand. You could probably fit a billion woes in every day depending on how small you sliced the hour.
The child repeated: “Two woes more hereafter.” It seemed to gag on its own tongue. It looked into the father, blinking. It said, “My anus is a portal.”
The room around them slightly rolled.
The child’s mother shouldn’t see this, the father thought. He turned away and hid his eyes. He went back downstairs and locked the door behind him. He tucked a towel under the crack. Though for hours, through whatever insulation, whatever silence, the child’s voice still slammed his head.
Back in the living room, the father found the mother staring into the staticked face of the TV. Though the programming stations had been out for months, he still caught her watching rather often, usually with her nose inches from the glass bulb, humming in tune with the sound. For a while he’d refused to let her waste the generator, but now he didn’t even argue.
“Where have you been?” she asked. She didn’t press him. Her hands gripped both sides of the screen. She drooled.
The father watched her for another second, then went into the kitchen and he stood there.
And he stood there. And he stood there. And he stood.
That night, on the carpet, nestled in half-blankets wrecked by moths, the mother spoke her want for a new child.
“Surely it was some kind of error,” she said, pressed against him awkward, their limbs uncomfortable in tangle. “That first baby. That precious sorry little boy. My body needed flushing. We have to try again.”
The father didn’t blink. He could hardly hear her for the baby’s voice still lodged on his brain. He thought of the child there in the attic just above them, pressing its large pus-smothered ear against the attic floor.
“I wouldn’t try again for anything,” the father said quite loudly, to make the child hear too. He did not look at the mother. “No matter what kind of light was promised. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t even.”
The mother’s face became a knot.
“Are you so lost already you couldn’t imagine God’s grace?” She touched him, her fingers icy. He couldn’t look. His blood was still.
She got up out of bed.
She stood in the queer light through the doorway, seething, the gnatty skin crimped at her neck.
“If you won’t help I’ll find a way myself,” she said.
She left the room. The father heard TV static a second later, so loud he could feel it in his teeth. The walls around him seemed to sink. He spread out with his arms and legs in her absence, stretching, the carpet warm in spots. He spoke aloud and tried to reason with her even though he knew she couldn’t hear.
“God,” he kept repeating.
His tongue felt fat, electric near his throat.
Outside, the night was runny. The father cupped air in his cheeks. He breathed and swallowed, breathed and swallowed. He lit a candle and waded back into the muck. Underneath the surface there were currents. Hard clusters near his knees. He moved to where he’d pushed the baby under, if he could remember. He reached deep in with his long arms. The muck gummed his nostrils, shook his lungs. Reaching. Reaching. Nothing. The father bit his splitting lips. He grunted, stretching harder. Hot wax dripped in slow strings down his other arm. He dropped the candle in the wet. Then the sky was nowhere. The cold face of the moon was blotted out with birthing flies.
He could not find the child.
The father called for his wife into the silence to come and guide him home by voice, but she couldn’t hear or wouldn’t come.
By the time the father made it back to the house the muck had dried across his upper half, a crust that came off in greasy chips. The stinking made him dizzy. He stripped to naked in the front yard. He tried to think of what he’d do if the dogs returned right then. He wondered if he’d fight or just stand and let them rip. He dreamed of incisors, shredding into cells.
He felt his stomach rumble. Mostly, his body had gotten used now to nothing. On worst days they’d eaten cloth or rubble.
What might the child have tasted like? he wondered.
What would the wife?
In the living room, still naked, mud-clung in long patterns, the father found the mother passed out with her head propped against the TV. She had a bra left on and nothing else, a see-through thing he’d long since gotten over. Normally he would have carried her to bed and tucked her in but this time he left her crooked and wet, eyes aglow.
In the morning she was still there, inch for inch. Her neck sat crumpled with the burden of her head. He moved to shake her shoulder. Gnats muddled in and around her mouth. The tongue, the meat, already rotting. She’d jabbed a kitchen knife into her stomach. Blood spread around her in an oval. Static seemed to gather at her face. The father stepped back from her, hands wet and trembling. He looked at what she’d done.
He could hear the dogs outside again, hungry, barking, bashing their bodies at the boards. The sheen of the mother’s blood did not quiver in their rhythm.
Overhead he heard the baby breathing through the ceiling, smacking its gums.
Upstairs the child sat swollen even larger—now nearly five times redoubled. In its eyes the father saw translucence, the whirred white flesh of its cornea neon, raw. Its flesh was golden and covered in larvae. It was bigger even than the father.
“The second woe is passed,” it said, giggling and cutesy. “And, behold, the third woe cometh quickly.”
The father kept his face turned from the son.
“Soon your skin will rupture and your eyes will vomit grease,” the child continued, his voice now several voices. “Your balls will pop and worms will wriggle and the air will liquidate. The seas will rush to smash the sky.”
The breath coming off the child was spotted.
The spots, together, became light.
The father felt the thing behind his eyes spin centered, spraying.
“I don’t even see you,” he shouted. “You’re not there.”
The child guffawed. It slapped its thighs and spit up. In the spit there wriggled something. The father could not inhale. He hurried past the child and took the tools he’d long ago stored away. He left the attic again without looking. Downstairs he could still hear the child’s cracked cackle even with the door closed and locked again.
He carried his wife into the backyard by the armpits. The yard was wet and sunk with residue. The trees had rotted and fallen in. Vast shapes moved on the horizon. In the dead flowerbed he found a soft spot where she could rest.
In an hour he had a hole dug.
In another hour he had her under.
Atop the mound of overturned earth, he spoke benediction: what sacred phrases he could remember. His tongue gnashed at his palate though the words were hard to taste.
That night the sky rained soil.
At first the father thought the sound of the pounding on the roof was the child’s kick and stammer, the child’s long swelling, but through the crack over the high bedroom window the father saw the great crudded gashings of loose earth coming down. The sun hung somewhere muted, disremembered of its light. He tried to think and felt his brain’s wheels catching, grinding wells into his head. His extremities began to tingle, buzzed by the sudden loss of flowing blood. He felt lightheaded, zonin
g, dumb. He hadn’t slept in several days. He sat on the wrecked mattress with his knees crossed. There was an impression left among the shredded bulges where for all those years his wife had laid, and another shaped like him. He rolled onto the ridge between their two spots and wondered how long until the ceiling gave, until the earth grew covered over. He chewed his tongue and breathed and breathed. He could hardly think of who he was. He said his name aloud so he’d remember. In repetition, each utterance grew slightly further off from what it should be.
Name, he thought. A son’s name.
Son.
He sat until his head grew so heavy he couldn’t hold it up.
Inside his head it was all one color. His heartbeat skittered in his throat. He did not dream.
He woke to a sour mouth some time later with someone standing over him by the bed. At first he assumed it was the child having come to smother, rub him out.
Okay, he thought. Let’s go.
As his eyes grew accustomed back to the room’s light, he saw the grim, loosed lines of his wife’s face. She looked many years older now already. She coughed up gravel on the mattress.
“Do you remember the first time you fucked me?” she said. “How sweet your kiss was? We bought a room in an old hotel. There were flowers in my hair. I’d never met a man like you. I thought you’d take me places. Light my insides. Do you remember the way you spurted? I’d only known you ten days. You called me another name. How wise your eyes were, rolled back in your head. I had my mind on television.”
She moved toward him, her body hulking. She put a leg up on the bed. He could feel the chill in her forearms, the hair there already grown out long and matted.
“Let’s make this baby,” she said, begging. “A new life. Please, my dearest. Squirt me up.”