Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler Read Free Book Online

eating. I’d yank on wallpaper to let the looser dustings shake so there’d be something I could chew. My tongue took to the texture but my belly would not stop screaming, and the bug matter hung in gristle, my stomach so weak it couldn’t grind. I could feel my offspring moving elsewhere. I could feel the crawl behind my eyes.
    The old ceiling sat around me. The new ceiling: a smudged sky. In the idea of those unbent stars still drooling—the false hope of short-lived water rain—I began to convince myself there would
be something somewhere some time again. I had scars all up my forearms. Larvae in my hair. My teeth ached. And deeper, in my organs, something else I couldn’t put a name to. Other eyes behind my eyes.
    When the sound of scissors filled my forehead, I swallowed air until they wore away. I would rock and lick the salt of my kneecaps and laugh aloud and remember math. I’d been good at that crap sometime. I counted days in further scratches on my forearms. I heard awful noises in the walls. Above the static, a high pitched squealing. The bang of hammers. Thump of weight. I called the boys for water. I called the boys to come. I called and called and called until my voice broke my throat.
    Through the window, too small for my body, I saw they’d took to piling our books and baubles in the backyard. The kitchen curtains. Their baby blankets. Grandma’s afghan. They’d learned some kind of dance. Out of the wood Dan had used to build a treehouse, they’d made an altar, tall as me.
    Over time the room got smaller. The air felt liquid. I fell thin.
    In the eaves I sensed a groaning.
    In the floor where once I’d held my babies one by one and hummed, set in the wood I found a mouth. A man’s mouth—warm and easy. I felt his gender in the bristle of his bridge and the texture of his breath. By taste I knew it wasn’t Dan—Dan’s mouth crammed with rotting molars and gold loam. I could not remember other men. Yet when I came near enough this man would whisper, his voice ruined and raspy, beehive flutter. He mostly said only one thing, a name, I think, though nothing held. He would repeat until the words became just words, until even what short sleep came for me was slurred. To shut him up I’d spit between them, what dry saliva I could manage, and the lips would shrivel, bring a hum. You could hear him suck for hours, my taste some nourishment, a fodder. But soon enough again the wishing, formed in hymn.
    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