Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler Read Free Book Online Page A

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