Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler Read Free Book Online Page B

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