Sky Saw Read online

  In the yard the trees were shaking. Dirt had filled in over our glow.

  The tone peeled at the nursery walls. In strips the paint flapped at 1180’s head. She felt her kneecaps swelling, weighing her downward. She felt another presence in her, like the child, though longer than it, thicker than it. She touched the shaking boy there on the lacquer. Their skins became at once adhered between them. The mother could not get her hand back. The skins were smoking. The child’s spine showed through his chest. 1180 yanked and yanked.

  Was the child laughing at the mother?

  In the pockets between shrieking, Person 1180 read aloud. She read the book she’d found wedged among the folds of the long curtain in the hall just after Person 811 left, a date whose definition she could no longer remember, nor did she know why they’d chose to hang the curtain there—the only thing it hid was flat white wall, marred with no windows. The book was the same size of the book that you hold now. The front page had an inscription handwritten to Person 1180 by someone with an illegible signature, in bright blue ink that stung her eyes:

  READ THE CHILD THIS BOOK OR HE WILL SUFFER

  The text on all the other pages had been printed in a code, or in a strange language she did not recognize—babbly syllables and glyph fonts, planar symbols and number reams—and yet when 1180 passed her eyes over the lines and let her voice go, she felt the syntax easing out. Her reading voice was low and burnt and came up from her linings, something old and rhythmic as it passed. Doing the speaking in this manner juggled color in her lungs and made her woozy, a kind of crystal glass around her face. Whole hours or even days might pass before she noticed she’d been suspended in that method for so long, often even in reading a single line. She did not like this feeling but could not seem to stop it. She’d thrown the book into the flood yards behind the house more times than she could count—she’d buried it, burnt it, sold it, ate it, locked it in a metal cube—and each time the book had appeared again clenched in her arms while she was sleeping. At night the night was loud and seized with lice and there was nothing else to be. Often the lingering feeling of what she’d last read made her want to take actions unimagined, things she knew she did not really want to do and never should, and so for the most part she did not do them, though some nights it was so cold.

  After each page, before turning, Person 1180 would lift and hold the book up at the child so he could see it and together they would stare. The text contained no pictures beyond the way the paragraphs all seemed to congregate and blur among each other, rising colors. The child would coo and gosh and try to touch the paper. When she’d not allow him, he would shriek—a splattering mess of voice so loud it traced her brain. And yet she read, and the more she read the more he wanted, and the silence in her ribs. She could feel the hours passing between them in those moments, slapped like batter, and she could not blink or turn away until allowed.

  Around the house outside the men arrived. There were very many men.

  The men were nude, their thumbs were missing; they had lesions on their eyes. In the lesions were further lesions uncountably compiled, and the chalky mouth-washed blood that ran between them thrumming at the seams of where they were, soldered into cricking plastic tubes around their bodies—from when, years back, the city had mandated all one blood among ex-felons—these men must share and wear their plasma. Within the rancid blood, the grit amassed: grit of terror and of sad breath, swell and recession, an aging blackness in their pits—of the sky’s continued creasing, of hyper-need—grit of want of spaces between buildings being filled—our silent scrying old forever.

  Some of the men had cysts grown on their backs or forehead larger than the men themselves. Some had paid to have these cysts removed while others shanked them off with lengths of wire or by lying down in streets where starving dogs would chew straight through the gristle, wetting earth up with their blood. The men’s newest wounds were open and incandescent and in spots spotty with attempted healing—skin that could not quite find the width to fit together, and so in the light would spit and blush.

  These men were alive and always had been and always would. Once they’d had made a workforce, an army, navy. They’d bought and sold on an open market such fine goods, and each alone they’d managed small houses of their own, and wives and sons and celebrations, occasional ideas. They were men as well as women. They wanted out of where they’d been and into something they could hold. They surrounded every home, and where every home now stood no longer, a long low cold held on the world.

  The men could smell the mother—her liquid, gallons, warm wet she’d hid inside her all those nights—they could feel her flesh meet on their teeth. Person 1180 had sewn herself shut once for several drier days, but the men had fixed that.

  The men had hair grown in their eyes—hair the same color all over their bodies and in their stomachs, in their brains—hair that before them had lined their fathers and those men’s fathers. Many of the men as well had tattoos of every word they still could think, which obscured certain portions of the men’s bodies into patches of craggy, mottled ink.

  The men came into Person 1180’s home. They slit the windows with their tongues and knives of screaming. They pried up the vinyl siding where wreaths of spore had lodged for blossom and they wormed their way between the blue. Certain men slid their fingernails into the locks, shaped for this instant. There were so many ways of entrance and only one clear way back out.

  In the front room of the house there was a picture of the house.

  Through the front door window in the photo you could see the same photo behind the glass, and if you looked very close you might see the photo lodged in that photo, and in that one, though beyond that who could say what for what or why.

  It was a very, very old house, and an even older picture.

  Person 1180 watched the baby on the table rasping and gabbing at itself. She measured the stutter of the indention in the child’s cranium, which by now should have sealed. In the slick inch-width porthole for the child’s skull, 1180 sometimes saw things crawl in or out. Sometimes she’d put her eye to the knot and peer in. She saw nothing. She’d been squirted in the face. She kissed the hole and she wished into it. The children was growing faster than he should be, she thought: this other little man. She should not be able to distinguish hour to hour how he’d changed, the shape of his infancy already leaving his skin behind for other colors.

  The mother had a resume of rancid husbands since her husband’s exit, a list she kept lodged in her chest, each one that much ouched over the other, aching one another out inside the nights of screeching and endless bleeding, burned from white to orange to red to brown to black to gold inside her mind. She could not recall any of these men’s numbers, nor the specific texture of their hands, though they were in her, all compounded and compounding. Each day the list grew longer one by one or two or ten. Each one she’d shown a new part of herself that they could take away and keep and keep inside them, or perhaps hang upon some wall, or maybe eat or smudge or overpower, somehow rip unto destroyed.

  The child, not yet a man himself, seemed somehow smearing in the absence of the father. His waking flesh was mostly gray. His thumbprints had the grain of gravel and against certain kinds of wood would give off sparks. The last time the mother had weighed the child the scale displayed all numerals she could not read.

  The child’s veins would sometimes bloat and stiffen. He already had acquired all his teeth, more teeth than he should ever have at all, together. Every morning 1180 shaved a brand new mustache off her child’s top lip with the electric razor the father had left behind. He had taken the straight-edged other with him, perhaps a weapon—as well, he’d taken his legs and arms that 1180 had used to calm herself and spread herself and remember at all she was there, though he’d left the locking necklace he’d given her with her photo pasted inside. Sometimes now she would open up the necklace and see not herself but blackened paper, sometimes a tiny wedge of mirror, a scratch n sniff of stew.<
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  Most evenings now 1180 slept with the child beside her in the night, along with the child’s dolls and caps and all his clothes, each of which she’d fashioned from the crap that fell into the house among its yawnings, junk blown from the remains of other houses and small polished portions of the sky—this way gathered all together there’d be sufficient mass upon the bed to bruise in the mother an illusion as if there were still someone there beside.

  Someone is there, she would say aloud inside herself repeating. This child. My child. My son. Person two-thou-sand-and-thir-ty, my nearest number.

  The mother felt the creaming liquid in her whorl.

  The men were coming up the stairs. The men were chanting.

  The men were made of meat.

  These were the decomposing years. There was air that made the moon go blue.

  These were days of no new healing, days undone by knives.

  1. SAFETY SCISSORS—First known to have turned on the students in a fourth grade art class in an aboveground bunker in Des Moines. The children had been assigned to design effigies of themselves. The teacher had put on a record of Christmas music, though it was not Christmas. The children had had their milk. Suddenly, the teacher reported, they began snipping at their faces. They gashed their hair in chunks. They slit their necks and spoke through the incision. By the teacher’s word—herself unharmed—the child’s eyes were not there. Said teacher serving 25 to life.

  2. PINKING SHEARS—The effect of these on a length of bed sheet. The effect of these on a length of cheek. The effect of these on a length curtains, cream, bird wings, film, your mother. Where were you? Why did you not answer when I called?

  3. MOWER BLADES—At some point the earth was air and air was earth and through the earth the blades moved churning, routing tunnels, forming combs, combs in which the young lay rolled in wombs or chewing Crisco, moaning for the moon. These blades were the first that did not cut.

  4. SHAVING RAZORS—They came for us in swarms. Through the strip malls, sung like bees, kissing at plate windows, scratching, making runes upon the arm, derouting feed tubes from mother’s babies through and through them, even sometimes making small men’s faces clean.

  5. I DON’T KNOW WHAT THESE BLADES CAME OFF OF—They were so large. They fell from nowhere (we can agree to call the sky nowhere…

  I believe we can).

  (Will you please help?

  )

  These blades landed on expressways. They crushed the green out of tall young forests that had begun re-growing in the raze. They knocked the birds off branches and smeared their eggs into the ground. The blades sung with sound of vast incision. The blades filled the store aisles all swum in contained light. In these blades you could see some head reflected, though never quite the one you wear.

  The other things that fell—not knives, but liquid—trash, or parts of people—of these things do not ask. There was nothing in this salt mound left to await, even in the most hopeful of the people.

  Still, cuffed in the black, what could manage still made their way, all filled with hidden surfaces and blood miles.

  There were a billion half-rebuilt homes stuffed in this era. Much of the new houses’ construction had been abandoned underway. The land had been annexed, named and numbered, priced, the dirt laced with wire, the trees with censors, streets with poly-buffered trash—a hundred-thousand megamansions lined by stained glass window big as other houses’ sides and encrusted with colors that did not quite exist, invented for this house alone—homes with yachts moored in the day room in case someone wished to feel suddenly at sea—as on the water, I can sleep—backcracked acts of magic performed in private parlors by computer on marble stage, under neon lights left blinking, blinking—rooms all gathered hard around a hole through which one could look down through the earth, see the shells and shelves it held encrusted, owned—we own you—all of you are all of ours—rooms each forever spun in spirals and injecting you with speech beyond a skin—walls all old and stuffed with screaming, a cold reminder of who’d they’d held, what could have been inside them—would be—was—each instant held forever in awaiting for the next to press against it, push it down into the black catalog of the cells of the unseen.

  I could go on at what these days were but the truth is I am tired. Would you even believe me if I did? I’ve spent enough years with my face arranged in books. I’ve read enough to crush my sternum. In each of the books are people talking, saying the same thing, their tongues slim and white and speckled with the words.

  I don’t want to be here. I want to get older. I want to see my skin go folding over.

  Someday I plan to die.

  When I was 1, most nights the house would fill with teeth. They lined the walls and studded the ceiling fans. They would come down like rain and click around my bed. In my head they built a stutter. I couldn’t feel my hands yet but there was something then also in me—something gnawing, something come undone.

  When I was 2, I licked the sun some. I could spread it open with my fingers. I could tell it what I wanted. I could float further than even that.

  When I was 3, the world went flattened and we couldn’t find the streets. My arms felt made of tissue. Words woke up inside my head. I would speak them as if I meant to speak them—as if they’d always been all mine—sometimes their grain would cut my stomach—I felt I did not need the stomach—I felt OK.

  When I was 4, I remember someone standing above me in the night.

  When I was 5, each time I wore white I found myself slowed down. I could see the shapes run out of other’s mouths, and I could see their arms ahead of where they were. I could see their faces stretching white with wrinkle and the degrading hue stuck in their eyes.

  When I was 6, I found the ground got softer if I rubbed it with my shin. There was a certain part of the backyard where I went straight through into a den. In the den there was a man seated upright in a chair and the man told me exactly what would happen.

  When I was 7, I dreamt the names of every child I’d ever have. In the dark I scratched them on my forearms, all fifty thousand. When I woke up my skin was clean, though there were new bruises on my knees.

  When I was 8, I ate a tree. It coming back out was the hard part. That year I saw only the turning weather burn through other people’s eyes. By now my knees had still not healed, and my blood behind them had turned purple.

  When I was 9, I’d buy a new school notebook and get home to find it filled. Often with drawings of myself inside my mother, and often with someone else in me. When I would try to show my mother the pages all became one page.

  When I was 10, I don’t remember.

  When I was 11, I don’t remember.

  When I was 12, I changed my name. I went by blather. I wouldn’t wink unless you knew. My hair went curled. My eyes changed shape. It was only in the dark that I could think.

  When I was 13, I don’t remember.

  When I was 14, I’d hide in bed so many days my skin would stick tight to the sheets—in the end it was the sleep that tore me open. It was soft sleep ate my brain. I met so many men in folds of nowhere—ones I’d found or fucked or scratched the skin on or ate or was ate by or swam with through the ground.

  When I was 15, I found a ring and wore it on my thumb. Each day it got a little tighter. I lost one finger, then another. I didn’t want to quit the ring. It had my real name writ inside the band. I swallowed it with sugar.

  When I was 16, I squirted my first baby as a cuff of creamy cud behind the house. I swear the child had eyes. I worked his girth over with my fingers in the gummy earth, already bubbling, and no matter how hard I packed and patted, I could hear the breathing in my teeth. I hid the patch with nettle. In the morning, the yard was swarmed.

  When I was 17, my parents were carried off into the antbed on the hill. I clawed the dirt for hours and all I came back with was this rash. At night the rash would rise up off me and hang above my body. I could hear it speaking in my sleep. I can hear it even now—and
now—and now.

  When I was 18, the house’s caulking swelled. The sky would disattach. It would come to curl around my throat. A little lake welled in my belly. Holes opened up inside the ground. I managed not to have them eat me, even when I went and threw myself on in—as if there were a magic sleeve of cellophane around me—as if I needed to go on. I did not need to go on.

  When I was 19, the tone began.

  When I was 20, I didn’t sleep at all—such hours—soon I learned to see the men hid in the eaves—the doors lodged in the séance—the stink.

  When I was 21, I met the father—another man who swore he knew—knew what I had in me—knew what I would need. This is what he said. In the night his forehead hid the sky. I woke to blood spots on my pillow, in our oat bran, in the sink drain, but still I stood beside that man—I touched his hands and said the words—we were one then.

  When I was 22, I don’t remember.

  The mother now had given birth twenty-two times since the father’s exit five days prior. Each time the span between the births decreased. The pregnancies were swift and brutal. She expelled her paste in gush and crumbs. The warblings of her and the babies’ bodies both boomed through the empty rooms around them. Sometimes the mother felt she could have named the ancient human names of all the men that made her bigger, despite the blindfolds, the ice and biting—she could taste them in the branding of her flesh—a permanence mostly lost on the ejections.