There Is No Year - Blake Butler [10]
The father had never seen such a large hole. The vent’s revealed mouth matched exactly with his shoulders’ width. He stuck his head in, already sweating, his teeth tight in his gums. The passage went along a long way straight before him before it turned quick at a right angle, toward the TV room and to the kitchen, thereafter blooming out to other rooms. The father felt a sudden want to sing into the warm hole, to fill the house with sound. He could not think of any songs.
With his shirt between him and the metal, the father forced himself in along the hole. He felt he’d gotten fatter. His flesh-bulged form fit to the rectangle. His feet and shoes dangled in the air in the guest bedroom and then, following his ass, became drawn in.
Where in the vent the roof had ridges, he felt his back’s long black hairs becoming ripped out of their pores. It kind of hurt more than it should have. The passage seemed too small. Some goop of residue caked on the pipe’s sides was rubbing off all on his pants and hands, his hair. He tried to stop and back out from already several feet deep. The air was blowing hotter, harder, at his body. Like someone breathing. Somewhere: babies. Mothers. Money. His hips seemed swelling. His thighs were meat. The vent’s skin sucked in all around him. Nearer. Leaning. The father cursed and breathed the ripping air. He half-called for someone to come and help him. Half-called less loud. Whispered, Help.
Help! His crotch was sopping. The air was thick, and more so the further in. He knew he should not be crawling any further—what if someone came along and screwed the vent’s grate face back on behind him, moved a dresser to block its eye? And yet, ahead, where the vent curved in an L out of his vision, the waiting metal shined. The seizing of his cells inside the terror made the father’s teeth taste sharp—made his heartbeat lurch inside him, metabolizing. The air grew warmer, quicker, tighter, the deeper still into the house the father crawled, still with his mind inside him thinking, Help
Help
Help
Help
Help
Help
Help
DECISION
That night on their mattress, lying spines entwined and sleeping, the dusty father and itching mother agreed by grunt how it was time to sell the house.
HIS
The son received a package in the mail. The son had not ordered anything or been expecting gifts, nor could he think of anyone remaining who would give him gifts or want to. The son had not given his new address to anyone he could remember, or spoken it aloud into the air, though he may have written it on a free contest entry at a local food chain, which made him eligible to win a free week of gym training: Shape the Self Inside Your Self. He planned to exercise unbounded if he won. He would one day ripple in bright light.
When the son was younger, the mother’s mother had often sent the son things for no good reason. At Christmas, the mother’s mother sent the son special food that arrived already rotting—she did it every year. Once the mother’s mother had sent a shrunken gown and a locket with a name inscribed—the mother’s mother’s name, not the son’s. Folded between the locket’s metal halves there was a picture of a man. The man had black hair grown down over most of his face. He always seemed to be looking directly at the son. The son tried to wear the necklace despite the father’s protest but he felt it choked him anyway. The son threw the necklace out a window. He’d found it several times sindce then: around the neck of his favorite doll; looped over the brass knob to the closet. Once he’d coughed it up. The son could no longer see or feel the necklace around