There Is No Year - Blake Butler [28]
The mother did not show the young couple the TV room where some certain smell had caked the carpet with a frosty fuzz, charcoal-colored, its surface pilling up in patterns, veins.
She also did not show them the son’s room, though she knocked and knocked and tried the knob and called through the keyhole. Behind her, the veiled woman sniffed the air. She sniffed not as if from sniffles but from smelling something disagreed. The sniffing made the veil’s fabric pucker against the woman’s face.
The woman continued to stand beside the son’s door even as the mother moved on to show another room. As the mother stopped and saw her hanging back, the husband stepped between. He pointed at the room with two long fingers, nodding. He smiled to show his teeth.
The mother knocked and knocked again and halfway shouted for the son. She felt her voice around her face, a little mush. The son had stuffed some kind of fabric into the crack beneath the door, letting no light through. The mother could not tell if this had been there when she first began to knock. Her forehead flushed with blood. She turned back toward the man, and looking past him, at the woman, explained the son was likely sleeping—said the son was a very heavy sleeper, which was true. The son had been sleeping more than ever lately—most days he went to bed and slept hard from the moment he got home until it was time to get up again for school the next day, unless the mother or the father woke him up and made her come do something nice like eat. The mother could not help going on and on, making excuses for the child, saying his name again and again in a slightly high voice, sweating through her shirt. She felt embarrassed. Her sweat had no odor at all, and traced the veins along her neck.
The couple lingered by the son’s door even as the mother started to lead them away. The woman stayed still, touching the doorknob. The man rubbed his eyes and took her by the hand. Throughout the house thereafter they kept on looking back in the direction of the son’s room’s location, even through the floors and walls and walls.
They did not seem to care at all to see the master bedroom, where they would sleep night by night by night by night by night, the mother mentioned, the word night falling out of her mouth in repetition, she could not stop it, and still they did not say a word or blink.
They did not look askance to find the master bathroom’s mirror again off its putty, leaning forward above the basin making double image of the floor.
They did not seem to smell the smell of something musty coming from the vents there, the mold loosening all through the house, suddenly warm.
Their foreheads folded slightly at the child’s bookshelf, packed fat end to end with colored spines, though while awake and of his knowledge, the son had only ever read one book—a volume given to him by the father’s father, unbeknownst to either parent, a strange, enormous edition with only one letter on every page, to be read along a slow strobe. The son had found he could quote the text at length before he’d read it. When he did read blood would leak out of his nose. It would pour onto the white pages, blanks, making new letters, then, on closing, smear them doubled, smudge the letters into more.
The couple moved so slow all through the house, like lava.
A bell inside the house was ringing, though the mother could not hear.
This is where on the weekends my son likes to sit and tan her skin, the mother mentioned in the kitchen, pointing through the door glass at the yard and swimming pool. His skin, she corrected, not hers. My son is a boy. She said how good it felt for children to go swimming. What clean work water could do.
The couple appeared blank. The mother shook her head, began again. Hello, yes, welcome, please come in now, I’d love to show you our fine house. The flushing mother started to open the door to lead them out to where the pool was, to have a closer look, but then thought of something and stopped and