There Is No Year - Blake Butler [3]
The mother clasped her hands. She went out on the porch and stood among the copy family, silent.
There she was.
SMOTHERING, THE MOTHER’S KNOWLEDGE OF
In the copy mother’s copy face the mother saw the way the years had run her down—the slow stretched lines of older versions sunk to layers—the cheekbones taut and caked with rouge. The mother hulked her copy body off the ground. She carried her copy body in the weird light strumming downward off the shifting sky in sheets. The mother moved through the crunched grass to the concrete to the swimming pool the house had come with. Her copy body hummed hot and burbled. She held herself the way she’d hold a massive baby. She threw her copy body out into the pocket of caught water, watched her splash down, watched it burp. The copy mother did not struggle. The pool was green with straw and algae and old rain. The mother could not see the bottom. The water stunk. A string of silent glassy bubbles rung up from the copy mother’s copy head. Her body sunk into the muck and did not rise. Along the top the mother watched a scrim of pollen slosh in waves. The windows of the house next door were all cracked open and opaque. The house next door to that house did not have doors or windows, walls at all.
CLOSER
The mother found the copy father’s skin felt rather pleasant—softer than her husband’s—responsive to her touch. She spread her fingers in the soft short hair over his forearm. She whispered in his ear. She said the things she’d meant to say.
She closed the copy father’s eyes.
When the copy father’s body hit the water, his shirt and pants soaked darker several shades. The copy father’s skin became distended. The water boiled. The copy father’s copy body tried a while to stay floating on the pool’s surface in the muck but the mother pushed it down. She held it under with her foot and then the pool net. She ran a tongue across her teeth. The moon hung over the backyard had a sliver missing from its center. All the homes held underneath that light.
Suddenly the mother felt a voracious thirst for pork.
THE COPY SON, IN PARTICULAR
The mother returned from what she’d done then to stand above the copy of her son. There was very little about his copy body that betrayed any major difference from its other—in fact, if the mother hadn’t known for sure already her true son was upstairs curled in the new bed the father and the mother had bought him—no more nits yet in the mattress, nothing eating where he slept—if she wasn’t sure for sure the true version of her boy was up there with his sleep eyes spinning in his head—wasn’t he?—if she hadn’t put him there herself—she wasn’t sure that she could tell him from this child here—this child with the same scar along his forearm like the one the son had gotten fallen fainting from a tree—he was not supposed to have been walking yet—he’d been bedridden for so long—trying to reach the sun, he’d explained later. This child here had the same black pockmarks where disease had come into the son’s body, searching his flesh for what it wanted—when the son had stayed alive the doctors seemed more nervous than relieved—how peculiar, they kept saying, it’s against science. This child here had the same blond bowl-cut hair like the son, hair the mother could barely bring herself to snip, every inch of him her precious—such nights she’d dreamed of his insides, swimming deep inside his cells. This child, this boy—he was made of her, and she was made of him.
No, the mother could not bring herself again to do the thing she’d done twice just now already.
No.
NO
The mother peeped through the window from the outside to make sure her husband was still sleeping. Under the blanket, she watched him wriggle. The father had always been a rowdy sleeper. Most nights he kept the mother up straight through till morning. The mother slept most during the day, if ever. The sleeping father spoke in languages the mother had not heard—if she’d heard them she could not remember. The sleeping father chewed the skin inside his mouth to bits.
In a hurry,