There Is No Year - Blake Butler [32]
The mother lay face down on the floor.
She lay face down with arms splayed out beside her and listened to the air inside the home’s vents gushing, coming out to feed her, warm.
OFFER
When the father got home from work that morning, the mother was in the kitchen. She was sitting at the counter on a tall stool with her legs crossed and her back toward the door. He seemed to not have seen her in months, or years. The father knew the mother would not believe his explanation that the streets were getting longer. He’d been getting up earlier and earlier to make it to his desk on time and his desk kept getting smaller and he kept getting home later and later and his fingernails kept growing. The last several nights the father felt sure that he’d come home, gone upstairs, taken off his clothes, gone to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, gotten into bed on one side—he had not noticed the presence or absence of his wife—rolled over on his side, gotten out of the bed on the other side, gone to the bathroom, splashed his face again, put on the same clothes, walked out the door. It took several full tanks of gas to get to work and back. The father had clocked the distance on his odometer and it always stayed the same.
That night on the way home he’d stopped and eaten books at a restaurant he’d never seen. The restaurant was next to another building he felt sure he recognized, as it had an unusual shape. He knew the second he saw the restaurant that he would eat there. He’d given up on trying to make it home in time for family dinner. He was so motherfucking goddamn hungry. The restaurant had no sign. The tacos were delicious, the best he’d ever had. He couldn’t even think of how a person could make a taco that tasted like these—they seemed to contain the pleasure of a whole meal in every bite. In each bite of the taco the father tasted steak and onions, ranch dressing, chocolate cake, bananas, gummy spiders, rum, and Cheetos. Those things all together tasted somehow very good. He’d ordered extra to bring the mother some so she could try them but after a while in the car he’d gotten hungry and he’d eaten them and he felt awful and too full, but would have done it again given the opportunity—given even thirteen hundred complimentary tacos, he would have eaten every one. The father had a new favorite place to eat and he planned to keep it to himself.
The father was walking up behind the mother. He moved slow, trying to be quiet, though he knew she knew that he was there. He found himself walking on his tiptoes, slow and lurching, like a man who’d come to kill. The father put both hands across his mouth to keep from giggling. His teeth bit at his one hand and he was bleeding and the blood was in his mouth.
The mother at the counter hunched and cringed with the father’s every step. She felt afraid—afraid not for the father’s silent acting, though she could sense it, but because the couple had made an offer and she didn’t know what he would think. The phone had begun ringing almost as soon as she’d closed the door behind them. Within the hour a contract had been delivered in a black envelope by a private courier who appeared to have approached the house on foot. They’d offered the full asking price, in paper money. Afterward, the mother felt so cold. She put on as many layers as she could manage, the oldest clothes stuffed in her drawers—dresses, shirts, pants, shoes she hadn’t worn in ages—back before she became pregnant with the child. With so many layers laid around her she could hardly move her arms or legs, her body, heat amassing in her thighs, so large, though inside her, at the center, her stomach roared.
Behind, the father moved closer and still closer. The father’s mouth drooled, overflowing. He had his hands worked into weapons. He closed his eyes.
When the father reached the mother he put his head square in the center of the mother’s back. He pressed with his forehead in a way that made the mother’s muscles stiffen, through the fabrics. They hung there slightly humming, their two