There Is No Year - Blake Butler [44]
The ants were not after these things.
The ants were swarming the black package.
They were all around it.
Mashing. Massive.
Clicking eyes.
Click clack.
The son had had the package in the closet all this time.
The son had stepped over it naked, getting dressed.
The box had seen his dick.
He’d walked around it like something that’d been affixed for ages, something built into the house and in the son’s life—common as a keyhole or an eye.
The ants were all around the box. The son could hardly see. He could hardly remember where it’d come from.
He could not remember.
With the flat skin of his small hands, the son brushed ants’ bodies from the box.
At his touch the ants seemed to die or stiffen or go dumb, sloughing off the box in crippled hordes.
The son lifted the box against his body and carried it back into his room.
In the exact center of the carpet he held the box between his knees.
The box’s outer lining was a silky, stretchy putty that would not quite come off with his nails. The son stretched the stuff in strands of sheeting, slurring his cuticles, stuck deep. It burned.
The son went to the closet, hearing nothing. The son got out exactly the right knife.
There were no markings on the outside of the package except for two small watermarks the son could not see.
Under the black lining was another lining.
Under that lining was a box.
The box was a cloth-wrapped package, blackened, and kind of smashed along the sides. The addressee’s name had been removed. The son split the seam edge on this new box with another certain kind of knife. He opened this new box as well and found inside it yet another. This next box was bubble-wrapped and wound around with tape. This box had a new address that had also been marked out.
When the son shook the package he could hear something in it move.
In the third package was another package.
In the fourth package was another package.
And the fifth, the sixth, the seventh.
What came out of the seventh package seemed too large to have fit inside the others. It was nearly four times the size of even the original black package. It was writ with words, which ants were still swarmed over, crawling up the son’s arms and in his armpits and his teeth.
Across the street, the enormous box upon the neighbor’s yard—a mirror image of this seventh box, here—was changing shape.
The son had a tattoo now on his back. The tattoo was of a tree. It discolored the son’s already discolored skin. The tree’s branches spread up his shoulders, up his neck toward his eyes.
As the son unwrapped the center of the seventh box the tattoo sunk into another layer.
The son was made of layers, too.
In the seventh box’s single center—fat and bloodred—there was a nodule.
The nodule had a lever.
The son pulled the lever and the center bloomed—bloomed out into a light—a light as large as many rooms—
—& the son could not stop shaking.
He could not stop.
???EGAKCAP EHT EDISNI SAW TAHW
Something wrapped in matte white paper.
Paper had no seam or sealant. Paper tasted clean.
The son scratched the paper with another knife till there was room to use his fingers.
Inside the paper there was another box—
the son was getting tired
—a black box just like the first of all—
exactly the same box.
Inside the box, inside more paper, the son found a photo of himself.
In the photo, the son was older than he was now, but the son could still see that it was he. The son had his mother’s eyes.
The photo was an 8" × 10" headshot printed on photographic paper. The son’s autograph appeared at a slight angle across the gloss.