There Is No Year - Blake Butler [61]
—into the room where the mother had figured she’d someday find time to do her sewing, making bed quilts out of old clothes, instead the room had grown so thick with dust you could no longer see the walls
—into the room that’d most sold the father on the house for no particular reason he could put a thumb on, six walls slanted inward up to some center overhead, a leaving point, a sight
—into a room that was all windows, the glass gurbled, spurting, off, through which window the father saw only color that was not like any color unto him before, the compiled color of the lengths of skin he’d bruised upon himself and certain others over the fearful evenings of his life
—into a room made of liquid in which the father could swim deep into one corner and could touch something there giving off air, a tiny rimless hole, and the father put his mouth against it and he breathed, inhaled the smell of gasoline and cinder and gunpowder and new cars, and there were objects consecrated there around him in the liquid, held within a gel, he could not see
—into a room of cold wet sand tunneled by worms, worms that once had lived inside the son, and ate of all the food the son ate, making a blank space, and heard of all the sound he heard, and sang in all his singing, and wallowed in his light
—into a room of babies held in long glass bubbles burping, screeching, needing feeding, waiting for their size, each of which would one day make their own sons and daughters, and those their own sons and daughters, and theirs, and theirs, more and more blood
—into a room lodged in the bulb glass of some light fixture in a woman’s apartment in some city, where the father watched the woman remove her clothes and masturbate against a mirror and brush her teeth and wrap her head in string, the father wanted this woman more than any one or thing he’d seen in his whole life, and did not realize how she looked exactly like the mother, named the same
—into a room the father had already been in before this evening but not in the same light, not like this, to be honest all of these rooms had the same shape and grain and color, each measured 5.24 m × 10.48 m × 5.86 m
—into a room where the father was hardly dust and the father could not feel his arms, his hair around him in a coarse gown, as one day he would be buried under sand
—into a curtain of endless blank where there was laughing, every person, all at once, one thick and endless sound so loud it went beyond human hearing and beyond that again, killing all ears, breaking all windows in all buildings, shattering all light, and then replacing all of what it had damaged with new versions of itself, so deftly done we’d never know
—into another room made of something other, the description of this room has been withheld by request
—through a room he recognized into a room he did not recognize, each in exact image of the room where he would die
APEX
In this last room the father touched the wall and slid against it and the father was on the floor there looking up—through the ceiling the father could see some clouds convening, or were they clouds or something else. Something unraveled, something blackened, threaded through and through and through, and in this last room, from another, in a far part of the house, someone was shouting something awful in the soundshape of the father’s other name, and the father turned toward the name, his insides lifting, and the ceiling flexed with all his work and in the center of the ceiling a new hole opened and through the new hole came an eye, which there, then, saw.
LAWN
Outside the house the grass around the house—the dead and endless grass the mother had mowed and mowed in begging to keep down—the grass with no roots left to mention, their butt ends frayed into a mush—roots that once had spread embedded underneath the other nearby houses in a network, a scumming labyrinth, a kind of whip—by now this dead and pure white groan-grass had grown up a few feet high. It grew to just below the house’s windows and grew up around the doors and at the outsides