There Is No Year - Blake Butler [79]
And then the son was being carried through the massive lawn with all the mud splashing up around them, and the sky or ceiling stretching overhead and coming closer down and closer down, and the son could feel his cheeks all puffy and the son could feel his and his father’s heartbeats both together through his own chest, the visor of the father’s helmet banging back and forth against the son’s skull’s hardened soft spot in the rhythm of their fumbling run.
And then the son was in the son’s room looking at all the clear gel spilling from the closet, the closet where the son had spent so many hours typing still unknown, and the son saw what he made, he saw the texture of the ejection, of the words burped from several selves he’d held in hives, layers wished and crushed and in him, and he felt the words spread through the room expanding, felt the words burst back into him and through and through and of the room, words worn on paper, wet and endless, a flooding ocean at his knees, at his chest, his neck, his head, gel gumming up his nostrils and in the air vents, in the air itself—and then the son again could not breathe—and the words slushed and slammed around the son as massive slivers, blubbing up, and the son rose off the floor inside the rising, and the son tried to swim and kick as best he could, the language welling in his head and stomach, stretching his legs and muscles, and therein the son gushed on, and the son slid down through the hallway, wide as ever, and the son warbled down the stairs, down through the house where all was runny and one color, and the son gushed on through the front door—
and then the son opened his mouth and shut his eyes and then the son slid backward through where he’d been and the son saw seas and rooms and constellations and the son grew very large and he grew small—
and then the son was in the father’s arms gel-covered, and the son was the father’s arms themselves and they were standing there beside the mother at a hole large as the house, a hole with many holes inside it, concentric rings of endless holes inside the hole, and the mother’s head was wound with bees and birds and gel and she had a shovel and she was digging in the rip, and she was digging and she was digging, begging in the holes—she was saying something about the father or the son or both together, and the mother ripped and bent her long nails on the hard dirt—the dirt that had built up around the house high as the house and ever higher at the hole’s edge and yet had not yet found a way to touch the sky—and the father tried to make the mother put the shovel down and come away from the half-assed hole she’d hardly dug inside the hole, among all the other holes there all around her, and she there screaming on and on into the grass about insects and sand and windows and the houses and the light—
and her warm body—
and her rubbed insides—
and all her wanting, measured in flume—
and all the rooms she’d never seen, and the rooms those other rooms contained—
and her need for forgiveness—
and her life—
and then the mother turned and turned, around in nothing, swinging the shovel at the father—
and the yard was smushed around them burned and buzzing—and the sky was smacked and stretched with mold and slip—and the trees were splotched with sores and raining color— and the son could not see the father could not see the mother could not see—
OR
—from above the house—and around the house—despite these things—the house could not be seen—the house was hidden, sat in dry air cold and throat-choked with vast collision, all minor manner of humming creature swarmed in spirals through the sound—a sound of something soaked and squashed stung forever in the house’s lining—beneath the roof all bulged and scumming over through the thicket of new trees—bees and bats and ants and crows and cranes and gulls and geese and ducks and dogs and helicopters and doves and pigeons, dragonflies,