Читать книгу Sky Saw - Blake Butler - Страница 11

The shrieking sound came through the ceiling. Person 1180 felt her skin go limp. Fat powder fell around her on the blond wood—powder of bodies, burst into the air from somewhere else, their hair and syllables all knitted up in the meat of what she inhaled, and in the linings of her thinking. Beyond the house, she heard the fry of insect legs in time, long needles wanting at her flesh. All the light was full of perforation.

Person 1180 had the child spread on the table. His newborn eyes sometimes changed color. They would be dark green like the father’s, then next blink they matched the wall. Sometimes the whites went checkerboard or spiraled—sometimes the pupils were not there. Person 2030 had come out twenty pounds. Person 1180 had a limp she blamed on jogging and a scar she blamed on God.

The shrieking warbled at the window. The glass bent but did not break. The child began to leak black liquid as his ass raised off the table.

The tone had been appearing on the air for weeks. Its tone contained all possible timbre: every sentence ever crammed into each blink. Sometimes the tone would last for several hours, sealing the air against all other motion. It always hurt. It made Person 1180’s blood go numb. It made the books fall off the bookshelves and land opened to certain pages, though when she tried to look the words would melt or disappear. No one could say what made the tone or where it came from. Tax dollars were purportedly at work.

In the yard the trees were shaking. Dirt had filled in over our glow.

The tone peeled at the nursery walls. In strips the paint flapped at 1180’s head. She felt her kneecaps swelling, weighing her downward. She felt another presence in her, like the child, though longer than it, thicker than it. She touched the shaking boy there on the lacquer. Their skins became at once adhered between them. The mother could not get her hand back. The skins were smoking. The child’s spine showed through his chest. 1180 yanked and yanked.

Was the child laughing at the mother?