Читать книгу Sky Saw - Blake Butler - Страница 13

Around the house outside the men arrived. There were very many men.

The men were nude, their thumbs were missing; they had lesions on their eyes. In the lesions were further lesions uncountably compiled, and the chalky mouth-washed blood that ran between them thrumming at the seams of where they were, soldered into cricking plastic tubes around their bodies—from when, years back, the city had mandated all one blood among ex-felons—these men must share and wear their plasma. Within the rancid blood, the grit amassed: grit of terror and of sad breath, swell and recession, an aging blackness in their pits—of the sky’s continued creasing, of hyper-need—grit of want of spaces between buildings being filled—our silent scrying old forever.

Some of the men had cysts grown on their backs or forehead larger than the men themselves. Some had paid to have these cysts removed while others shanked them off with lengths of wire or by lying down in streets where starving dogs would chew straight through the gristle, wetting earth up with their blood. The men’s newest wounds were open and incandescent and in spots spotty with attempted healing—skin that could not quite find the width to fit together, and so in the light would spit and blush.

These men were alive and always had been and always would. Once they’d had made a workforce, an army, navy. They’d bought and sold on an open market such fine goods, and each alone they’d managed small houses of their own, and wives and sons and celebrations, occasional ideas. They were men as well as women. They wanted out of where they’d been and into something they could hold. They surrounded every home, and where every home now stood no longer, a long low cold held on the world.

The men could smell the mother—her liquid, gallons, warm wet she’d hid inside her all those nights—they could feel her flesh meet on their teeth. Person 1180 had sewn herself shut once for several drier days, but the men had fixed that.

The men had hair grown in their eyes—hair the same color all over their bodies and in their stomachs, in their brains—hair that before them had lined their fathers and those men’s fathers. Many of the men as well had tattoos of every word they still could think, which obscured certain portions of the men’s bodies into patches of craggy, mottled ink.

The men came into Person 1180’s home. They slit the windows with their tongues and knives of screaming. They pried up the vinyl siding where wreaths of spore had lodged for blossom and they wormed their way between the blue. Certain men slid their fingernails into the locks, shaped for this instant. There were so many ways of entrance and only one clear way back out.

In the front room of the house there was a picture of the house.

Through the front door window in the photo you could see the same photo behind the glass, and if you looked very close you might see the photo lodged in that photo, and in that one, though beyond that who could say what for what or why.

It was a very, very old house, and an even older picture.