Читать книгу Sky Saw - Blake Butler - Страница 15

These were the decomposing years. There was air that made the moon go blue.

These were days of no new healing, days undone by knives.

1.SAFETY SCISSORS—First known to have turned on the students in a fourth grade art class in an aboveground bunker in Des Moines. The children had been assigned to design effigies of themselves. The teacher had put on a record of Christmas music, though it was not Christmas. The children had had their milk. Suddenly, the teacher reported, they began snipping at their faces. They gashed their hair in chunks. They slit their necks and spoke through the incision. By the teacher’s word—herself unharmed—the child’s eyes were not there. Said teacher serving 25 to life.

2.PINKING SHEARS—The effect of these on a length of bed sheet. The effect of these on a length of cheek. The effect of these on a length curtains, cream, bird wings, film, your mother. Where were you? Why did you not answer when I called?

3.MOWER BLADES—At some point the earth was air and air was earth and through the earth the blades moved churning, routing tunnels, forming combs, combs in which the young lay rolled in wombs or chewing Crisco, moaning for the moon. These blades were the first that did not cut.

4.SHAVING RAZORS—They came for us in swarms. Through the strip malls, sung like bees, kissing at plate windows, scratching, making runes upon the arm, derouting feed tubes from mother’s babies through and through them, even sometimes making small men’s faces clean.

5.I DON’T KNOW WHAT THESE BLADES CAME OFF OF—They were so large. They fell from nowhere (we can agree to call the sky nowhere…

I believe we can).

(Will you please help?

)

These blades landed on expressways. They crushed the green out of tall young forests that had begun re-growing in the raze. They knocked the birds off branches and smeared their eggs into the ground. The blades sung with sound of vast incision. The blades filled the store aisles all swum in contained light. In these blades you could see some head reflected, though never quite the one you wear.

The other things that fell—not knives, but liquid—trash, or parts of people—of these things do not ask. There was nothing in this salt mound left to await, even in the most hopeful of the people.

Still, cuffed in the black, what could manage still made their way, all filled with hidden surfaces and blood miles.

There were a billion half-rebuilt homes stuffed in this era. Much of the new houses’ construction had been abandoned underway. The land had been annexed, named and numbered, priced, the dirt laced with wire, the trees with censors, streets with poly-buffered trash—a hundred-thousand megamansions lined by stained glass window big as other houses’ sides and encrusted with colors that did not quite exist, invented for this house alone—homes with yachts moored in the day room in case someone wished to feel suddenly at sea—as on the water, I can sleep—backcracked acts of magic performed in private parlors by computer on marble stage, under neon lights left blinking, blinking—rooms all gathered hard around a hole through which one could look down through the earth, see the shells and shelves it held encrusted, owned—we own you—all of you are all of ours—rooms each forever spun in spirals and injecting you with speech beyond a skin—walls all old and stuffed with screaming, a cold reminder of who’d they’d held, what could have been inside them—would be—was—each instant held forever in awaiting for the next to press against it, push it down into the black catalog of the cells of the unseen.

I could go on at what these days were but the truth is I am tired. Would you even believe me if I did? I’ve spent enough years with my face arranged in books. I’ve read enough to crush my sternum. In each of the books are people talking, saying the same thing, their tongues slim and white and speckled with the words.

I don’t want to be here. I want to get older. I want to see my skin go folding over.

Someday I plan to die.