Read Online Sky Saw by Blake Butler - Free Book Online

ice cream inside the microwave and watched it melt in sputtered waves, watched it evaporate, become dust. Now the room felt very small.
    In the child’s head his cells were spinning—his pupils wide with what inside or outside him must arrive.

Through the evening the mother slept hugging her chest. The child had stretched so much in several hours he fit a full man’s shape exactly. She’d tried to coddle the child, breastfeed him full of her again there through his now large mouth, but he refused to stay in bed. He still smelled like the birds. He paced the rooms downstairs and smoked long curls of his own hair—he ate the melting crap plastered behind the peeling wallpaper, his stomach snarled —he sometimes would walk along and on into the wall still there as if unseeing where the house had ended and he was held. The warts and ulcers already broiling up from his sternum would seize and pop in little rhythms.
    1180 felt afraid. She saw an age reflected in the full-sized infant’s eyes—hardly infant’s now— were they? —she could not relay contact. She did not know what had come into the son to make the scaffold of his creature.
    From some short distance, she would have surely mistaken him for 811—sometimes she did regardless—her body sometimes burned. Through long afternoons she locked her door and stayed in the bed watching the ceiling—waiting that it might crack open and offer her a way. She licked the pictures taken of her and the gone man gushing together before the son, in that old air, then, and she stuck them to her body that they might sink in and reconvene.
    Through the vents and at the door crack she heard the child moving through the house. In his sudden, swollen body he’d grown violent. She heard him screeching into nothing, throwing chairs or cracking glass, and when the tones came—much louder now, more frequent—the son howled in texture harmonizing. In other silence, she heard him speak in his new gouging voice. The words bulged in strange syntax, like the book and birds and something other, a shape contained by false edges, beyond air. She could feel certain of her son’s words grow large and move to bang against the air around her, as if with arms. So much speech coming out of the child’s holes—words he’d be meant to distribute over time, which now needed catching up and phrasing. The house’s oxygen strained and clung. The syllables and slurring shook the small walls as 2030’s tongue and lips grew more and more into their own shape. Not knowing what they knew there, but speaking nonetheless.
    The mother wrapped herself in blankets. She felt afraid somehow of growing young, having to see all of this repeated—as if the age the child had gathered in so quickly had been supplanted out from her—she wasmuch closer to the end than him, her meat insisted. She rolled in the sheets and comforters and pillowcases and old afghans someone old had knitted, pounds and pounds of threaded fiber, sunk with sweating among slept years—under their weight she felt she lost her body into mushing, yet she could always feel her head, and she could not quite make her eyes close.

Behind the wall the room that held the film that held the father began to grow so great in mass it warped with heat. It made the walls expand and stick to nothing. The floor squealed in juicing ridges full of pulp. The film had grown so thick among its spools that it began to form in knots and spots of blue emulsion. 811 felt himself become melted with it as it grew gathered.
    The machines began to smoke. It stunk of burning sweat. The air itself began to grow.
    The man without his head and yet still somehow eyes saw the machines steaming from through the wall. He crossed the room toward another wall parallel to the one through which the film room held the father. On this wall he spoke into a set of holes shaped like a star. Someone spoke back tohim, in wrecked language. The symbol of the star slightly changed shape.