Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

Mostly, his body had gotten used now to nothing. On worst days they’d eaten cloth or rubble.
    What might the child have tasted like? he wondered.
    What would the wife?
     
    In the living room, still naked, mud-clung in long patterns, the father found the mother passed out with her head propped against the TV. She had a bra left on and nothing else, a see-through thing he’d long since gotten over. Normally he would have carried her to bed and tucked her in but this time he left her crooked and wet, eyes aglow.
    In the morning she was still there, inch for inch. Her neck sat crumpled with the burden of her head. He moved to shake her shoulder. Gnats muddled in and around her mouth. The tongue, the meat, already rotting. She’d jabbed a kitchen knife into her stomach. Blood spread around her in an oval. Static seemed to gather at her face. The father stepped back from her, hands wet and trembling. He looked at what she’d done.
    He could hear the dogs outside again, hungry, barking, bashing their bodies at the boards. The sheen of the mother’s blood did not quiver in their rhythm.
    Overhead he heard the baby breathing through the ceiling, smacking its gums.

    Upstairs the child sat swollen even larger—now nearly five times redoubled. In its eyes the father saw translucence, the whirred white flesh of its cornea neon, raw. Its flesh was golden and covered in larvae. It was bigger even than the father.
    “ The second woe is passed ,” it said, giggling and cutesy. “ And, behold, the third woe cometh quickly .”
    The father kept his face turned from the son.
    “Soon your skin will rupture and your eyes will vomit grease,” the child continued, his voice now several voices. “Your balls will pop and worms will wriggle and the air will liquidate. The seas will rush to smash the sky.”
    The breath coming off the child was spotted.
    The spots, together, became light.
    The father felt the thing behind his eyes spin centered, spraying.
    “I don’t even see you,” he shouted. “You’re not there.”
    The child guffawed. It slapped its thighs and spit up. In the spit there wriggled something. The father could not inhale. He hurried past the child and took the tools he’d long ago stored away. He left the attic again without looking. Downstairs he could still hear the child’s cracked cackle even with the door closed and locked again.
    He carried his wife into the backyard by the armpits. The yard was wet and sunk with residue. The trees had rotted and fallen in. Vast shapes moved on the horizon. In the dead flowerbed he found a soft spot where she could rest.
    In an hour he had a hole dug.
    In another hour he had her under.
    Atop the mound of overturned earth, he spoke benediction: what sacred phrases he could remember. His tongue gnashed at his palate though the words were hard to taste.
    That night the sky rained soil.
    At first the father thought the sound of the pounding on the roof was the child’s kick and stammer, the child’s long swelling, but through the crack over the high bedroom window the father saw the great crudded gashings of loose earth coming down. The sun hung somewhere muted, disremembered of its light. He tried to think and felt his brain’s wheels catching, grinding wells into his head. His extremities began to tingle, buzzed by the sudden loss
of flowing blood. He felt lightheaded, zoning, dumb. He hadn’t slept in several days. He sat on the wrecked mattress with his knees crossed. There was an impression left among the shredded bulges where for all those years his wife had laid, and another shaped like him. He rolled onto the ridge between their two spots and wondered how long until the ceiling gave, until the earth grew covered over. He chewed his tongue and breathed and breathed. He could hardly think of who he was. He said his name aloud so he’d remember. In repetition, each utterance grew slightly further off from what it should be.
    Name, he thought. A son’s name.
    Son.
    He