Sky Saw by Blake Butler

food—the white pecans and goose hair
    I swear she had it in for both of us
    As I did too
    I would tape her hands together for our sleeping but by midnight she’d chewed through
    She took to knitting a parachute in case the world slurred sideways or inverted
    There were so many things to come, she swore
    My eyes by now were mostly swollen lids
    I walked in the patterns I most remembered to our bedroom and rolled myself into the moth-made bed
    For once I found the way to sleep by simply sleeping
    I hid inside me in the world
    I’d half cracked a dream of false condition—free fast food, water parks and mega-money—when I felt my wife’s tongue in my cheek
    It moved around inside me as if searching, as if after some compartment I had not found, the most mashed part of me stored white inside it, some lick I’d managed to keep mine
    Her tongue touched my own tongue and made me speak a language I’d never heard
    Those old tongues in me all full of other people
    My wife there all above me in no light
    We had been together for exactly fourteen days through all the banging
    She ate my breath and held my hands
    She let her tongue continue slit so far down deep into my throat I could feel it coming out the far end
    I could feel it squeegee through my balls, the halls of ugly others of me all inside them, also speaking
    Knowing all of our old names
    It folded through me like a waking
    Where I would go to be alone

Very soon our skins had changed
    I heard the sound of metal drumming
    The walls inside my sleep were slurred and pocked with goiters
    There was a swan, a goose, a chicken—all of them pecking at my head from the inside—while on the out my wife would shriek and she was in me and I was in her—so
    Then was someone other also too
    My wife swelled up only from one point, her private center, while the rest of her curled dry
    This was all within a matter of an hour
    Her front became a thing against which I could lean
    Then it became more than that
    I could forget that I was there, though when I did this my wife would try to drink my body
    My blood and such shit
    The other of us wanted mass
    Each inch had its own inches to derive and to comply to
    My wife gave it all the rest that we had saved
    She ate the ash that shook off from the ceiling
    She made me go out into the yard and dig up a certain kind of nit—a thin translucent nit no bigger than an idea
    The nit had a massive nest of eggs just like it, in its image, as were we now
    My wife gave each one a little pet name before she slurped them through her sternum to the child
    The nits replicated and came back out of her through where her holes were
    As had I once been created, as had you
    There were webs or nests all through the bedroom and beyond
    This was all within a matter of an hour
    One then another
    My wife tried to hug me to her chest
    I said Ouch a little, and she echoed it back at me
    There were new lines in her eyelids and what beneath them
    She was already unfolding
    I felt my ribcage folding inward as the form inside her stomach kicked me in my own
    She lashed and gnashed and shrieked up steam shaped like my face

I kept the door between us mostly always after
    I slept with knives and mirrors and a bell
    I heard her in the old rooms brimming over
    I heard the child inside her coming out
    There was a smell and some kind of gonging
    I couldn’t see, I closed my eyes
    My body moved me through the house
    I felt my each inch spreading out
    There was more of me than I could need in any instant
    There were more years then
    There was the new edge of the night

Inside the house Person 2030 sat silent with his eyes closed scrawling drawings of himself. In each picture he’d made his gut appear enormous, like his mother’s, filling up most any page—another person lodged inside him, like his mother. In some pictures the person was hair-covered, while in others it had no openings.
    The child had made hundreds of copies of himself. Each one he named with longer