Sky Saw by Blake Butler Page A

numbers that weren’t numbers. The paper filled the room. It caked around his face and made it hard to breathe. There was so much paper. The pages that appeared blank were fat with certain words where the child’s sweat had kissed against it. His arms were throbbing. He could not stop drawing. His stomach in the pictures kept on growing and in his real stomach something moved—an odd shape shaking through his inseams, against his blood—he felt it stretch up along his body to his finger.
    He bit his finger, sucked the foam. Among the mottled knots of flesh and tissue, there were a set of keys, a keyboard organ made of organ. The keys each had a different word imprinted on them. Each of the keys, when played, made the same sound. The child touched notes and felt his fingers burning. He felt the notes inside his head. For each note there were endless others at the same time in it bending what the note had meant to mean, and yet once played there was no way to unplay it.
    Outside his shape, he heard the other sound, the shrieking of the tone, again beginning— a tone, he realized, made of every sound he’d heard or uttered here so far and so too would utter then in years to come; these words that made him, in the book, and all the books read or dreamt of as they passed the words into the book of him in its creation. He’d heard the tone many times before but never in a room here by himself. It struck the air so loud it shook his body to its strands—he could see straight through his skin—his skin now newly rashed in bumps that matched the pattern found on each of the bodies of him that he’d drawn, and too the bodies in the bodies growing, written in their 2D lard. He moved through the room’s light toward the sound. At first it seemed to come from one direction then it spread out into spirals. In the spirals the child moved. He wobbled through the kitchen to the hallway where down the hall he saw the door.
    He had been told not to touch this door. The door would burn him, the mother warned in her sleeping. The door would eat your mind. It is terrified of everything. Along the hall the child bonged back and forth between parallelwalls. He shook inside himself where the blood inside him bonged along also. There were pictures on the walls of earth from far away and overhead but he elected not to see.
    The door had not a knob now but this did not stop him from making it come open.
    Behind the door he saw the private stairwell where his mother once with another man had hid, though now instead of down the stairs went up.
    Each stair had a unique symbol traced in dark epoxy.

The child could not quite see as he ascended. He could not see the frame of the house or its condition or the way the space around him stayed one size as he moved forward on its air. The stairwell seemed much thinner than it should be in some places, so thin that the son had to turn profile and scrunch against his side, dragging himself upward using his convulsive muscles to draw himself along the banister in shifts. Sometimes the stairs became automatic and the son could hold on and ride clean.
    At various points along the incline the stairwell opened into rooms. The child came upon a room swarmed with tiny flies. They were coursing over objects, like a long land. He moved into them full, regardless, as if he knew why they were there. He recognized the patterns in the layers of them. He listened to them breathe. They caked around the son’s face until there was no face left, sucking, until the insides of the son floweddry. Then all again he was ascending, stairs beneath him. His ass and legs already burned.
    The markings of each stair’s face burned low with an old glow, each feeding some form of murmuration through his legs. The son had no reason to go on upward but he knew he could not go down—there was no remainder of the stairs that had brought him to this level—and with each step the well behind him disappeared.
    Further on the stairwell