Sky Saw by Blake Butler Page B

opened onto a large and long white building, higher than he could crane his head to see to look. The building had thick curtains closed and glowing in each window, silhouettes. He could not find an entrance into the building. He pressed against it. He moved his hands all through it as through milk. Someone was reaching on the far side for him, then he was falling. Then he was ascending again on the stairs, and soon another landing opened down into a house, into a room like the child’s mother’s bedroom had been as a child herself.
    She was there sleeping. She seemed the same age as the son now. Her hair was long and clean and blonde. Her eyes were open as she slept. She watched the son move there above her. He tried to speak and he could not. Through the walls a screeching filled the old air, like the prior tone but backwards, as if captured in his blood. The girl smiled. Above the bed he touched his mother’s face with his face and together they drew air and then again the son was no longer in the room there but still ascending and wished he wasn’t but he was. There were so rooms many the son could notremember each, one after the other. On each the son could not remember how he kept finding his way back to the stairs. There was always more blank space and further eras.

Some levels up, in ripping heat, the dark stitched so thick that it was liquid. The child crept along the frame contorting. The texture of the walls along the stairs felt like a person but it had no color and no sound. He continued on until he felt one of the steps go flat beneath him and the floor spread out into a panel on which he could move further in one direction. The meat of his feet screeched underneath his other layers. A certain length into the space he felt his leg muscles going weak, bowing his stride out in long elastic loops. His bones inside him held the tone. Slow fur grew and subsided on the son’s dry inches, making rasp sounds at his teeth, alive.
    Further out the floor’s face seemed to soften—his feet sunk in as if at flesh. He could no longer locate where the stairs had been behind him. He continued into the brim-mouth gaping, sinking further and further in—something stuck sucking at his eyeholes—corrosive pressure bloomed inbolts, stretching and aching at the flesh around his nostrils, between his teeth. There was a slur then—it welled around him—he could not stop going and he could turn away—he could not blink or cry out in help or warning as there was no word in his blood. Vast stinking suction pulled in against him, stretching his face into a mask that had no edge and gave off smoke. He felt the ball-bulb’s pupils pop one after another, screeching holes that warm nails fit in. Micelight spread into his skull with pissy gold. The gouge sunk nausea through him like a yo-yo—it recoiled into his throat—made his tongue harder—bowing his stomach and the small black sacs surrounding.
    He fought to stand. His back cracked in cartoon screwing. He began to cough a white wide light, a light that cut the son inside him as it sparkled through his gut to course the room where as the tingling settled in his shoulders, he saw among the heavy glow how all the space was stuffed with sleeping people, their mottled bodies packed in naked, flesh to flesh conformed and still conforming. Many of them had no faces. Many others had no heads. Even those that did seemed to blur where they were built, their features changing in floods of color and old mud. The room around them also glistened. There were no girders, no corral bins of the walls—only the mass of bodies comprising distance and nearness. The proximity of their tight-knit skins held each other upright and unconscious, writhing in REM. Their eyeseams stung crusted with yellow sleep shit and their veins twitching in their lids and arms and necks. Some of the heads spoke aloud into the air above them, a language shattered, throttling the room. Some of the bodies tried to