There Is No Year by Blake Butler Page A

black object on the neighbor’s yard grown even larger, edging out into the street, so large you couldn’t even see the neighbor’s house behind it.
    During this last drive he’d felt his eyes forcing themselves closed stuck on the highway, and for long distances with his eyes closed he drove and drove.
    Days were weeks and weeks were days inside the father. At least that’s what the banner along the longest office hallway said, black text on white paint right outside his cubicle:
    DAYS ARE WEEKS AND WEEKS ARE DAYS INSIDE YOU
    Looking too long at the words’ letters in relief would cause the father to go gooey—soft umbrellas in his thighs.
    The father had never seen another body on his hallway, though he could hear them through the walls: typing, typing, breathing, eating, stuff.
    God, he was hungry, the father realized, in third person. Tacos! Meat! Though there wasn’t time enough to take a break now, the father knew. No, he had this box that gave the light out, which he must attend to, into which he also sometimes typed.



HOLE
    In the front room, through the open door, the son saw how ants were coming in. The son thought he’d shut the door but it was open. The key was no longer in his hand. There were hundreds of ants, thousands of them, clustered in weird lines along the carpet, headed up the stairs—new crudded skeins of running cells—black—like glistened mobs of moving mold. They were everywhere, innumerable. They streaked in long neat lines up the house walls and into cracks riddled with holes. They made a buzzing sound like bees.
    The son stood in the flood of influx with them swarmed around his legs. The son could not unfocus his attention. He was staring at his cell phone, which he’d taken from the other son. The handset had shifted color. It was gray now—gray as gross birds, birds which for weeks had flocked at the son’s window, peering, chipping their whittled beaks on the long glass, wanting in, chirrup-chirrup-chirruping.
    The son’s phone had made 488 new outgoing calls in the last half hour. One specific number had been dialed 237 times. The son did not recognize the numbers. Some of the numbers did not have enough digits to be completed. Some of the numbers had digits that weren’t digits. The phone had also received a handful of calls incoming but the numbers were in encoded scripts the son could not decipher. All of the numbers that had been stored in the son’s phone—his mother’s cell phone, the house number, his grandmother’s house (the grandmother dead now and her number disconnected), 411 and 911, the number of the people who’d lived next door at the house they’d lived in before—where a little boy that looked a lot like the son had lived and he and the son had played together every day and the son had spoke into that child’s head, giving into him the words he could create outside his body, overflowing from his silent book, until soon thereafter, in the spreading, the son got sick and swollen up and blue, bedridden, and then the neighbor was not allowed to see him and then they moved—all those familiar digits had been replaced with one single listing. It hurt the son’s eyes to try to read the number. The phone’s display was glowing very brightly.
    The son stuttered upstairs toward the hall. The son crushed thousands at his feet. With each ant he crushed another thousand, each of them with eyes. All the eyes he crushed stuck to him, staying.
    Certain of the stairs had been eaten through so completely the son felt his foot go through, sucked into the house.
    The son felt sick. His eyes were spinning. The son bumped and fell against the wall, raining a sheath of loose ant matter off the drywall, off the layered phrase of paint, each layer making the house that much smaller , along the stretch of dry partitions, creating space, the ants made veins toward the ceiling—webwork. The veins throbbed and fed the bodies into the overhead. The ants had ruined the