There Is No Year by Blake Butler

Author:Blake Butler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Bisacsh, Families, General, Literary, Experimental Fiction, Fiction, General.
ISBN: 9780061997426
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SKINNING

When the mother woke the following morning her body was as sore as it had ever been. In her sleep she’d drooled and sweated like the son and there the fluids had formed a kind of crust across her body and the bedsheets and the air. The mother’s hair stuck to her cheek skin. The crust had spread across her eyelids and down her nostrils and in the grooving of her ears so that it took almost an hour with her nails digging as at blackboards before she could see well enough to cross the room.

In the bathroom the mother washed her face and body in the shower with the coldest water the house could make, holding her head against the pressure close with her mouth open, sucking spray. She could not seem to bring her mind and body out of sleeping. She could not quite bring her mind to think. The coldest water rinsed the mother and slicked bits off her body into the drain. The shower water exited the shower and the bathroom and the upstairs and the house. In its exit the shower water traveled deep into and through the ground, met with other water that women and men within the neighborhood and others had used to clean or clear their bodies, water which would later be filtered and fertilized and redistributed on the earth—it would be mixed with bourbon in a dark room to help take the shaking out of a certain kind of man—it would be mixed with sugar and Kool-Aid powder at a young lady’s seventh birthday party for the pleasure of the young lady and her seven guests, each of whom would bring a gift—it would be given to the sick to help with sickness. The water, via the mother and her others, would taste delicious. One day the water would return to rain.

While the mother dressed and did her hair and makeup—even in sweat she kept a way—she imagined a set of unseen hands lifting objects from rooms in the house. The mother had already begun packing the house up for moving in her mind. It hadn’t been that long since they packed the last time. A certain percentage of the family’s belongings were still boxed in the garage and attic—things the family did not need really except to help them remember who they’d been at other times—things that could have been removed and burned or melted down and the family would not have known the difference. Material of this nature comprised 62 percent of their belongings’ mass. She imagined massive hands wrapping the beds and chairs and sofas in brown paper and sealing them with tape. She imagined the house lifted off the ground—brought to hover above the next house. She imagined the house turned on its side—the house turned fully over—its contents raining into place—the contents in the new house and the house made of years as yet to come, congealing and all else et cetera gone away. The family would be happy.

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