Free There Is No Year by Blake Butler Page A

thought to say something but could not think of what or how. The man stood with his hands clasped in front of him and turned to look at the wallpaper. He leaned his head near to the wall. The mother watched him watch. His gaze was rigid and unblinking, staring straight on into surface. He seemed to be reading something. The mother moved to look as well. The wallpaper was a deep purple with deep purple ridges and tiny buttons in relief. The ridges’ texture was rather soothing. The mother felt her body limp a little. The skin around her eyes grew moist.
    She was not crying, not exactly.
    The man was radiating heat. He had the smell of grass about his breadth, strong arms like the man who’d fixed the mower— and like that man, this man, too, was gorgeous, if with a rash upon his cheek . A sudden stink of slit grass and motor rubbings made the mother’s body lump. She started to ask something, blushing, but her mouth was closed and time had passed.
    Behind them, in the bathroom, the other woman made a sound. A shrill, quick beep, a mouth noise, as if emulating some alarm, or some detector. There was a kind of pitter-patter. Then breaking glass, and wood against wood. A light showed underneath the door’s lip. The woman’s ever-moaning, saying words. The beep continued, high and awful, rerepeated, each iteration slightly shifting, until, in the mother’s ears, the noise became to have a frame—began to take a shape of language there around it. The beeping, at her head, became a name. The son’s name. Son’s name. Beeping. The woman making, again and again there, the title of her child. The word she’d placed on him from nowhere, that had occurred as lesion in her sleep. The woman screamed the name into the walls among the houselight, in the smallest of all rooms, curdling the air. Beeping. Beeping. Name. Name. Name. Name. The mother felt the blood inside her turning hard. And just as quick, the name becoming something other: becoming ways she could not recognize—the utter shifting off from where it’d held him and slipping therein off into a struggling string. Not a name but something troubled. Reaching. Burble. The scream so loud by now it shook the house.
    The hair along the mother’s arms was singing. She closed her eyes and swallowed in the sound. Then, just as quick again, there was no sounding. Silence—or something so loud or strung out there was nothing to be heard. The house as still as any.
    The mother turned around. She moved toward the door where in the smallest room the woman was not moving— so still it could not be . She knocked politely on the door’s face, then immediately again.
    The woman did not answer. A bigger silence. Some nothing larger than the house. The mother opened up her mouth—and again there came the beeping, this time louder, jostling the door, her hair, the ground. The shaking made the mother dizzy, and yet she could not stop—she could not close her mouth.



OTHER MOTHERS
    The mother turned toward the man—the man right there behind her, breathing.
    She’s sick, the man said again. His voice was clear among the noise. Sick, he said, distinctly. He did not seem concerned.
    He splayed his hand on the wallpaper, singling fingers.
    This is words, he said.
    The beeping felt, under the man’s voice, somehow very far away.
    The man ran his thumb along some lines. He read aloud in a strange language, what the bumps said. His skin glistened on his head.
    Under the speaking, by the beeping, the mother heard the broken glass inside the locked bathroom getting crunched, as if under some other bigger object, like the woman, another wanting mother, one day to be . More jostling around, cabinets slamming, spraying water. There was the sound of sawing or other friction on the wall between the tiny bathroom and the son’s. The mother spoke into the door’s face. She tried the handle with her hand. The door, for sure, would not open. A door in her own home.
    The man behind her, rubbing