Free There Is No Year by Blake Butler Page B

the household, its wallpaper, read aloud another line . These words came through him as more beeping, forming chorus, though now the mother, inside her, could understand. She could hear the voice as if it were her speaking. She fought within her to form breath. Doors inside the house. Doors in other buildings. Windows, vents.
    The mother turned inside the sound to shake the bathroom door’s knob with all her fingers. She tried to think of the woman’s name so she could call it out, then realized she did not know the name at all. This woman could have any name.
    She could be Janice or Doris or Euphrasie or Kathleen. The mother had this list of names inside her again, female: other mothers . She could be Mary Anne, Sally, Barbara, Arlyn, Mary, Jan; she could be Grace, M., Linda, Regina, Anna, Annie Ruth, Phyllis, Polly, Addie, Afeni, Cherry, Salomea, Joan, Komalatammal, Doreen . . . the names came on and on, in spinning, as for combinations on a lock. The mother tried to say the same name as her name, or her mother’s, or the father’s or the son’s, but she found she could not recall any of those names. Her breath sizzled inside her. She leaned into the door. She squeezed.
    These walls aren’t even here, the man said behind her.
    The man took her by her hand.
    The mother started to rip herself away but the man’s hands’ grip was strong and now the fingers were all warm—blistering, even. She felt wet all up in her buttocks and her navel.
    The man stretched the mother’s arm and placed her hand against the wallpaper. The ridges slightly writhed. The man’s gone eyes.
    Feel, he said.
    She felt.
the house there all around her, laughing
all through the roof and walls, the sound
in light, the child’s name rerepeating
names in names in names on names

VOW
    The mother loved the couple. She wanted them to have the house.
     
    She wanted them to move in and live there right now. There was room. They could share the space together while she and the father looked and found another house. Or, perhaps, the mother mentioned, with her eyes closed tight inside her head, all of them could live together in this air together. They could be two mothers and two fathers, or whatever. All of them in one.
    That is ridiculous, to think that, the mother said aloud just after, and yet knew some small to large part of her meant what she had said, and did not wish she didn’t. She could not remember the names of even just the people in her family, much less anybody else. All of these words together in the mother’s head, and still the beeping. A furry evening, all this light.
    The mother lay face down on the floor.
    She lay face down with arms splayed out beside her and listened to the air inside the home’s vents gushing, coming out to feed her, warm.

OFFER
    When the father got home from work that morning, the mother was in the kitchen. She was sitting at the counter on a tall stool with her legs crossed and her back toward the door. He seemed to not have seen her in months, or years. The father knew the mother would not believe his explanation that the streets were getting longer. He’d been getting up earlier and earlier to make it to his desk on time and his desk kept getting smaller and he kept getting home later and later and his fingernails kept growing. The last several nights the father felt sure that he’d come home, gone upstairs, taken off his clothes, gone to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, gotten into bed on one side— he had not noticed the presence or absence of his wife —rolled over on his side, gotten out of the bed on the other side, gone to the bathroom, splashed his face again, put on the same clothes, walked out the door. It took several full tanks of gas to get to work and back. The father had clocked the distance on his odometer and it always stayed the same.
    That night on the way home he’d stopped and eaten books at a restaurant he’d never seen. The restaurant was next to another building he