Free Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

city, miles from where they’d come.
    In the blanched road they crossed dog carcasses wearing tags engraved with phone numbers, family names. Craters lined with white mud. Burnholes in the earth. The birds that had followed in fat flocks for the first few days had by now fallen from the sky, or disseminated after other things.
    Randall let the girl eat leaves and roots and soft paper and anything preserved or clean enough. He had her chew her hair and nails for protein. When she asked what he would eat, he rubbed his gut. “So much saved up I could go forever,” he’d say in smile, though he knew if they didn’t find good food and water soon, they would wither, slump, and die.
    They continued on together in a straight line beneath the scratched lid of the sky. The sun stayed stuck ahead unblinking. It did not wax or wane or become obscured by clouds or disappear
for night. The surplus glow affected Randall’s vision. The ground and air lightened several shades. Slim spheres of heat moved in his margin—gaudy, blistered blobs of nothing. Inside his head he saw slow color, melted, morphed, and neon-blinked. Sometimes the colors formed his son—two blistered eyes behind his own eyes. His brain burped and gobbled, wriggling.
    He could hardly think of what had been. He said his name over and over under horse breath to keep his mouth shape from forgetting, but soon even those familiar syllables went marred. His skin began to feel taut and made of leather. It peeled in layers. Itched his blood.
    He tried to make the girl stay wrapped in a tarp torn from a camper, but she kept letting it slide off—she wanted to see where they were going, though she seemed to know he didn’t know.
    When they weren’t talking, which was mostly, she hummed in glitches, cuts of hymn he’d never heard. She’d insist he hold her hand.
    They crossed expressways with concrete cracking, large gaps woke in the median where the cars had skidded off, their windows sweltered obscure with condensation, airbags deployed and flaccid, popped. Smoke and ash hung on the air in streamered fuzz. They passed long fields where all the grass had died and ruptured black. Where there’d been forests once the trees had fallen over rotten and turned half to mush against the ground, the dirt riddled infertile with threadworms and microbes, small creatures burrowing spored homes. Drainage ditches gathered backed up with yellowed foam that didn’t give when it was kicked, though the stench was almost liquid.
    Sometimes the sky would open up. Storms would appear out of nowhere, without thunder or a cloud. The only thing that didn’t rain was water. Lather. Crickets. Lesions. Seed. Sand drenched in thin torrential pillars, poured from above by erupted hourglasses. Blades of grass came whipped by wind and sliced the thin skin of Randall’s wrecked head. Peapods, pine straw, even plastic—sometimes they had to dig themselves out of what’d come down. Worse were the insects—gnat, mosquito, aphid—wriggling at their eyes. They picked the shit out of one another’s hair.
    They hid under bridges or in carports that’d been abandoned. They made lean-tos out of rotten saplings, formed pillows from dead leaves. Often within minutes the girl snoozed soundly no matter what surrounded, her small head humming; Randall only
ever tossed. He ripped his hair out in fat folds and threw up. He felt birds rutting in his stomach. His brain fizzled, swelling out.
    He figured the sooner he did not remember, the sooner he would sleep.
    The girl kept singing, making noise. She didn’t seem to notice what they’d come through. She announced what she’d be when she grew older. An astronaut, she said. A breadmaker. Randall often could not catch his breath.
    They saw ruin and rocks and shit and stinging in long plates of earth congealed.
    They saw whole buildings made to dander—where there’d once been people, now burned black and shrunken.
    Sometimes Randall convinced himself