Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler Page B

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    This is the mouth of the sewer. Vortex of lost balls. Remember how on hot days you could see the heat rise in wavy lines. How on that first day, after six hours of torrential downpour, the manhole overflowed and bubbled, and the water spread out from around it, washing sludge and shit into the street.
     
     
     
     
    This is a makeshift graveyard where we all buried our pets. No one could say who’d started, but you could count a hundred markers: cats, dogs, ferrets, snakes, hamsters, goldfish, lizards. The dirt was soft and loamy, fat with earthworms, ripe, alive. In April the flowers grew here first. Remember when Moxie died—followed by both Moonbeam and Skipper within hours, each living off the other, connected in the pulse—my father carried them one over each shoulder. He made me watch while he struck ground, heaving. The emphysema had him too. My mother began to recite a benediction and he told her to shut her mouth.

     
    This is blacktop concrete, great for skinning knees.
     
     
     
     
    This is a children’s playground.
     
     
     
     
    Imagine secondary drowning where inhaled salt water foams up in the lungs.
     
     
     
     
    This is a spacious 4 bed 2.5 bath colonial with formal dining area, fireplace, walkout basement, in-ground sprinklers and a kidney bean shaped pool.
     
     
     
     
    This is the Anderton’s, the Banks’s, the Barrett’s, the Butler’s, the Carlyle’s, the Canter’s, the Crumps’, the Davidson’s, the Dumbleton’s, the Fulton’s, the Grant’s, the Griggs’s, the Guzman’s, the Kranz’s, the Lott’s, the Peavey’s, the Peery’s, the Pendleton’s, the Ray’s, the Rutledge’s, the Smith’s, the Stutzman’s, the Weidinger’s, the Woods’s, the Worth’s.
     
     
     
     
    Imagine shallow water blackout, heart attack, thermal shock, and stroke. The skies alive in color. No light, no sting, no sound.

     
    This is street number 713, abandoned since I was eight. Murmur of murder. Phantom life. The paint was green and chipping. The grass had grown up around the hedges, the trees leafless all year round. Sometimes in the evenings you’d see a light come on upstairs. Remember the summer some kid’s cousin went in during night. How he didn’t come back out for hours, and later they found he’d fallen through the stairwell and snapped his back. Remember the way I sat up all hours as a preteen already balding, staring through my bedroom window at the house with one eye and then the other.
     
     
     
     
    This is the last square of the sidewalk.
     
     
     
     
    This is telephone wire.
     
     
     
     
    This is mud.
     
     
     
     
    This is a rowboat, long abandoned, rotten, mired in stagnant water.
     
     
     
     
    This is the steeple, still uncovered—the high mark of the flood’s thread. Remember the copper swallow of communion, the tab pressed against the tongue. Remember trying to imagine how my father could stand the burn of every evening; how his throat must have been mottled from all he’d poured through there, I imagined. How he’d seen me come home through the front door in my Sunday suit and spat.

     
    Imagine the ocean approaching overhead. Imagine waking up under dripping ceiling. The puddle plodding on the carpet, the water already having filled mostly up the stairs. My parents’ bedroom on the first floor. The coughing swallowed, calm. Remember my mother’s wet head in the bedroom, a hundred thousand thin blonde protein fingers spreading out as I swam down to kiss her face.
     
     
     
     
    This is a quiet evening.
     
     
     
     
    This—I’m not quite sure.
     
     
     
     
    Imagine nowhere. Imagine nothing. A world all swollen and asleep.
     
     
     
     
    These are the tips of the tallest trees—the funny firs up to their wrecked necks, spreading out distended undersea. See the new nests brimmed with egg. The mothers’ wings weak, flown for hours after food over the flat, shimmering face of endless water.

    BLOOD
    Though we