There Is No Year by Blake Butler

felt sure he recognized, as it had an unusual shape. He knew the second he saw the restaurant that he would eat there. He’d given up on trying to make it home in time for family dinner. He was so motherfucking goddamn hungry. The restaurant had no sign. The tacos were delicious, the best he’d ever had. He couldn’t even think of how a person could make a taco that tasted like these—they seemed to contain the pleasure of a whole meal in every bite. In each bite of the taco the father tasted steak and onions, ranch dressing, chocolate cake, bananas, gummy spiders, rum, and Cheetos. Those things all together tasted somehow very good. He’d ordered extra to bring the mother some so she could try them but after a while in the car he’d gotten hungry and he’d eaten them and he felt awful and too full, but would have done it again given the opportunity—given even thirteen hundred complimentary tacos, he would have eaten every one. The father had a new favorite place to eat and he planned to keep it to himself.
    The father was walking up behind the mother. He moved slow, trying to be quiet, though he knew she knew that he was there. He found himself walking on his tiptoes, slow and lurching, like a man who’d come to kill. The father put both hands across his mouth to keep from giggling. His teeth bit at his one hand and he was bleeding and the blood was in his mouth.
    The mother at the counter hunched and cringed with the father’s every step. She felt afraid—afraid not for the father’s silent acting, though she could sense it, but because the couple had made an offer and she didn’t know what he would think. The phone had begun ringing almost as soon as she’d closed the door behind them. Within the hour a contract had been delivered in a black envelope by a private courier who appeared to have approached the house on foot. They’d offered the full asking price, in paper money. Afterward, the mother felt so cold. She put on as many layers as she could manage, the oldest clothes stuffed in her drawers—dresses, shirts, pants, shoes she hadn’t worn in ages—back before she became pregnant with the child. With so many layers laid around her she could hardly move her arms or legs, her body, heat amassing in her thighs, so large, though inside her, at the center, her stomach roared.
    Behind, the father moved closer and still closer. The father’s mouth drooled, overflowing. He had his hands worked into weapons. He closed his eyes.
    When the father reached the mother he put his head square in the center of the mother’s back. He pressed with his forehead in a way that made the mother’s muscles stiffen, through the fabrics. They hung there slightly humming, their two bodies perpendicularly aligned.
    Without turning to look at him, without surprise, the mother lifted the offer paper off the counter. She read it softly to the husband like a bedtime story, her voice rather raspy and unconcerned, feeling the sulk and burn of coming crying making her whole throat run with slush. The father’s body tensed against her as she spoke the couple’s offer’s words, the formal language. The mother felt the father remove his head and stand straight up. There was a grubby guzzling sound then, as if inside him the father were compacting trash.
    The father reached across the mother’s shoulder and took the contract from her hand.
    In the smallish light there in the kitchen for a minute the father seemed to stare straight through the paper. If he had seen through the paper, the father might have seen a person at the window. The father’s hands were shaking. He found himself already holding a pen, the logo of the place where he’d eaten dinner kissed upon it. The father moved to press the paper flat against the mother’s back.
    Through her flesh the mother felt the father sign a name—not quite his name, she could feel that—the loop of lines and dots and holes went on so long.
    The father crossed the other name out and