By Blake Butler
REPLICA
A recently divorced father of two, having been denied visitation by the court on claims of unnecessary flagrance, found himself compelled, in his alone evenings, to build a replica of the house where he’d grown up. The house had long since been demolished-sold at his parents deaths, both within days, to a contractor who had torn the ranch-style 3-bed 2.5-bath down-the father had not gone back since then to see what there now stood. The replica, then, had to be constructed from the father’s memory, however battered in the liquor and the light. He used whatever could be scrounged from there inside the house-there was no room left of the outside. Shanks of his own hair for curtains. Crackers and coasters made fine walls. TV wires transferred something. The man worked day and night, compiling, sometimes stuck hours on a singular detail: the way the lip of the floor coming from the den into the kitchen dropped off several centimeters, rendered in the miniature to scale; the way the living room had forever stunk of sweetish rotting; the loose carpet nail hid in the steps up to the attic, on which one day, crawling, he’d ripped the flesh out of his left knee. He still had the scar sunk in his aging, a slim white stripe of something glown. The replica did not have phones or doors to the outside-though it did have an extra room above the kitchen, a room the father did not notice he had made. As supplies grew scarce, the father used his body: bit of his skin and fingernails, his eyelashes and pimple meat, his blood. He used food he’d planned to eat. He breathed the air out of his lungs to fill the rooms’ air, blew in his speech and smoke. Soon the replica attracted insects, husks that clustered at the walls. The father’s failing body began to give off its skin coming off in flakes, which became placemats, wallpaper, pillows, gowns. Skin under the father’s nails would ache. Nights he slept with the perpetually unfinished house seated on the mattress there beside him like a body, the insides lit with tiny light.
NEW ROOM
In the weeks before the house caught fire, and the family there inside it burned, the house along its longest wall grew out a new room, a room large as the house. In the evenings it could be witnessed during the minutes between the light leaving the air-a shape visible from outside the house but not inside it, and not by those who lived within. From outside the house’s new wing appeared in vast contrition to the previous design-where as the house’s color had been before all of a crème-colored vinyl, the addition was pure black, so deeply stroked with all hues that it seemed to suck the heat out of the air. As well, the addition had a strange, bulbous shape about it, a pustule or a dome, which did not seem well fit at all there to the house’s structure. Neighbors passing the altered house there would not wave, would not stop to converse with the new father about the manner of their days, though any person stopped to press their head against the surface they would have heard their name repeated, called. Inside the house, along the longest wall, the family’s pictures darkened or fell off and shattered or the expressions caught inside them changed-new skin over their faces, tongues that through the glass could move. The wallpaper curled into curtains that stuck to the children’s skin, left bruises. The adults moved the TV so that from the long wall they faced away. For days therein they slept fine. They kissed each other on the mouths or cheeks. They ate and sang and tried to remain feeling only pleased. Underneath its outer layer, the wall wore writing, which in their sleep the family would repeat: In the weeks before the house caught fire, and the family there inside it burned…
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