Scorch Atlas Read Online Free PDF Page A

strumming. Something new. Feel my skin go older quicker, the wet running up my old folds. The smell of mold drawn in the water. Toothpaste dinner. Constant wake. My hair draped on my shoulders wet and shades darker, like a scarf. Sopping and sagging I trundle under, wondering how long it would take to prune my tired face unrecognizable.

A JEW, A SHRINK AND AN ASSHOLE ALL WALK INTO A BAR…
    —Thanks for your well wishing. I understand the want for jokes. My throat is ripping, clogged and cracked now. My back creaks when I think. I pray into my dirt most evenings for the urge to snicker again, green. You should see what’s become of our peach trees. The bloat. The blackened axis. The bow and bending of our city buildings. Slow roll of corrosion. If I had the nerve I’d build a guitar. I’d string it with my hair, white at age twenty. I’d play in rhythm with my stomach—the new roar that’s replaced our baby’s bump. The boggy burp’s best bass. Oh, what songs we’d make together, me and my doppelganger, cheek to cheek.

COULD YOU BE DOING SOMETHING MORE?
    —I spend my evenings these days in the kitchen. I knit new clothes for our child. I learned to knit after the death of cable TV. I use colored wires ripped from dumb machines. I would have made him bonnets. A cape. A canopy above his crib. My lips would tickle the stubble on his under-neck once he was old. Tell your mother where you’ve been . Now that he’s quiet and the skies have settled shortly, I hold my grieving in the folds of my elbows, neck and knees. The way time robs in futures pissed. Sleep-rooms in pools up to your crown. I’d have liked to think me kinder, but the neighbor—I hear his kids beg and think: coffin nails . Sometimes I know they’re not even there. That their pounding is only more of my dumb pulse.

HOW WILL YOU REMEMBER?
    —In my loose teeth. In my knocking knees. With the stripe of morning across the yard; where the worms rise, where the earth spits up its dinner. This house grows older with me every night. How I’ll remember? In the burning. In the cloud rattle. Each time the roof thuds above me. Each time I wet my face in squirm. And there’s always all this paper—our receipts, shorthand and thank yous, birthday rhymes composed by strangers; notes and trash and mail unopened; photographs, if water-warped. Sometimes I recite my life aloud for hours. Sometimes I just don’t have the heart.

    GLASS
    The glass came first in early morning. I watched through the only safe storm window. The sound of sky come ripping—some sour music box, cranked to crack. The panes shattered on impact, each giving off a second spray. We watched the dead yards, already buried, now held under new refracted light. Glass over grave sites in display. Glass slit through awnings, billboard faces. The facemasks became more dire in the scatter, each inhale suspect, lined with slice. Glass specks embedded in our eyelids—count the new ranks of the blind. The glass came in many colors: some pure translucent, however tarnished; green and brown burst bottles; backed with silver as in mirrors; blue from Depression-era heirlooms; stained from the awe-stuck eaves of churches. The shriek of glass on glass peeled my skin. The screech of all things scorched around me. The brassy, tinkled detonation. Shards of wronged birds. Real birds impaled and writhing. Even the sun had hid its eye. We were several layers under now. We could not think of other times. We called truce and splayed our fingers. The sky would not forgive.

WANT FOR WISH FOR NOWHERE

    My first child splurged inside me. He ate what I ate—ate it all. There never was enough: my milk, my eggs and honey, my hunks of ham and strange things craved. I picked gnats out of the carpet; chewed through the shower curtain; swallowed blood. Baby hungry. Baby want. His teeth nicked in my linings. He tore my inner-skin, his nails already long and gleaming in the manner of what I used to shave my pits.
    I would not