Scorch Atlas Read Online Free PDF Page B

ready. The time is never. He won’t live.
    And overhead, the flicker: day, then night, day, night.
     
    Some evenings later, I took the child home in a sack provided by the state. He could not yet be exposed to sunlight, considering the sky—scratched and black and bumpy. I hadn’t seen a bird in weeks. The air was full and smelled of burning and in some winds, seemed to speak.
    With the child, the state had sent a pamphlet of instructional directives. The list weighed twenty-seven pounds. I memorized the key points in my downtime, aloud and sing-song, a dream hymn—
    - There are holes in every home.
    - Consider the effect of certain light in/around/against the child and/or its skin.
    - If you become tired, someone is always awake somewhere. Rest well.
    - Try to smile.
    - Effective punishments of rash behavior in the infant may include: threat of hair loss, short confinement, gravel picnic, bad percussion, systematic slurring of education, heavy bath.
    - Sometimes, to invoke power, pretend the child is not quite there.
    - Sometimes put the child’s eyes to your eyes.
    Despite whatever medication they’d injected, or what creams I might apply, the child’s skin kept mostly muddled. His rind was thick and multicolored, prone to sore. He often oozed. He smelled of
cabbage. He was in there, still, I knew. I had to peel his lids to see his pupils spinning—neon yellow, again like Father’s. He seemed easy in his body. He came up to my waist. At six days old, he ate two-fisted from the fridge. I could not keep anything slick or sweet around. He ate the meat before I cooked it. He drank the soup straight out of cans. He’d burp and laugh with his whole body.
    His genitals were shriveled and oddly colored.
    His fingerprints were whorled.
    On okay afternoons, we went walking through the forest that had choked the half-backyard. The trees were gnarled and beat and bare of leaves, save for in spots so high above us we couldn’t see, in which case the blooms of mold became a canopy. There’d been a stream here somewhere once whose nightly murmurations sent me somewhat sleeping—but now it’d evaporated or sunk to mud. The yard as well was strewn with garbage. There were never any men. We ran neon tape behind us to mark the way. We walked into the fold. I showed him where I’d laughed once, and said what had been there then. The dirt often seemed to breathe.
    At the wide-warped bow of land burnt by lightning, ripped wide-open, slick with mud, I told my huge son of the house we’d had there when I was his age, before the running, before the rape.
    At the raze of black rock damming the river dry, I described the days I’d gone swimming with my brother—the water level just above our stomachs, the current ever-begging to take us down.
    I did not tell him what I would have done differently, had I known then.
    We glimpsed the charred valley where the sun rose sometimes
    and the bulb of maggots over McDonald’s
    and the crisp crust of something unknown on the cold sand where I and his father had dug our dinner. I tried not to speak ill of that sore man, that absence. I tried not to let on my vehemence. I spoke in rhyme and benediction. I kept any anger hidden, scrunched to a tight pellet in my stomach, seamed with heat.
    Mostly, through all my talking, the boy blinked and cawed and chewed his lip. Sometimes he’d respond in giggles, grunting, sinking his teeth into his bone. Whether he understood or not, it didn’t matter—my words were seeping in. They’d spread his flesh and find a holster. He’d look back one day and understand.
    I’d make this world somewhere to rest in. He’d remember.
    We would not grow old alone.

     
    As weeks got worse—the earth’s plates snapping; the flies at the window cracking the glass; the stitch of rhythm in the incision of the earth sinking in itself—my boy continued to grow faster. I could not sew fast enough to clothe him. He would stretch a pair of pants in several days. In his