There Is No Year Read Online Free PDF Page A

long and dark and smooth. The woman did not pass any windows, any people, hangings, doors. The skin of the woman’s legs was bruised.
    The son stayed in the TV room for three days, days counted unnamed. He felt air or fabric move around him, but he did not get up to see who or what was there. The son could not get up. All that happened was he watched the woman walk down halls. The TV movie did not break for commercials. The son had to think to even breathe. The son knew he wanted a roast beef sandwich but could not bring himself to get up and go make it—his stomach speaking words—writing words along his flesh inside him—ageless, lightless. The son could feel the TV’s weight and heat burning deep and deeper through, warping layers, peeling skin. No one came looking for the son.
    Over several hours the son managed to slip his fist around the TV’s extension cord. With concerted effort and metronomic breathing over several further hours, he used his will to tug the cord out of the wall, the tendon of his arm meat seething with the heat of the cord curled up around him and the electric flood sent there inside it through miles of wires through the outlet to the screen, which when pulled as prongs out of the two holes made no stutter—the woman went on walking in the long light. In the light along the woman’s dress the son could read small embroidered script of words he’d said or would say later, stitching down her, near her skin. The woman was getting older. Her hair molted from blond to gray to black. It grew in inches parallel to her encased backbone, thousands of elevators, strands in packs . There was a wet spot between her shoulders, leaking.
    At some point, in some hallway, the woman passed a door. She didn’t pause or stutter in her walking. She didn’t stop to try this passage in this unending hall after all these hours. Just as quick, the door was gone. The son had seen the door. The door was white with a white knob and had a number. The son could not think which one, though he could see it. The woman’s new long bone-white hair dragged behind her on the hall tile.

THE SON’S FINGERNAIL
    Looking closely at the son’s nail—the ring finger on his right hand usually, though sometimes the left, and sometimes on a toe or chewed to slivers in his stomach—one could distinguish a certain shape that in certain kinds of light became another hallway or a wall.
    Other times one could see the son himself there embedded with his face cracked down the middle on the run of weird cell-matter the son’s disease had cut into the nail— the gloss of certain weeks the son had spent upside-down or in a prism — the rings the son would one day wear — the blip — the years uncoming, the windows sloshed with sun .
    Other times there was absolutely nothing and you’d be a fool to think in wonder.
    Look again.

POWER EXIT
    The father lay on the bed. He lay beside the sleeping mother. Into his mouth he’d stuffed ten cigarettes. He gripped their gather like a bat. He inhaled through his mouth and out his nostrils. Filled with smoke, he fainted briefly— a second smoke inside him —and woke up. The house’s power had gone out. There was no light from in or outside. The moon had moved behind something or another, or someone had blocked it, or it was no longer even there. The father’s pupils began expanding.
    In the bed the wife sat up. She asked what happened to the light. The father asked what did she care, she was sleeping. The mother said the light had gone off inside her sleeping also. She said she’d been talking to someone in there and they were looking at one another and happy and things were good and then the light went off and she could not find this person no matter how loud she called into the dark. The father said, How nice.
    Through the air vent to the downstairs they could hear the son’s voice, shouting, though neither said anything about it. The father inhaled his cigarettes and blew more into the