Sky Saw Read Online Free Page A

slim and white and speckled with the words.
    I don’t want to be here. I want to get older. I want to see my skin go folding over.
    Someday I plan to die.

When I was 1, most nights the house would fill with teeth. They lined the walls and studded the ceiling fans. They would come down like rain and click around my bed. In my head they built a stutter. I couldn’t feel my hands yet but there was something then also in me—something gnawing, something come undone.
    When I was 2, I licked the sun some. I could spread it open with my fingers. I could tell it what I wanted. I could float further than even that.
    When I was 3, the world went flattened and we couldn’t find the streets. My arms felt made of tissue. Words woke up inside my head. I would speak them as if I meant to speak them—as if they’d always been all mine—sometimes their grain would cut my stomach—I felt I did not need the stomach—I felt OK.
    When I was 4, I remember someone standing above me in the night.
    When I was 5, each time I wore white I found myself slowed down. I could see the shapes run out of other’s mouths, and I could see their arms ahead of where they were. I could see their faces stretching white with wrinkle and the degrading hue stuck in their eyes.
    When I was 6, I found the ground got softer if I rubbed it with my shin. There was a certain part of the backyard where I went straight through into a den. In the den there was a man seated upright in a chair and the man told me exactly what would happen.
    When I was 7, I dreamt the names of every child I’d ever have. In the dark I scratched them on my forearms, all fifty thousand. When I woke up my skin was clean, though there were new bruises on my knees.
    When I was 8, I ate a tree. It coming back out was the hard part. That year I saw only the turning weather burn through other people’s eyes. By now my knees had still not healed, and my blood behind them had turned purple.
    When I was 9, I’d buy a new school notebook and get home to find it filled. Often with drawings of myself inside my mother, and often with someone else in me. When I would try to show my mother the pages all became one page.
    When I was 10, I don’t remember.
    When I was 11, I don’t remember.
    When I was 12, I changed my name. I went by blather. I wouldn’t wink unless you knew. My hair went curled. My eyes changed shape. It was only in the dark that I could think.
    When I was 13, I don’t remember.
    When I was 14, I’d hide in bed so many days my skin would stick tight to the sheets—in the end it was the sleep that tore me open. It was soft sleep ate my brain. I met so many men in folds of nowhere—ones I’d found or fucked or scratched the skin on or ate or was ate by or swam with through the ground.
    When I was 15, I found a ring and wore it on my thumb. Each day it got a little tighter. I lost one finger, then another. I didn’t want to quit the ring. It had my real name writ inside the band. I swallowed it with sugar.
    When I was 16, I squirted my first baby as a cuff of creamy cud behind the house. I swear the child had eyes. I worked his girth over with my fingers in the gummy earth, already bubbling, and no matter how hard I packed and patted, I could hear the breathing in my teeth. I hid the patch with nettle. In the morning, the yard was swarmed.
    When I was 17, my parents were carried off into the antbed on the hill. I clawed the dirt for hours and all I came back with was this rash. At night therash would rise up off me and hang above my body. I could hear it speaking in my sleep. I can hear it even now—and now—and now.
    When I was 18, the house’s caulking swelled. The sky would disattach. It would come to curl around my throat. A little lake welled in my belly. Holes opened up inside the ground. I managed not to have them eat me, even when I went and threw myself on in—as if there were a magic sleeve of cellophane around me—as if I needed to go on. I did not need to go