Scorch Atlas: Smoke House

A story from Scorch Atlas, a 2009 short story collection written by Blake Butler and published by Featherproof Books.

Recorded on location in an office lot.

Nights at home now the house sat wordless, so still the mother could not sleep. The bed cramped small and dirty; the air above her suffocating. The mother in her nightgown, tight, worn ratty where she rubbed her fingers in worry circles. She got up and left her husband crimped with his back toward her on the mattress and went downstairs. She went through the kitchen stuffed full of flowers, long rotten, stinking.