In a den of water well beneath them, an oil-thick sea far underground, the amalgamated film spools of the father began ejecting from a small hole in the sand. The film spooled out into the waters, amassing around the spigot in a cloud. The images in replicate kissed in wetness, melding — frames banging into frames — lacing through other older frames of other men and women already held there—any person—black hours slithered through a common liquid, finite years. Fish and bacteria nipped at the celluloid and chewed some of it out, relaying bits of frame into the waters, thrumming with them into foam and lather, subdividing the wet night. In this way the endless film spread along the long floor of ocean, rising up and out and on, while far above, there on the surface, the other men were growing mold, light in their eyes, moving in the same motion the mouth set in the man’s own head vibrating and peeling at the edges of the transparent.
The mother found that she was walking. What was all else had disappeared. She could not remember how long she’d been asleep or ever sleeping. She was not in the house as she remembered making, but a long wide surface like the outside, countless edgeless corridors and pockets white as paper, yet contained. The room’s comb wore a crusting curtain through which another nothing glowed. Her blood slushed on the air around her, built a lather on the floor. The mother could no longer think of what number had been her name for so long, or that she’d had one even then. Each time she tried to think at all she was just walking.
At the end of the hall the mother found the hall opened up into a room shaped like an orb. The room loomed huge and was not like any room come into before in any home. She could see a long way over, on the other side, a door that led into the room that had once been the room the hall led into. She could see a lot of something shining, so much it turned her eyes another shade.
The blank before her held an old sound — the room so wide and pink, squirming with metal. There were little nodules on the ground, emitting more. The nodules tripped her, in slow motion. When she fell, their vibrations caught and kissed her face. Through the nodules she could see into the house as from above. Smoke wrote itself in code over the mud surrounding. Old windows purpled cogging in the light. Inside, she and the child and the father there inside one room, making their day there, all days engorged into one scrunch, so thickly built in gathered action they were not moving. There forms each sat together, holding still, frozen through all the motions there enacted, the air around their faces all a blur. She could not tell what they were doing and did not need to.
She stood again and again and walked and felt the room expand. With each step her organs juggled just a little, ridged and glowing, making room for something else. The tone vibrated through her body. The more she moved the louder that it grew. She kept her eyes ahead. She did not flinch among the weird spray as her blood wrote itself across the air.
BLINK
The mother’s blood formed endless stairs.
The stairs aimed downward, though this kind of downward at the same time was also up, and also was straight forward or backward on any given air, and also never moved at all.
The stairs seemed to never have an end.
The mother found that walking on the stairs felt no different than just breathing, doing nothing. She kept walking, falling forward, taking each stair among the sudden claps of massive light.
The mother felt certain, any stair now, she’d recognize a place she’d been — a room where she had lived once, somewhere to sit.
The knives and blades of every instant unremembered gleaming all around her cut her body, burned her eyes.
The cities waiting to be given.
BLINK
In the sheen of blood there somewhere far down, somewhere way below the house, below the ocean under these houses no one in this book had ever found — a black wet large as silent ideas, piled together in tiny other orbs lathered in bruising juice — the mother touched the first end of the film of all their years in all their minds — hers and the father’s and the child’s — each of the many men — each of the inches of the house. She looked into the frames and saw her many versions, the fray of the earth set in the warped celluloid — she saw the slush of those gone bodies, their screech and stutter, speaking all through her with one word, a sound like the tone through all the days there at once, all the words inside them, vibrating her lips. She inhaled the word where she’d just thought it and felt it spin in her again and come back out, its digits blurring in her colors.
She fed the flat end of the film into her mouth. She could taste the emulsion and the shade of each frame going through her. She ate each frame slick and small, the film there threading in her blood and organs. She chewed until her jaw hurt, then she sucked. Then she was only ever drinking, then only breathing, being, then just nothing. The film showed through her skin. The space around began to lean and change its color. Her form stroked phrases on the air. It spoke in code and complex whining that made the skin along her forehead eject jewels she’d swallowed in the night — jewels from necklaces and rings she’d worn in other rooms for occasions and ceremonies, the endless people, some of which she could recall. The numbers all bled together. 1, 6, 15, 28, 45, 66, 91, 120, 153… No. The presence made the ceiling above her shape turn translucent, but with such strained eyes even inside her she could not see. She was getting stronger through and through in old milk, though not enough yet to crush the crystal screeching in her gums.
BLINK
BLINK
The mother’s shape was turning inverse. She was so wide now she could not stand up on her own — and yet the presence’s long voice made the hair on her cheeks and forehead quiver. Her tendons stung so strained under duress that she would wobble horizontal in sick dance, the wall weight shaking song out of her mouth. 190, 231, 276, 325… finite, unending — each fluted inch producing many new, and each new inch producing also in the midst of its production other inches and thereon — her and the wider lining stretched inside — her throat swelled up with cells like little hallways, bedrooms, pockets waiting to be filled. The mother’s glands grew larger than her head, the mother’s head itself hung fat, encrusted, lined and bloating through its space and space surrounding speaking. Her flesh pocketed with nests. Tiny winged things snurted from the mother’s mouth and packing in along the walls — eggs giving birth again, again, again, eggs giving birth to eggs — each as before imprinted with a language she could now somewhat in some way read, the barf of phrase and shit of sound strumming her slick with old orgasm, erupting tunnels — the flesh around her eyes hiding her eyes. Her backbone crimped till she bent up and over, back between her flabby curtained gut, all the way around, around, around in spiral until she’d knotted to a dot. Against her mind the space of days touched submerged again along the fruit rash of her labia and blouse, her years there held inside her wanting all other years back. For lengths she seemed to be floating on an ocean of old sweat and acid, her stomach full not of this ruined presence, but more light. There were so many other of her crushed upon the air there — husks of her she’d hid or lost to smear or deformation — the mother with mouth froze open and fingers crossed behind her back and knuckles riddled with so many rings they were not so much fingers as spiny, metal, gleaming knobs — the mother mushed in old mold from one she’d buried deep the longest, the one with the fleshy spirals hid up beneath her bitten nails, flesh all riddled with tattoos, a catalog indexed names and dates and numbers, textures beyond touch. Their colors gored all through the feeding prisms turning off and on again in strobe clotting the walls inside the sound. The house would reappear around her shape in clicks and patches, gone slightly longer every instance. The birds and eggs in nests in each of her there lathered over, crushing each other in the soft devices rolled, the color trapped in her sockets, an old flesh rising.