The mother fumbled down along the stairwell reeling, feeling at any moment ready to go toppling headfirst, though somehow keeping her posture aimed in weird momentum by dragging her arms out beside her in a thin X on the air.
At some point the walls became so close together there was no space at all between them, and yet she walked.
The mother went down and down. The surface of the air seemed to suck around her. She found herself head-on, faster and farther. She could not stop her body coming with it. She opened and her eyes and closed her eyes and opened them and watch the pattern of the texture change: like the language in the book she read the child would, the same symbols in her lids. Without seeing, she went farther down along the stairwell than she’d ever before been — past the bit of wall on which she had meant to mark her future child’s arriving height — past the bit of wall that’d crumbled open and through which she could not see, but could reach her arm up to the elbow — past the low water mark even, where the water had once sat still and teeming, waiting for its next fit of rising — she felt nothing. She went so deep beyond the house there was no air — the dark around her held together chalky, ashen. She could no longer measure her impression of her descending of the stairs. She slipped and twisted in the darkness but there seemed no context to it, no dimension — as if she’d woken up inside a pillow full of dust, the grain clung in her throat and whites of eyes. She fought to find a ledge or other landing to the space there while in the dark she sunk straight down — not quite free falling, but growing lower, ground in amongst sand. She felt it chewing at her knees and cheeks together. She opened her mouth to call out for someone—who? — and in the dry dump her cheeks bloomed empty with fat pits. The gums inside her ate the language. She could feel her shoulders ripping up. Her fingernails seemed to pull out from their sleeves. It pulled all through her.
The mother vomited a bird. First there was one bird, then there were many, their tremble rummaged up her middle, from her throat. They scratched her cheeks and pore meat with their clawing, her O-hole stretched wide as it could go. Enormous birds, she saw, as white as nowhere, thrushed with feathers matted in a gel. They kept coming up out of her in a chain, all gushing and aflutter—silent—each one imprinted all through and through their gristle with a word, one word for each all written in their linings and down the contours of their suits, the word and word again all densely textured, though the mother could not read the words as they emerged — she could not make out the letters or what about them, or their presence there at all. Each bird’s word was its own word for it alone, though all their screeching came out of them the same, brief and lame and hellish.
Once emerged, the birds stayed thick around her rushing, flapping fat, their gross warped wings beating at her body, pulling her back up out from the fold. She felt their enmassed cluck-caw on her eardrums and their blown motion somehow muffled into one continuous barrage, their note-stung tendons pulsing at her hot as if after some way through her body there back in, finding none — altogether in their presence wanting someone other than she was.
The sky above the house began to blink — the tone surrounding as it stuttered as something again soft inside it came apart and lathered down on us in waves — old fires burning still in all the houses and phantoms fucking — the air all written full of what any evening left alone must do and always would.
Somewhere elsewhere hours or days later, she could not tell and did not think to try to, Person 1180 found herself inside a box. There held a long low light like the kind of light along a longer hallway, someone in a far room glowing with TV. Her skin was so thin that she was see-through, held inside her, her organs putty colored and dented in. Her blood curled through the corridors like tangled instruments between. There was language cut into the box above the mother’s face. She could not read. She had no idea how long she’d been inside the box, or how the box was any different from any hour held before or coming after. She could not remember her number or anything about any room. There was a rumble spinning through the flat panes. At some points, through glass, the mother saw some of the men who’d filled her up, or who she had seen inside their eyes how they had meant to. Some of the men were holding infants, and those were eating. What were they eating? Some of the men were exactly her. Each time she closed her eyes the box was still right there, its darkness burning.
Person 811 moved toward the polished wall. Tucked in the far corner there, under a small sheath of black protective plastic that burned his hand, he found a panel that instead of showing outward, opened in. Through the panel, he could see a bulging naked woman standing in another house. She was pretty, he thought, beyond the lesions. She was …
Person 811 stood with one hand spread at the glass panel over the woman, stroking with his thumb and his ring finger the raspy spread of where her body breathed. The woman’s eyes were closed and kept on closing — innumerable lids. Her gut was stacking up at each new instant with fat in fat like pyramids. An ageless dark rouged through her shape tracing her veins. His tips ached where he could not remember before that he’d touched her, and not the other way around. Other men before him had left their mark there on the glass from the same rubbing, though the father could not smell them or defer — he could only taste the itch of it.
Against the screen he laid his head and heard the shrieking.
Before I was born inside the mother I slept inside the wound for 37 years
There was a spot between the gloss and sill where I would settle in and suck the dust
My mother’s hull had many doors wedged in her knees and neck, her belly
You could slit the locks with one wet thought
I could not count the other women hid among the mother though they filled me turn by turn with sight
For a while I was the women too: I had husbands, blisters, monthly blood of those I had not nurtured
I had bumps all across my scalp, one for each of whom I’d wanted or would awake in wanting soon
I was the child
I as well often was the mother and the father, though they did not have my hands
Nor did I want what hands I had been given
When I slept I dreamt only ever of the Cone
The years went on like that for years
Sometimes what a year was would change in midst of counting
A month would pass and it’d been a week
An hour did it’s thing and it’d been twenty
The space of air outside my mother often filled with dogs
Or it would fill with larvae or with flowers
Some days other men or sounds of men
Inch by inch I watched the years that were not years sludge along under motor oil and ash
What white of wide machines among me scratching rooms and windows into all my eyes
Our hole of god
I heard the evenings counting down
What had been and always be had not yet happened
Inside the house my mother hung long reams of paper, which rats would rip down to use for dens
There were the walls we had repainted