SAL: “We didn’t even have to kill the family next door to kill them. They would be dead the next morning regardless, only now they’d not be having breakfast. The radios played Gravey dictating the moves we made on the FM band so everyone could follow on at home, though to them it sounded like Madonna.”
Name withheld: “I was involved. I was not involved. Both are the same. That’s no more of a confession than pulling your car up in the drive-thru at Arby’s and ordering just enough to fill you up in your imagination. There’s no need for threatening me about getting to go home for saying any different than I have already, a thousand times over, since I was born. I’m a fire. My body is my helmet. Bleat.”
We used our knives to cut the wires down around the neighbor’s house. I ate some of the wire into my mind and felt it bake there, unto dissolution. It had a taste of smolder, its knotted innards fused and twined. The image of the hours burst into the house, laughing at us all forever at the seam of Exit Sky. What words those inches had accrued in shitting information back and forth between the people. I could taste where in the wire the neighbor mother’s speech and seeing, all her wishes her best guesses, had already been rummaged through her coilings hot and hard so many times she hardly had an imagination left. I could taste the remainder of the days of pregnancy about her where the babies had come out. Each of the babies had their own films in them like mine and yours, some of which the father in transcription of flash and mangy memory had tried to store as homemade media on versions of hard drives of the house’s machines before he was removed; the wire had eaten most of that too, by my order, encrypting its data into mental zits. It made the house’s body glow under no moon, feeding a beacon for us to flood forth toward as a beginning with which we could begin to make this home into more of ours. I heard the paint murmuring inside me, baking organs I could spoot into the gaps for insulation, the singing crease. The lawn beneath my body as I walked with arms down turned to velvet Astroturf. The dirt beneath the lawn turned to a putty you could use to seal a tunnel cut through brick. The night sealed us inside it. Insects in its shitstorm murmured words the mother would have one day said had we not come, while in my blood the words she’d say instead became my torso. I had been carrying this moment’s creation in the curls of my black sacs for thirty-four years and a tight collection of horrifying months. Each hour I could not be here in the moment of the passing moment was a death I lived through and would never have again. The boys did not understand this, I knew, and did not need to. They had their own words and hours to carry thick, to lie down inside of without crying on the softest nights knowing what would come for them among some end. They were only partially eternal. They were not yet their own death, so could go on now into any other. As we crossed the lawn of our new victim toward the coming house I made our gang sign with my shoulder at the moon, the throat of Darrel, which could never be destroyed, no matter how much blood was hurtled through it, or what food the raining meat would ruin. The windows of the house our house descending in our vision above the neighbor house reflected nothing back at nothing. We did not appear in the smear, as we had had our own masks made of our faces and wore them now no longer left as masks but accusations of our heads. I could smell America warm for mating, like what else is new. Somewhere nearby men were carving ice into beautiful ideas. The glint of our knives against the window gleam made steam rise, become the planets. We encircled the house kissing the tips of blades. It made a hole around where we would enter. Through the rim of the house I could hear the fourth mother in preparation, rubbing her fingers, breathing the last gas her cells required to make her body’s shape and smell into how it would be when it became. There had to be the exact amount of her left in her and the exact amount left out. The minute had been decided. I led the song in singing as the throat of the moon disappeared behind itself and gave us grace, opened up our pure eternal vision, and in we come.
FLOOD: Indeed, no evidence in the homes of Gravey’s victims demonstrated their penetration. No apparent damage to the sealing or the locks, as if the rooms did not separate their interiors from their exteriors. In cases where the homeowners had alarm systems or watch dogs, etc., the alarms were not reported tripped, nor were unusual activities reported by surviving neighbors, suggesting that Gravey’s methods for entry were unusual, perhaps verbally or otherwise coerced.
We did not need the breath of keys or codes to slit the windows or the doors to allow our entrance. They already believed in us as much as anything could ever, without the necessity of will. All walls are permeable by simply wishing back against them hard enough to stir inside it the wish to be parted. Like this me and the boys came through the brick of any home, and found there the same objects of belonging, like a library full of shit. Once in, the boys at once dispersed into the house in shafts of their own need, bleating their organs on the peace. The gristle of their mind clung to keep their innards from wanting so hard they burst out through their holes as they overturned the furniture and air, sniffing for the remainders of historical calamity we could fuse to right now. Our shapeless song began to splay and flub out of the holes the ceiling owned, turning sudden sense of present tense of coming killing into the night of what had always been the past. The fourth mother had yet to emerge. She had not completed her unknowable, unmanageable mother preparation in skin and nails and hair in the bedroom of her last night with her children in their rooms asleep. The phantom presence of the father in her mind provided us a breathtaking Trojan horse; she lived as if he’d never died, as if he’d been there in the house like any other husband every day since and past, part of Our Country, which is our world. We felt nothing beyond whatever natural border in our minds existed. This was painless to abuse; in passage it became true of every house surrounding: a nation of no father while the mother waits to die: the true nature of adultery. In the house becoming ours the mother wore her whitest gown. She appeared before we even found her. Her name was all over everything, in the sound of her sexlife and want for future, food in the fridge waiting to become more of her. The house clearly wanted her dead, too; it wanted to eat the food itself, to live for itself alone, to be itself and no one’s box; its cells were taking shape in full cooperation for the translation we would provide for what desperately everyday hope she’d tried to smush into the home’s walls to refortify what was not there. Everything had already happened and yet I had to play the part as had been promised. I walked along the long hall lined with pictures of the mother in different bodies than she had now and could never have again, alongside what other bodies the mother had met in nearby rooms and made time with, alongside the kids she’d pushed out of her hole, each of them as well in bodies that no longer fit them. I could hear the mother quiver through the house’s circuits, burning like star meat. She had a few more thoughts to think through unto the becoming zero. Her god was off duty tonight, somewhere like Disney. My teeth were greasy with intent to do exactly what I was doing. I had a boner and a cough. I heard Darrel in me getting stoned on our blood bowling open like locked darkrooms, black cabinets full of speaker coils. I was so ready to be. The smoke raised through my shoulder blades and made me scream in places where my own cells were turning square-shaped like STOP symbols on VCRs. I stopped along the wall and groaned our song some out of my mouth, holding my breath. I could hear this mother on the far side of the drywall. She was reading romance. I pressed my palm flat on the paint and said each word aloud as it crossed across her eye. She looked up at where I wasn’t yet. This turned me imminently blacker with the fury. The grain of the glass made reflective over the pictures shifting past from each new angle showed secret films of every hour in the house as this family had lived it, filled with great pus and totally false senses of inhibition. It was in me too, so it was in her. It was in the babies we had not had yet and for whom the future had to end. The house’s present children were asleep, dreaming of tunnels. Along the hall as if to match this vision in reverse my boys come coasting forward with the mother borne between them in another Christ pose. They’d given her a pretend choice between sex and death and she’d said nothing. They covered her mouth so the song would come out of her nostrils. I raised my arms and said Hello, pointing in every direction I could think of. Her head shook swoopy with her looking as she followed me with her face trying to understand anything. The book she’d read tonight had made her dreamlike. I had a new book. I bent down and said Hello again. She had another belly on her, someone else’s trimester. Her curvature was silly and elaborate. It kept begging me to kiss it. As I did, I heard her other children in the bedroom getting snuffed inside their dreams as one word from my lips sent through the wires in their new brother sent wide black swords into their sleep, and then their sleep went on forever. Each of their last cries was better entertainment than anything I’d ever rented. I moved to press my own belly against the mother’s so we’d match, my own gut full of the rite of fast food, hers the pustule of the future baby and diet shakes. My laughing gave her a massage until she was warm enough to pry apart in all the places her creator had designed for me to do so. I used my fists first, then my forehead, then my teeth, and then my eyes. I used the edge of her own camera to slice the best bits. I used the glass that housed the photographs and then the photographs themselves. I used the edges of the money she’d been saving to give to cancer research, I used her own nails, I used her own teeth, I used her. Every color that came out of what she had to be turned into was exactly like mine. They laid the mother on the floor. With my chest against the ground I drank the blood out of her womb with my whole mouth. I drank the blood from her vagina until she didn’t have a vagina really anymore, as far as god could tell. I drank and ate of her forever. The boys were clawing at my hands. I fed the boys in turns with each of my ring fingers as they sucked the way I told them. I made them wash their faces in it, their arms and hands. They took the blood and heard me speaking, clearing each word of the mother’s from the remainder of her mind. With these words as I translated, the boys began to scribe this book along the wall, rubbing their ring fingers and their dicks in a dot matrix aimed at covering the house, filling in the walls with our scripture around the mother until her bleeding was depleted and then the real writing began.