Here when I press my head against the voice here there comes the sound of my skin becoming ripped apart, the chime of convalescing mechanisms rubbing their frames against the land and when I pull back my mind at long last from its own intrusion, I found I had lived out in one instant every life. I found along my arms my hands were open, and on my palms vast sores all healed full over, and our blood had fit all back into me, and I knew at last which way was ours; and so inside the house I rose and walked again, and went unto the want again and forgot the voiceless voice there like I had all else. I went on through what I’d wished and wanted until the beginning of this same impression came again, finding again inside the shrieking prisms of night no one to sleep and wake with, and no one to poke or fist a hole though, slick in my skin to let the mass out again when I was full of all this air.
Then just as quickly this again was over. No idea at all about forever in this instance of us but the house made of more floor and floor made to begin again at every measure. What had just happened had just happened and was not yet set for happening the next, though I knew it would or knew it would not and knew I would not remember either way, and so could never at all tell, and either way was gone as ever and as always.
When where what now I am again. So sized there is no sun and not a longing. No lap of tongue where blubber fills the space of action named unmade, the pillow of a rind around a fissure. Each instant clapped as old fat gathered through its mirror-instants strung with our skinned knees and all our teeth, the space burnt out alive inside its last remaining color, pulled through its own center like a dot. All through the abused membranes of finite years in popping intersections of transitory ornaments, beyond soil or water, blood or bone. Each inch where we had unwound at last locking full into whatever could not be. Each syllable and pixel past repeating where it wore against us on every tongue as bright as light beyond mirage, over the whole blank of whose conception, breadth filling up what it could not.
I remember that the light here is and was the only thing not missing. It is and was an old glow, opened and curving without core, alive there where it is and only there. Above me and above you, prismatic rooms where absent bodies lay and lavished prostrate upon the whitened tables of countless sheeted altars hardened with the sweat of uttered worlds turned back and in against themselves, absent of age. Death hid and hidden in the shape and strobed so deep enough it could not etch the lungs of any recollection, and yet still must and never would, could not but never become gathered in the make along our flat gyrating ancient fate. We in laughing dens where any of us all lay chained and fat as old kids, awaiting freedom, no, not that word; awaiting a simple lick of trance to swim in with the smoke shattered from our eye, the single singing glassy eye of eyes so small and so surrounded by more film than sight could hold together in any all, throughout the exploded light of our conception, where the end is what we are.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BLAKE BUTLER is the author of five books of fiction, including There Is No Year and Scorch Atlas; a work of hybrid nonfiction, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia; and two collaborative works, Anatomy Courses with Sean Kilpatrick and One with Vanessa Place and Christopher Higgs. He is the founding editor of HTMLGIANT, “the Internet literature magazine blog of the future,” and maintains a weekly column covering literary art and fast food for Vice magazine. His other work has appeared widely, including in The Believer, the New York Times, Fence, Dazed and Confused, and The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. He lives in Atlanta.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.