The child inside the fourth mother realized its lungs suddenly. It was screaming ideas of metal. It spoke in personas bled into it by the mother in her sleep, deleted Worship tomes in the Rolodex of names shat out of my mouth between me and the child forming a syllabic bridge of colored mush rising a language wind. The names between us became human names erected in tines of purple cells and hissing insects. Each name as it blew through me knocked the godblood out of my mouth. It splashed to kiss the crease of where the boys asleep now in the kitchen had exposed their holes for Shaking. Each name replaced a wish in Darrel and became Darrel and became. The space bar in my mind grew letters on it. Where each name went in, another name came out and fell upon the house’s carpet made of shining lymph. Soon the house was overflooded with the syntax icons of all Americans. They piled up in pyramidal mink. Each brick locked in with six bricks exactly of mosaic skin, pooing a movie I would star in when I died, screened in the long flat white awaiting. The inverse image of the movie sealed the mother’s false deleted children in their ripped nurseries into cubes of dentures and clean beds, already aged beyond the stage of memory making. The cubes heated with my smiling and turned to ovens where their bodies would be burned. The house’s oven opened wide and said our prayer. The prayers sealed in the bricks around the mother and the child, who as the sounding rose me forward from the house forever wished me luck with all his holes unsizing in all of where he’d never been, while behind me the house looked like any other house just built and sold upon the dead mountains of our country, its front door exit breathing in the word in the world where we all talked at the same time.
FLOOD: The remains of the fetus were handled differently from most of the other victims’ bodies, presumably because it had not yet been born. It was dispersed in two parts, the head sent to the set of a popular morning news-gossip TV program, addressed to one of the famous female pundits, though it was intercepted before receipt; the remainder of the body to the White House. Each was marked plainly and with return address leading each half back to the location where the other half had been sent, and their distribution in such a manner presents in my mind a willingness in Gravey not only to be found, but to become known for what he was doing, though of course we were not able to connect them to any culprit until the discovery of Gravey’s activities. Therefore, until now, it could have been anyone. I do know that looking back after I was assigned the case I had been receiving anonymous phone calls to my private extension for several days from someone who would sit on the line in silence, not even breathing. Whether this was related to Gravey or some sort of malfunction I don’t know, but the more I think about it the more I believe what I want to believe, which is that from the beginning this case always belonged to me, before there ever was a case.
Upon the night hiding the bloodbath there haloed seven moons. Each of the moons had seven moons about it. Each of the moons’ moons was engraved with one of seven symbols, huffing smoke out from the edges where the night’s anger surged against its own surface, wanting to destroy the speech from all horizons. Where before the sun had been, there hung an orb the same color and dimension of the prior bulb that watched us among along with one vast unending pupil. Even my boys did not imagine such eternal confirmation. They were all so engorged with how we’d fed, they had to drag their ass across the earth. Their skin cells left no trail behind us, indistinguishable in this era’s light from soil. Each house howled as we passed it; each house wanted us to revise its content also, include them in the narrative. And in the morning, when we all woke again together invalid as ever, there was no mail, and the malls stayed closed an extra half an hour, during which, for once, I wept, which felt like rape, and after which I washed my hands and aimed at the old idea of god and waved.
We put new mirrors up over the mirrors in the black house. We harvested the chuff of our deadening emotions for the glue. Mushed them. Wished them whiter. Soon there was no inch we couldn’t see ourselves in. My bloodstreams were going bonkers from the new meat and blood all rolling through them, already starving. I needed to calm down inside my pleasure, so said Darrel, which would cause accidental detonation music. Over the mirrors we laid another mirror layer, then a layer of magnifying film. Each boy was then commanded to cleave the skin off his forehead with the sharp end of a magnet. We rubbed the oily side of the skin on the wall for lubrication, then fed the rest into the kitchen sink, forcing raspy floods of us into the pipes that carried air in knots of to and from in network under universal homes. What opened over our eyes was not a wound, but many eyes. When we were healed it would be the first day of our Sod, a day designed for destroying any gifts we’d ever been given by any human. The stink that rose out of our common facial bleeding amplified the innards of the house, over which we laid a final layer made of newer mirrors snatched from newer nearby houses we had sacrificed to flames, and over this at last we painted over the mirrors in our minds to match the black like our house’s outside. Consecrated altogether with our spittle, the new wall’s rapt heavy face remained reflective just the same, a total window to the holes of holy era already coming. And now the flies between the walls and wounds began to laugh and lay eggs and eat them. Everything from here on would go much quicker, each instant of it that much easier to lie down inside of, like a prison.
FLOOD: Each of the boys we’ve brought in thus far does indeed have a marking on his face, some of which they claim were self-inflicted, while others, they insist, were branded in a medicinally induced unconsciousness. The marks are specific for each person, one of a series of seven total designs (as far as I have counted). The symbols are: CIRCLE, SQUARE, HEXAGON, STAR, TRIANGLE, DIAMOND, RING, the same ones previously noted. I’ve had no success in gathering further information from those bearing the symbols on their bodies, as they seem to have no idea themselves, though some, when prodded, will open their mouths and strain their throats and face skin as if they are being throttled from the inside. Otherwise, they often act as if they don’t realize the marks are there, or feel pain. A surprising number of the wounds caused by the markings have yet to fully heal, and they emit a yellow pus. There are no visible marks on Gravey’s own head or body other than distinct markings from childhood acne and a tattoo in his right armpit of the numbers one through twenty-one.
The fifth through fifteenth mothers were made makeshift from the boys. The shrinking house was packed in angles of mushy arm meat and abdomens in such ways I couldn’t walk to see who was there or what food I would not eat. The sexdrives of the molding prior bodies of the dead refracted through me in the silence of the act of spreading of our silence outside the house. We clearly knew one day we’d have to all kill one another to become All, and why not begin now? Which boys we’d dismantle among our own first would be selected on the basis of those I didn’t most want to beat the shit out of the second I saw them, notarized by Darrel with a shudder of rushing breath through the shafts becoming woken up beneath the house. Because these boys were boys and therefore most of them came equipped with testicles and no wombs, I had to have their junk removed to make them inhabitable. I performed each operation with a butter knife and several lengths of wire from a clock I bought online that was said to once have been kept inside a deaf-mute astronomer’s bedchamber. The boys took turns holding the others down. They sprayed all they had left into the room, their rancid death-urine foaming up among the lashing of their limbs and clouding the house fat enough to believe in friendship. The unspent semen would be harvested and spread over the walls and on the ground around the house to keep the machines out. During these operations the band played their nothing music to steady my nerves, not even holding instruments between their hands now: they’d learned through proper practice and my hissing to speak the music through the skin around their knees. The music turned the house into a spitbath for air, lacing the whole bloat of the discharged-choking space between the walls with numbing aether through which the motion of me rendered slower, and I could see my hands move before me before I went to move my hands as all of we already had in the marbling of history. Each hour, to match the new boys, more mothers were being brought in and processed. They were being broken down into component parts again, in sweatshop. The legskin of the mothers was sliced off in neat precision so as to fashion costumes we would wear out for the final Halloween. The brains were packed together in the smoking closet as an ashtray. The scalps and cheekflesh of the mothers were fed to Darrel through the plumbing. The remainder of their fleshes was turned into a couch. The backbones became fishing poles and back scratchers. The remainder of the bones we simply saved; together, as the dead fell, they would interlock across the continents, forming a freeform pyre spanning all homes in total larger than the homes themselves, an incidental holy location thereafter to be worked down over time, as sun and rain continued in our absence. The blood we always totally ate, or at least all together would lie down in and fake sleep.