The room is roughly six feet deep, high enough to hide a body propped up erect, though there are no new bodies down here. The texture of the face of the surface is marbled pink with loam of discolored pigments set into it like speckled ham. It is soft and seems to be made of a synthetic polymer, like something from spacecraft. There is no smell; the air of the room above seems not to permeate beyond itself.
Flood’s flesh having fallen sits under the shards of black glass knocked unconscious for some duration before he returns back into his head. A large raised divot above his right ear throbs a heating music. There is blood exiting from a slight slash on his chest, and from another wetting through his pants’ knee. He pukes, woozy, upon waking. It takes a second and third seeing from inside him to realize again where he is: inside an alcove that had previously remained hidden beneath the layered mirrors of the floor in the locked room: a false floor, the key through which had been his own weight, i.e. himself.
Any wall could have another room behind it, Flood says aloud to no one.
All the edges of the world.
There is also blood on Flood’s hands; he goes to rub it on his shirt and makes twin handprints in impression; he rubs the remainder on the wall, though there is still blood on the hands even after having wiped them clean enough they seem mostly clean. He stops and forgets about the color, looking up into the mirror of the ceiling of the room above from where he’s fallen in, seeming higher than it should be. The room is too dark to make out his reflection in the mirror lining, layered up there now, seeing him seeing what he sees.
The linings of the exposed alcove have a glow, Flood realizes, eyes adjusting. The curvature of the space of the small revealment is affixed with low fluorescent light, panels of the surface there itself, backlit at low grade, almost low enough to not notice. In the cud of it Flood is yellowish, elderly-like. He smears a little blood on skin on himself, touching himself to see if he can feel it.
He shifts to stand. Erect, his head rises well enough over the lip of the indention that he can see around the room from down below, nearer to the reflective lining of the first floor’s flat expanse that makes the space seem both ever endless and, in knowing of the false nature of the surface, that much less. Mirrors speaking back and forth into one another, prismatic closets, which in the instance of this particular chamber and the past it held as present even just weeks before seeming somehow thicker in its air, black diamonds, phantom death. Traces of old blood and other matter’s smudging on the mirror reflect Flood’s head back at his central head appearing tattooed or blotted out in bits of obfuscation, showing nothing of him back to him the way to others he’d seem seen.
Flood squats to square down in the alcove, touching at the ground as a piano underneath him, the glass the scattered keys, careful not to cut himself again on the edgework, and still bleeding. He finds that when he speaks aloud no sound comes out beyond what seems just the inside of his head. He says his name; it is his name, only inside him. He cannot remember anyway it being different from this before.
This day is any day. The floor inside the subchamber, where it’s not glowing, is the color of his skin. It has a softness and quiet pliancy, a textured gruff. The glass bits on the surface from where he broke the mirrors seem to stick and cause no rupture in the smooth. Flood’s fingers tickle at the rubbish. He hears a tone snake down his spine. His posture loosens with warmth and sends a shimmer of clear liquid down his downturned sternum, to the head where days on days have hid and taken hold. He can hardly see beyond him. The liquid in the head seems suddenly to widen, casting in his vision, sudden memory:
him, Flood, nine, lost in a game in the white woods behind his grandparents’ home under a white sky, having fallen in a forest with mud up to his neck and in his teeth and hair and face, the muck he cannot make his tongue lurch past to scream for someone there inside the woods to come out of hiding, really, and pick him up, clean him up, lift up his body, take him from the night, though everyone is out there, everybody, where;
him, Flood, eleven, wrapped in a blanket, unable at all to breathe in, the white slick fabric hot and hard against him so close it appears black and seems to leak into his flesh, choking back up in the manner of a second skin around him, lurching down his throat to balloon outer, inward, snaking, coloring him in, the object like any object like a lining pulled out from his flesh and formed into a thing that he could touch then from the outside only and pretend to have never seen; thus is the nature of all objects, to any person, all of them, ours, displaced, undead;
him, Flood, of no age he can remember, upside down against an unseen surface in the air above his bed in his old home, flattened and pressed against it for such long time feeling like one instant that the whole world seems to hold, cogs of time aroused enough to keep him awake and out of resting but not aroused enough to let him move;
him, Flood, this morning, having stood up so fast that the blood rushed from his head, his limbs and balls and back and lungs thereafter weighing flushed out and dry light as a vacuum, as has been the way so many days, ambulating soft around the house and outside from room to room and space to space to face all feeling nothing where the blood was while still feeling air and motion on the outside of his skin, each day and all today in a kind of chosen bloodless automation, which some days is all that keeps him moving forward without thinking, even knowing that he knows, which as he thinks of here in this odd-lit room of this death home, if only to negate him, erupts the feeling of all that old blood suddenly flooding from a popping sound sent in his head, the blood all there at once rushing hot and fast from his skull’s orb of chortled memory and pregnant unnamed wishing back into him all at once with perfect frenzy, rain on rain, shelving colors in his vision, 3-D, 4-D, and again he pukes.
The vomit, made of liquid — water, coffee, orange juice, his own spit — reflects the cribbed in light a savage orange; it coats some shards, a little floor space, and flutters at his hands, while with his hands Flood stirs the slight air dying in the impression for some hold: a width to grip his chest with, a stirrup for his hands. He falls forward into the hidden area, in a way of falling that seems slower than it should be, in such a way it seems he can see himself from there above him again falling with his organs and his limbs, again becoming horizontal.
Here is Flood facefirst and chin down in the box. Flood feels flooded, ripe with windows being opened in his sternum and his ass. He could go to sleep here. He could sleep here. The lid above him, yes, could be replaced. Could be filled in with him into the house here. He cannot think what to do about the box or being in it or how to get out or to go, or what should happen, who should know this, if there is something else he needs to do, if there is ever any hour he is someone in his body, if his body is a wall.
A large lapse, like time defining zero, passes through him while he stares into the day on pause, unpaused. The day makes memory, mutation, affixing there to nodules of the memory regardless of their chronology. Each new instant, as it wishes, inside his head, may kiss each other, all. And the inhale of the next one, in the box.
Up close, along the low lining of the second floor right before his eyes, Flood reads a string of words printed faint into the surface, a message written there in tiny print and such slight indention, it is almost not there in the room at all, as if for him alone and him forever. The words scroll into him cleanly:
in god our blood the word of blood in god the name of god in god the name of god