For days I turned and turned inside the new long dark, trying not to remember there was nothing beyond the house to live with beyond the image of how it felt, or else the blurring bolts of what I could recall of what held near: splatter fragments of the skulls; tents of muscles slathered in a pig-white grease of centuries spooled through blood-browned sauce boiling; tissue shitting between nostrils in a head inside a second head; living rooms where babies fell and broke their brains; those were the days; attics in the attics above with blue bells ringing the coming hour to us counted down from zero into zero while names were read off of a list inside said broken baby skulls and gathered up packed back in entrails as cluster-semen replicated to be injected to eggs gifted on breakfast tables before god; windows; chasms; purple fabric; what else; what would you want forever; just ask; this world is ours.
Behind my lids, the black no longer was ever black; or not the same black there’d been when I was younger and knew more than I knew now, or how it felt; instead the shade inside the skull contained a thickness branched from the vision of all of whom; every blink or whip of eye along the long yards of the days undone; each of us seated only at the center of the space we could not see and now would never be anything but. It felt easier for me alone instead to think nothing, in this home devoid of anything but my own touch; it felt warm like endless milk, even so minor; as the only drawers I found in the walls of the ways here were mostly only filled with ash or fat or ice; the ice would never melt, no matter how much I rubbed at it, and the fat, it held no flavor; the ash was just ash though its color was monochrome and it did not float and it would not stay on my hands.
Often I couldn’t recall where the next room was from one day to another even seeing my body leading the way, even having lived in this house already my whole life, as I remembered; or I couldn’t remember what any room was for, why there were walls between this room and this last one. In all the rooms the floor was bright. No matter where I looked I saw more space before me waiting; I saw space between the spaces merging and emerging from itself inside itself to split the room in many parts, each as undone as the other, desperate for anything but what it was.
Days went by in weeks and weeks in days. Some days the days lasted longer than days and lashed themselves to surfaces that colored my face the way a winter would have in the realm of cells and in my face I felt the heat of time rubbing against anything it wasn’t, disrupting the inner knit of even rest. With the base of home as some new center inside the sand I began to patrol the sand for miles ongoing, finding quickly how in relation the light would turn me deaf and blind. There was only so far to go before I could hear and see absolutely nothing but white against me and throughout me. I had to always be looking back to remind myself which direction home was; I used a language dreamed up in myself to count, a series of clicks of tongue and teeth against the gristle of my cheek, pushed through the holes inside my head to blow against the grooves my dying memory escaped into its flesh. I left trails of the language burned into the sand and light without even intending; my very presence wrecking the idea of death itself; among which I could find, each day, a hallway back to the hole I’d drummed up to collapse into and once again black out.
Each time I returned to the house having seen nothing I would find, grown out from the house I’d left, sets of new rooms. From the further nodes and bulbs of skulls and cages littered in the sand for miles forever, there might appear a stairwell leading into the ceiling, which then days later manifested into a landing filled with doors. Through all the eye of the sky above alone stayed constant, though it was changing; veined with something cracking on the far side as if to match my tread beneath. Some stars might seem to read a word burned out into them, though in a language I could no longer understand. Only in sleep could I begin to fuse my clicking language with the words the sky wanted to say. I could not tell how reciting what they intended altered my vocabulary, the palate catching slowly in new grooves and gristle patches the gums and spittle, adjusting in the arch of the sound I spoke for me alone, my arms around me doing anything they could to keep me from waking, going back into the sand again, for no one.
Weeks soon went by then in months or things named with sounds that have no syllables to suffer. One second might last a lifetime inside a dry day with the heap of blue air rising from no hole over the remaining fields and fields as yet untraveled though it does not matter and any way I walked in resumed the same. I was awake. I was not awake. I could or could not remember the difference between a bookshelf made from kneecaps and any bed or length of sand expanding, the maps of the universal dead. The house around me was always what it always had been, and yet always felt like nothing else.
There was the quaking of the word. What the book wasn’t. What I wasn’t. Whereas before outside the home I’d hear no shudder for miles in sand on sand, alone again at home some blue voice appeared buried in the throat behind a wall, spreading underneath my head wherever I would let it. As if the house itself was speaking from a space it only wasn’t, or the house itself was not what I believed. The voice began to fill me through and through me. I knew its way along my lungs and down my legs and near my heart. I recognized the feeling; I was the feeling. Had been. Was not now.
I closed my eyes and saw only the blood. Blood of the dead I wasn’t and could more and more not tell from anything. In the blood the rooms were there too. Rooms that would not stop being. In sleep I moved into the blood and felt their sound. It wound down in around me, awaking more space in waking day against the frame of what I’d meant to render only mine eternally. Each room was any room that I could calclass="underline" the room where I’d been born, where who was murdered; each room the same as every one, revolving at no center, never touching. There were so many of us in me. The black I saw was wider than my skull, and spanned enough to wrap the solar system, like an eggshell, side by side among the million other eggs in every load, endless cells silent in all future inside my mouth with lips ripped out of characters burnt raw in the minds of the dead and their last fractions spilled onto a white of pages the maps must become erased against like birth canals in mothers turned to sand, to glass, to now.
I went into the kitchen to make food and found I’d already eaten every inch before I’m there. The room was slowly slowing.
There was nothing to renounce. No way to end anything I could imagine being the ending. Where I felt I was a man I had no hands; where I felt I was a woman I had hair all over my body; where I wished to be a child I had no grace. My scream sounded like I remembered feeling eating ice cream or walking in warm sunlight. Everything was just beside itself. The light was alone.
I continued getting older, but did not age. I was being watched from the inside and nowhere shining. No one was waiting for my mind. I drank the color from the light and felt no terror. I loved the sand for how under any shade of sky it all seemed irreplaceable.
I still had seen no inch of the new stone.
I went on doing anything I felt in my own image.
I mimed to laugh and heard no laughter.
I tried to make a drum out of my skin.
I banged the drum for hours.
No one was singing and our song contained no words.
I scratched where what I missed less and less felt near me in the darkness.
I made a crib.
I made a child inside my mind to fill the crib with.