Authors: Blake Butler
BLINK
The child and then the father in the mother’s house turned and found where where he’d felt the room there there were ten rooms, then there there were fifty, then then then fifty-thousand. Then came the colors, in reverse.
In the house around the mother the lights in the rooms blew open, each single bulb in slow procession split. With each the mother felt the light spreading on into her, wholly absorbed, her body rung with radiance and heat light. Inside her shape the mother found that she could both breathe and eat off of the liquid spurting there inside her and blurting from her body in the wash—she gave it off in bubbled grunts—liquid from her eyes and ears and nostrils, from her womb doors, from the condensed mesh of the many shrieking months she’d spent feeding food into herself to make more of her. Inside the liquid, further reams of film frames spooled in congregation. Her flesh had spread all through the room. It had no number. As well, the room had spread into the house, into the other rooms compacting, goggled with the eggs and all such what. As each room popped in convention with the tone, the mother felt the rooms appending to her—the house smeared and went on smearing, color for color in the wake of something warbling her
body. The mother could not feel her systems. She could not feel her second self—the other presence having spread so wide and bulbous through and through her, it was now no longer there—it filled her lungs and slicked her back—it seeped among the walls into the house’s air vents, its air and piping, the countless knobs and halls and wet—it laced among the house’s wires, cracked the dust—it spread outside the house through hidden windows, coagulating in a cold wave over the ground—it washed thick over the spinning buildings, over the globulating earth, encombing trees hung gross with columned nits and colored sores bursting in the suspension with fat flowers and smeared up in the silver-gleaming jelly paste—over the crooked solar curtains and highest flight zones, annexed in field marks held in see-through lesions—among the weird glint of where the sun had sunk to lick the papered edge of the ex-sky burned and rubbled with stretchmarked brined designs of stuttered language—the waist on the skyhead pulling and panting, bored. In scream of beef and mutter pooling, the mother’s liquid lapped the sun with her whole mind, and changed its color with vibrating, packed to black and neon burst in white, and in the color, too, the tone surrounding and surrounded, the sound of every door opened and then closed and clicking locked—then reopened to blue bodies—barfing nodules—to the sound of people sleeping in their threads, and side by side to other bodies beyond numbers, sweating off their names—the sound of one word spoken all together creamed with beeping along hallways with no walls and walls with nowhere in between them—the sound of white rinds stretching, rings on fingers sinking in—the sound of all things burst humming, all notes and nothing—the sound of all things folded over when. The sound was in the liquid and the liquid in the sound—the brim so fat
it seemed any instant when the bath would wake in rupture, rise to squash upon the frying night.
BLINK
There was a massive clap then. There was the gonging. The house walls ran with juicing fluid, blooming bulbs as they rained down. The room was all around the mother bulging color. Her hips and lips and eyes had spread so wide she seemed a portal or filled with blank. There was a stink there swaddled on her washing. It called the birds into her brain. They burst from bejeweled cocooning patterns encrusted on the walls, the air, her flesh. Their wings were metal. No one. What. Their language flew in all at once together in one chirping endless chain head-on into her. When now. They stuffed their way on down inside her face, through her throat and belly and her ass, and from each point thereon outward, while at her cusp the air around the mother’s liquid shone. Somewhere in the leak the leak was speaking. Its words weren’t words but numbers, coiled in wads. Curds of syntax made in old names. The speech made the house’s liquid cloudy. In the liquid there were eggs: one from each bird incubated and there laid into the mother’s open bruises and her blood, such swelling bite marks of the laying written on her massive lungs and tongue and gums and glands and hair and gait and back and lard.
The colors screwed across the sky.
They screwed into the sky and through the sky and there before it.
The flesh from all holes fell.
It fell into the holes and through holes and held them.
Where there were no holes, more holes were made.
The holes were made until where all before there had been no holes there were the holes now, so that all holes forever were surrounded, like a feeling.
There were then no other words.
BLINK
The film was blinking.
BLINK
BLINK
The space was blinking.
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There was the sound.
There was the face.
The eye behind the face came open.
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Now it was everything, the eye.
Inside the house, the floor was inclined
The entry room was very long
Against the far wall, just slight out of reach, a small oblong shape sat cold
It was seated on a cube marked with a white plaque with white letters I could not read
The floors around the cube were very slick
They seemed to need to pull me to the center
A scrim of paper-colored water poured from beneath me where I touched the ground
I came near and touched the shape
I rubbed against the shape and rubbed it
The shape was any shape but here had one specific of which I cannot name the name
Where the shape touched on my skin its face made new over the new
Layers laying over old holes, bruises, smooth
I felt the air turn inside-out
All I wanted was for this to stop
I did not want to change again already
I could not sit the shape back down
In chrysalis the rooms made lotion
I threw up white
For many days I lived forever
I felt the door under my face
I could see many thousand other shapes inside the shape’s face
Any shape at all
Inside the shapes someone was bleating my old language
I was not the child and not the father or the mother or the dark
I held the shape against my sternum
The celebration lights were gray
So much time passed and I’d done nothing
I hadn’t even moved my arms
Through all the lives I’d felt cruise through me I was nowhere
It was snowing
Here the air was made of such light that it made the light already trundled on the air go curved
Slowing flexed out around the edges of my vision so that in this light here I saw the sky under the sky
It with our old names imprinted on it peeling
The sky wide with bodies hung from it in troves, fat pock-marked purses of slopping people
Colors not of how the skin had been in living, but the current state of their decay
Some of the bodies’ globes glistened picked apart by gobs of sight and gnats grow fat off of the black-blistered ankles charred apart and caking pink
Among them, he who’d lived inside me for such stinging time and time regardless
Who’d therein eaten of my body and swaddled up a body of his own
Years in rooms where I could not see what he was doing, what he would make of what he had made of parts of us
Knowing without knowing
How I could hardly therein stand
The ages speaking loud inside my mind and bending over in my body
Ash of ash and ashes’ ashes
The skin around my scalp and shoulders curling a crown out
Endless foreheads
Each punched in through warm and of no hold
You were one of those among it
Slathering in packets, skulls surrounding in the hour of my way
Sucking all my weight up through my body to my ideas
My heat, my limbs, my lust pulled into dust, days
All the scramming shit and mounds forever wedged in here now
In such strobing robes of light of we
And overhead the sky increasing, already having sucked its surface spotless
And underneath, the light-horizon, torched with tunnels of new smoke
Soft bodies blurting out a scrim of black so long and wide it could not be measured
Shit burst in replicate commotion spreading through and through the gone
Though my new eyes inside the eyes inside me
Older than water
Wider than all air
Opening the floor you’d carried in you hid forever
Floors into the day
In the room again I turned again to see what I had become
Inside the turning soon I tried to stop as I had started and could not stop
The day was spinning, so I was spinning
I found the room controlled by light
Spools were bursting from some center no longer included in the room’s shape
The screen had quadrupled in its size
The film was blacker than my fever
The shape had disappeared
Or it had moved to some point in the room around me
The room just shook and shook
My spinning in the shaking at once made the other seem like calm
Like any day at all forever
I threw up gray
I threw up gold
Each time I said or thought or felt inside me the want for it to stop it went on twice as fast and twice as hard
I threw up all the colors I remembered
All the colors of the Cone
I felt the colors all surround me
I got down on my knees
I went to squeeze the day against me in a warm way and found it no longer at all there
No fold but just my arms now
I felt the air turn inside out again around me though in a different way than just before
And in my acknowledgement of knowing it had done that it did exactly that again
And then again then and then again then
Increasing in its pace until I could no longer tell when it had happened
What was becoming
Under great sun, without number
We were so large now in the house now
The houses there surrounding all surrendered and made cold
We were liquid, snug with vision, so much of all that someone stitching into me, stitched
We in the day had such dimension
The rooms drawn cold and clinging to my face
In each room there was and would be someone
The man, the men, the child, me, you
Each of us a body
Each in skin
All of it thinning by the hour, in the house, our whole
Each room around our mush went on for our whole lives each
The mold grew quickly, barking color, prism panes
There were gardens
I was young then, I had a burnt mind and clean lungs, I had a body
All of we did
All of we never have
There was wire
The weeks controlled themselves and passed in ash
The years were greasing
The house all bloated and the choirs in our eyes
The girth of burnt flesh in the hardened ocean
The liquidated sun
The way the ground had lurched to smack the sky
To mash against our groaning bodies, squeeze us leaking out the sides
All bent in black above our format