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you wake up in your house and there is a knife in your hand— well, waking up isn’t entirely accurate. you aren’t in your bed; it’s more that there is a black screen and then you are alive (in and in and out of in and out of in of out of in and out of sleep) and standing in the hallway and you know someone will be coming to your house to check on you.
the day is gray because it is november. you know there are novembers that are boiling and blue, but it isn’t how the world should be, so it isn’t. all this is just words on page, words communicate abstract ideas, words shared with presumably common experience, one brain to the other, any distortion based on individual difference, and at any time you could slip sideways into another thread, another reality, all equally grounded, hop forward, back, see yourself in third person, it doesn’t matter how your vision shakes and shambles in ever-shifting pixels.
you put away the knife into the little kitchen block. now your only weapon is gone, and you will have to go to school.
walkman. cassette tape. t t t take k k o o off f th tha th a a at ma a as sk i
you think you were cutting up someone, though your tool (now gone), hands (foreign as a mannequin, riddled with eczema) and clothes (a black wool jacket, a white buttoned shirt, gray slacks) are clean. maybe the memories coming to you now, of putting a pile of limbs in the dumpster behind your cinderblock apartment, are only the fading curls of dream, just as much as the pressing future vision of crawling through the school’s boiler room to find a pulsing mass— she, you know she is a she— fluctuating mother-of-pearl, curled over and over herself in wires and panels and wires and like a wyrm shedding its skin to begin anew, and wires and—
the television in your room only broadcasts in black and white. it’s old enough that when you put your hand to the screen, it interlaces its static fingers with yours. at night, you turn it on and plug it in, then tune the station to an in-between such that it speaks for itself, and when you press your body to it, it holds you entirely, humming a lullaby as it runs its circuits along your nerves, almost like a caress. the endless patterns onscreen pool under your touch in concentric circles, ripples on a pond.
this vision is mere smoke.
here is another wis(p/h): someone grabs you by the back of your head your short hair in their fingers (already your nose is bleeding broken red stains on drywall (yet no puncture) (neighbors in the other apartment don’t care, the way you like it) your throat chokes on live copper wire) drags you over the kitchen sink tells you to take a deep breath
it’s a sweet dream (lucid nightmare) you’ve had for maybe three years, one of a great library of terrible things happening to people. mostly you. sometimes you to others, not out of proper vengeance or any emotional investment, but simply because you are buying a knife in the shop and there is a binary option yes no yes leap over the counter hold your merchandise to the person behind the register and fail/run away into the night into the people are all gone missing low render distance no one else but you but you and you.
which is why you had a knife. you were planning to take it to school. you were planning to get caught.
i i w w wan wanna a s s see eeeee eeyourface
here is another story, one you play with on your back (like a cat with a ball of yarn/like a corpse with its arms crossed), half-asleep at midnight half wide awake, stomach churning: laying on the medical table anesthetized such that you do not feel them cut you open with pain, but simple prodding. you don’t see their faces; this is a dream; you only look down at yourself, at the gore your mind conjures without proper knowledge of anatomy, bloody but vague, a dim recollection of the lungs the heart the kidney the liver the intestines but deeper than that there is something they gain prodding and pushing around your insides as you lay completely still unable to act with the absence in your veins. there is something rotten and gleaming within you; that is what the vivisection/autopsy is for.
it feels good. you’re shivering when the vision passes but it feels good. rewind and play again until it burns into your nerves like a song, until you suck the fear dry and have to move on to another target.
here’s a story you probably know. a woman comes into a hospital. people get sick around her, nurses fainting, vomiting, not from smell but an airborne disease all the same, skin shrivels back into thick red lumps, hair catches fire, nails grow at alarming rates into the skin surrounding and then through, like a beaver’s teeth curling in on itself to pierce the skull, eyes bleeding, no, not bleeding, but popping from the pressure first, until it all comes out. it is a little isolated hospital. no one comes out. no one phones. no one knows.
WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO, SH OO OOO T TT T TT ME ???
the judge hands out a number of varied sentences (phrases/words/fragments) for a number of varied crimes. please fill them out on this form. attempted murder murder manslaughter serial breaking and entering loitering assault and battery assault and barratry assault and banditry assault with a deadly weapon perjury sabotage extortion distortion proportion absorption misfortune blackmail vandalism impersonation tampering with evidence with evidence with eminence with eloquence with elements with
well, were you guilty? looking to the side you see they’ve printed your charges on paper, stacked miles high, far past the point where anyone could see, could read, not to mention the evidence, which stretched even higher, in pages taking on the forms of what they represented, bruised and black and bloody. yes, you say, and they sentence you for life on life on life until in every reality the sun runs out and the universe collapses in on itself bites its own leg off tears its intestines out everything merely a piece of one great whole hole with a staircase along the side black concrete in black shadow on black space to walk and walk not to fall for that certainly will kill you while the endless descent is ambiguous in its monstrosity. it is only ambiguity in the way forward is in all in for way for why for ward
another story, well-known. a door in the closet, small and square, x-ed with chalk to mark the entrance-exit/amputation. little girl lost, voice echoing around the house, though she be nowhere, never found again, the entrance-exit seals forever and she is still there until the occupants leave and the house begins to ferment lactic acid (edges of doors and windows sink, frames giving way internally to weight and externally to paint, until they do not break but disappear entirely into new walls)
that is: it begins to eat itself.
there is, of course, another possibility. in the dead of night, go down the stairs, into the garage. find the rifle (its edge in white chalk outline) and tip it out (do not disturb). it’s heavier than you expect it to be (than you remember it being) but you keep it from clattering anyway. the issue, you learn, will not be the scraping of the walls, but the cracking of your own footsteps. (tip: keep near furniture; the house is sunken there, and the depressions speak less.) then up the stairs, down the hall, open the door to your parents’ room.
out the front door, just out, down the street in only your bloodied pajamas, then the next street and the next and the first a run next and then thand then a walk then when your body begins to ache (ferment) (next), a stitch in your side, but no fear, no fear, no feeling at all. there are nextandthen no people in your house, only monsters, and then (the next) (and then), beyond the edges of the map (idclip), nothing at all.
ch chok ch chhhhh ok ok! choking h h h a hahaha ha azzzz ard
a thousand little islands across the— well, it is not a sea but an expanse an abyss one could think of little tumors, great circles of sketched trees and faded sandy edges, graphite pine needles, all rotting the longer you let them sit. a blank expanse between. the bridges too far to construct, thin lines of endless sand to wash away in the ever rushing current, as such there is no point in trying, not while your islands burn and wither into something worse, overflowing with maggots, pulsing masses of meat, writhing, perfectly safe to consume, buy now! melamine tremolite cadmium GHB paint methanol malware you splice in between the children’s classics because you heard a rumor that minds are controlled through sub-subliminal messaging, flicks on screen and then through, unable to be seen unless you go frame by frame, not enough to be nudity but must be violence, people in black masks and tape all tied up and strung end to end no one knows if the guts are real and distorted faces not by camera fudging but real life this is the result of the end cheekbones blooming like cauliflower little maggots crawling from the ears the noses and mouths seeping with something not quite blood but somehow thicker, fingers flicker and warp in number, teeth transform, background rock formations take on human characteristics get up and walk away. of course the more complex horrors— your interviewees tangled to a chair, a baseball bat in frame— require continuity, a continuity, a continuity
h a hahaha ha ha h ah h h a ha h h h haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
everyone in the old laugh tracks is dead. you like to imagine the same case for every black-and-white photograph. or better yet, before being laid to rest, a thousand shards of shrapnel in the littlest squirm away, caught still, a twitch of the eye the smile, everyone here is doomed, not death but doom, the decay of dark dank dusty theme park rides no one has gone in for years, the tracks delaying, the animatronics breaking down, water damage, video broadcasts hijacked, lone employees in out-of-date mascot uniforms— would be so much easier if it were murder, murder is for slashers, for unconnected innocents, better in newspapers dismembered family members blood leaking out under the door interpreted as a piece of art because it is art when it’s still in your head, cellulose ether in colored water, would you know the difference if it was put in a museum?
the sculpture’s name is eurydice, hacked-together pieces of twine and wood, a great wreck in the center of the room, but the plaque is on a blank wall, such that you have to— you understand.
here is a proposal for another eurydice: bury the living artist (yourself) under the floorboards. a speaker hooked up to your breathing, to the slowly fading oxygen supply (have you ever seen a lung in a bag, still moving, ever-moving, this is how we keep people alive, we keep their parts alive first). let the visitors in. let them protest, let them scream, let them claw up the floorboards looking for the soon-to-be corpse.
to be clear, you are not eurydice.
here is a third eurydice. lie awake in the dark, tape player hissing in your ears, every ghastly story you can conjure up in something deeper than hearing, not enough to be captured in words, but intuition, the dark of the night, the mere possibility of something with you in the deepest cave, a presence, but ever unsure. do not reach out. do not move. there is a tapping at the window there is no tapping it is only in your mind a dark figure out there staring unmoving in the doorway in the closet in your bed beside you not moving the mattress but looming over you and you cannot hear it, only the tape, not heard, not heard— it affects the vestibular system without registering in the mind, causes ataxia, nausea, disturbed visuals, burst eardrums, damaged brains, hauntings.
there are ghosts in the dark. there are always ghosts in the dark. this is why it is essential for your piece to never open your eyes, to let her
You slam into wakefulness, the tail end of your narrative not trailing off, but being clipped entirely, first from its context and then from your mind. It takes a moment for the disgust/fear/??? to set in, distant yet uncomfortable, your nerves more awake than they’ve been for a while, such that even trying to start a new story (a new sugar) just makes your stomach flip over. Run your tongue over your aching teeth and feel the pits, jagged in places, smoothly worn off in others. Your mouth tastes like something died in it.
Something did.
As you shift in your seedbed, you can tell your breath is running out.