people shopping in these aisles. It replaced the definitions of certain words in dictionaries no one would ever open. It congealed in the next thing we would bite. It squished in trash compactors, snapped their gears and turned them pudding. I don’t know where we are. It became the stuff of pancake syrup. It meshed in the insulation of old houses, through the wires, it wore a buzzing, it caused long rips in old maps for new roads new zones new plate tectonics that would burp and screech, that would slide to one side or the other and let some new stretch burble up— on these flat pieces of new land were other buildings with no windows and no door, inside which there were men or women with no faces, features, no names, no nothing but keyholes in their eyes.
The film fed into projection booths of theaters no longer attended but still running, their smashed gray light gushed wrong and endless against the biggest walls of smallish rooms, the rows and rows of empty chairs all aimed as if to have even the air itself pay heed —to see. The film rolled in and made replacement of all the film on all the shelves in all the shops, all themen and all the women in and on and around the silent houses around any house, all the same house, the air of years and years of shapes embedded, forms recreated in grainy grain again, stored in a billion minds a billion times, or something, each sentence spoke a certain way, the way the eyes of certain actors would linger on the camera, the folds of days and age and light composed in each scene— never again —the reels and reels of names caught white on black or vice versa—all of this erased—all of this made of the father now—all as the tape spurted off and slithered, as the tape, unknown to the father, squirmed its grabbing girth around what had been and was the world.
That night the shrieking tone really erupted. The house stood on its side. The fibers in the house’s rooms erected from their expanses, spindling the hallways with weird fur. The tone went so large it bashed past hearing and into nowhere, colorlessness, then back to loud—so strong it popped blood vessels in the child’s eyes while he was sleeping—all he saw when he woke again was masked in pillowed red. He didn’t mind.
The tone ripped the mother’s clothing against her body through the seams, her skin smashed patchy with the resounding tenor, thin bloodshot lines creased through her flesh—spraying the lining of her innards with the spittle of cracking meat, stirring the remainders of what had gathered in her womb there into pigments, changing its face —a living mush of no known name. It brought the house’s eaves down, cracked the mantle, splashed the windows back to sand, braided the long hairs on the carpet, from thebodies. It peeled the wire out of the hallways, blanched the shutters. It slid its incision in most all things until air itself was hardly there, the night corralled to skeins of dust.
Inside the house, the rooms went warbly and became several rooms at once—where in them people laid on long beds laughing, the light of no moon strumming their nude and something flexed where nothing was. On the air you could see pilling, tiny spindled segments of the seconds split into hyphae, kaleidoscopic cells. The rooms reconvened then, and seemed to lift a little, becoming slurred in as the tone rummaged through the windows of each blink—the reconditioned post-stink stirring of each of these rooms and what they’d held, what they were holding, what they would hold now in the way of some new condition—all there scrambled or erased.
There was a shaking then. There was a long rip, coming from one direction then another. There were a million little tones. You couldn’t even hear it—as it began it had always been—the sound of something larger than the whole earth. The tone burped through light and carved it well into a strobe that in repetition appeared to slow down to gone again, while the day
The film fed into projection booths of theaters no longer attended but still running, their smashed gray light gushed wrong and endless against the biggest walls of smallish rooms, the rows and rows of empty chairs all aimed as if to have even the air itself pay heed —to see. The film rolled in and made replacement of all the film on all the shelves in all the shops, all themen and all the women in and on and around the silent houses around any house, all the same house, the air of years and years of shapes embedded, forms recreated in grainy grain again, stored in a billion minds a billion times, or something, each sentence spoke a certain way, the way the eyes of certain actors would linger on the camera, the folds of days and age and light composed in each scene— never again —the reels and reels of names caught white on black or vice versa—all of this erased—all of this made of the father now—all as the tape spurted off and slithered, as the tape, unknown to the father, squirmed its grabbing girth around what had been and was the world.
That night the shrieking tone really erupted. The house stood on its side. The fibers in the house’s rooms erected from their expanses, spindling the hallways with weird fur. The tone went so large it bashed past hearing and into nowhere, colorlessness, then back to loud—so strong it popped blood vessels in the child’s eyes while he was sleeping—all he saw when he woke again was masked in pillowed red. He didn’t mind.
The tone ripped the mother’s clothing against her body through the seams, her skin smashed patchy with the resounding tenor, thin bloodshot lines creased through her flesh—spraying the lining of her innards with the spittle of cracking meat, stirring the remainders of what had gathered in her womb there into pigments, changing its face —a living mush of no known name. It brought the house’s eaves down, cracked the mantle, splashed the windows back to sand, braided the long hairs on the carpet, from thebodies. It peeled the wire out of the hallways, blanched the shutters. It slid its incision in most all things until air itself was hardly there, the night corralled to skeins of dust.
Inside the house, the rooms went warbly and became several rooms at once—where in them people laid on long beds laughing, the light of no moon strumming their nude and something flexed where nothing was. On the air you could see pilling, tiny spindled segments of the seconds split into hyphae, kaleidoscopic cells. The rooms reconvened then, and seemed to lift a little, becoming slurred in as the tone rummaged through the windows of each blink—the reconditioned post-stink stirring of each of these rooms and what they’d held, what they were holding, what they would hold now in the way of some new condition—all there scrambled or erased.
There was a shaking then. There was a long rip, coming from one direction then another. There were a million little tones. You couldn’t even hear it—as it began it had always been—the sound of something larger than the whole earth. The tone burped through light and carved it well into a strobe that in repetition appeared to slow down to gone again, while the day
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