Read Online Three Hundred Million: A Novel by Blake Butler - Free Book Online Page B

moved inside the room hearing my mother’s inhale brushed in every inch of how my own meat fit together waiting to be made larger. I reached my arms to touch the twins both on their heads. We made a leaking tripod. Our fluids needed killing too. I took their tears up on my hands and licked them off me and could taste the aspiration of their young years becoming gifted in my blood, endless gifts of hell and semen I’d take for mine in contribution to my work. This had been a long time coming, in all those books and movies, and masturbation fantasy and bloodlust and laughter and church and days unwound in rooms with those we’d loved. Which was now too. I loved these mothers. Where I licked the skin burned and left a bruise in the shape of someone turning off a lamp inside a hive. The light around us mattered. It mattered even more. I touched their heads again. I drew a hexagon in light. Each place I touched turned wet around my flesh unto the air and therefore inside made them drier. Their clothes had been remaindered. They wore stuffing they had pulled out of the bed to hide their naked. Tufts marring their nipples and obscuring the marks the boys had left where they were kissing on their way home to bring the mothers to me or where they had or had not found their way in. I hated to think of the men before me in these women’s lives, and the women in their lives, and the women in my lives, and the men in my lives. I was kind of spinning in the minute. I touched the women harder. I wished my blood into their chests through my celebrity. I could see the way they felt it as their eyes grew open and they stopped sobbing. They were warm against me. I felt they wanted in me too, and so instead I brought them on and in and in into my body, inch by inch, face first. My coming birthday would be bluer. The newest New Year’s would have no color ever again.
     
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    FLOOD : The bodies of a pair of twins we believe to be those referred to here were located buried among the primary mass grave that would be created in the room beneath the house (frequently referred to as “the mirror room”). The flesh surrounding both victims’ features (cheeks, nose, forehead, eyelids) had been stripped in large part from the bone; as well, various small incisions of flesh from the chests, backs, thighs, and forearms of both females. The cutting is crude, and will remain so as Gravey’s ritual consumption of his victims’ bodies becomes more and more important in his procedure. Many future bodies will be rendered unrecognizable .
     

 
     
     
     
    The bodies of the women. They came apart like women. They came apart like men. The bodies of the bodies. They came apart. In the mirrors there we were. We were not there. We were not us. I turned around and closed the room. I heard the house expanding. I was inside it. I was expanding too. I heard the boys. Heard them coming back in from our night in the cloak of the long ongoing vault of ash that rains. Have you seen me in rain. I know you have. I know you. I went out to see the boys with both my hands. My mouth was full and I was talking. I said the words the second and third mother made me say. They said to close the door. The boys were holding new lamps. I took the lamps out of their hands and broke them on the ground. I told them to move against me. I told them there were more wives. Mothers. Wives. There were other men. I told them to bring the bodies to me so we could write the word that closed the window on the house for good and opened new windows in the floor. Their eyes were pyramids. They stretched beside me. I think one said another’s name not in the name. I grabbed him by the throat and made him spit into my hands on my chest. I made him spit till he was ugly. Till he was not a body made of him. I will wear him, and he will be me, I told another, whose eyes were rubbing at my head. I grabbed him by the throat too and bit with teeth that taste of women still and tasted in his