We cannot escape. Black smoke fills the hotel. Twenty three are dead.
Two days pass. The smoke has coalesced into a flesh-like sludge. One of the bellboys trips on floor 17 and is coated. He screams and screams and screams. We barricade the entrance to the floor.
Ten days pass, uneventfully.
I feel safe now. The sludge has moved away from my room. The lawman tells me the end will come soon. He gives me a hotel mint.
I sometimes hear the whispers of that poor bellboy, vibrating through the wooden belly of this geometric construct. He tells me he is fine, and he is happy.
A maid throws herself out of a window. I cannot fathom why. We are so near.
The bellboy tells me how his life was once filled with meaning. Motivation that drove him, ideals that enticed him, and responsibility that crushed him. He is nothing now. He is free.
We open the door to floor 17. I see
it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is lies there torn like tar stretched across ****** gills there is starlight in the gape of his throat pitch in his dead dull eyes father passes me a cup and I drink his blood father passes me bread and I feast on his flesh father
Philadelphia is a sweltering 70 degrees today! Whew! I think I’ll go to that cute coffee shop across the street, and try one of those new pumpkin lattes.
The new bus system *****! How is anyone suppose to get anywhere on time? Grr!
These muffins are so adorable I just want to throw up!!!
The park was especially lovely this evening. The flowers were in bloom, and this one little girl just kept sniffing them and sneezing and sneezing until she couldn’t breathe and was driven away in an ambulance.
Red blue red blue, they taped off the block today. Pipes burst beneath the road, a bus overturned and the streets flooded with bodies.
little faces pressed against the pavement little faces pressed flat little faces pressed like flowers flat flat flat flat a poem
don’t make me remember please stop
There’s a dead deer’s head in the foyer above reception. The rest must have rotted. They cut away the animal and left only the carcass, the severed space. Our bodies contain us, they are a boundary, and when we tear at the surface we open up and flood the world with emptiness, or perhaps the world floods us. I think that deer burst and they hung its face on the wall to remind us that this hotel is filled with emptiness, and that death will bring only more emptiness. Maybe we’re meant to connect like shaking hands and football and insider trading fill ourselves with foreign emptiness distract retreat like shaking hands always nervous smiling and empty.
I am not here I have never been here go away I was someone but not anymore
These muffins are disgusting they fill the insides with cream and jam and fruit and it is sick and false no one can escape this pointless stupid life go fill yourself with things filled with other things doesn’t change you are a void pulling in everything light itself devourer spinster
Today was one of the best days of my life.
Today was one of the best days of my life.
Today was one of the best days of my life.
Today was
The lawman tells me I have slept for six months. I ask him about that day on floor 17. He tells me there is no floor 17.
We have run out of hotel mints.
There is a gap. There is a gap in my perception. There is a blackness constricting the edges of my vision.
There never was a bellboy. There never was any smoke. The maid is alive. She is alive. I can touch her. She is alive.
We sit in the cafeteria. She pours me bitter black tea, her arm arching in such a manner that would not be possible were she in that twisted ****** state on the day of her suicide. We share this moment every day for a week.
I have begun noticing small grains at the bottom of my cup.
Today I feigned sickness and took the tea to my room. It burns my skin but I do not react. It is as I expected. I am drifting out of my flesh and I cannot stop.
THIS IS NOT THE SAME HOTEL. THIS IS NOT MY BODY. I AM SURROUNDED BY LIARS.
I am going to find the bellboy.
The elevator button is covered by layers of coarse black tape. I tear it away and find plaster beneath. I drive my keys in. The plaster crumbles between my fingers, revealing the bent end of a naked wire. I scream and scream and scream. I am utterly alone, suspended above the earth on a carcass of withered cellulose. The tips of my flesh quiver and the irregular geometric forms of my keys fall to the ground. They are hugged by the synthetic strands of millennia dead creatures. It is carpet, a small voice whispers beneath my skull. What does that even mean? I fall to my knees. I hear gurgling static above. Someone has turned a faucet, fully expecting water to flow out of it, as if it is perfectly ******* normal for water to flow two hundred metres into the air. There is a rasping sound and I realise it is my own throat opening for air.
I don’t want to exist in this reality, anymore.
Two weeks pass. I have collected enough dregs. I will soak them in mouth wash tonight.
The smoke fills my lungs. I hold it until my chest caves, my vision blurs. Grey streams rise from my lips, sinking into the ceiling. A siren screams in the hallway. I hear the lawman at my door. His head smashes against it, screaming, screaming, until it shatters into shell and yolk. I cannot wait to meet my child.
it is a womb alive twisting free empty stupid vessels floating blood in our casings waiting on the carcass spitting my lungs bring me my child bright death bright life
We shift bones to shift words to shift bones. Nobody died but there are twenty six corpses; his flesh fell through his frame, her bones shattered like shrapnel like atomic starlight, his head burst into prismatic decay. I watch their flesh pulled into the womb below. The hallways are umbilical cords pulsing nutrient streams gaping softly breathing burning. I know now. This intersection between life and death. It has always been. It takes in the lacuna. The space between spaces. Human shaped vessels with ill-fitted souls. You cannot tell them apart, you know. Strip the skin away they are revealed formless. They sink into bodies but never form identities. It is this place between places, where transience precipitates like breath on glass, dewdrops spun. I know I know I know the lawman rolls his head side to side blood and brains across the floor shut up.
There, in the hollow of my skull, I am dead, a fleeting absence. I hug the womb beneath me. I drag the rotting parts of myself down. I leave my head beside the lawman. I am going to be with my child. I am going to kiss my bright death into its soul, an indelible beacon to blemish the emptiness of existence.
Late 2015
Flooding the streets. We are empty souls, reflecting our own stretched fingers.
