Manus' (GH GH GH GH GH)

From a stupor at the vanity, I was thrust to turn my head aside to the doorway. Three flights down the stairwell, through the hallows of the concrete brut temple I’m cloistered within, in a large chapel that opens to the outside, it begins. An enormous crashing is sounded and I know it’s over. Metal scraping on metal and stone crumbling into stone and screams of those unfortunate enough to be caught inside. In the chapel far below me, a great squealing is unleashed the way flesh is knotted around and through itself by the forces of beyond, dimensions upon dimensions of the knot forming by an emptiness ripped open like knives across paper, the solid now made so radically open that the blackness itself seems to form psychedelic within, as though we can’t bear the horror of not seeing color beyond, we cannot truly bear the weight of knowing the darkness of swirling waters.

“Get up. It’s time to go.” The man in the leather jacket isn’t asking, as he threatened. I’m only wearing my nightgowns, layers of satin and silk and stiletto heels for his pleasure. My lips are too bright and I touch my face to realize its the wrong shape today. The man leads me on through darkness growing from the edges of corners, the hallways turning to have fogged cobwebs of the abyss seeping in where rebar meets stone. The walls were always empty and now something is painted atop them, like amber paneling over the plain wood of a Russian pretender-king, and we’re being enclosed, trapped within deeper layers of the house. This is a machine for unliving, something now made clear by whatever imagination in the rectangular rooms and concrete pillars birthed that horrid thing that now rends, a gnashing hunger that snowballs through and around in dimensions unknowable, rending and ripping and twisting, not a destruction but a distortion past and past and past what can be tolerated. It won’t listen to limits and we cannot die from it. I know this and the man knows it.

A body is twisted and rent across a room where the wreckage has been made total as the form of dominion the room holds. I saw his wife. The darkness went inside her and tore her as it spun, a tornado within under she was rent across the room in the walls as pillars crumbled and metal twisted and the room became a cubist nightmare where bodies were stretched beyond their composure and pain squealed from movement like water wrung from rags.

I don’t know how long it will be before my time. The area beyond is dead and flat, a desert on an infinite plane that stretched white forever to a horizon that never arrives. The man leads me away to make tracks in the sand. No matter how far we walk, we will never walk far enough. The home will never be home to us, its language always beyond us, an alien inhospitality in which we fitfully navigate in continual tripping and stumbling, sharp bladed scraps and pieces arranged in the order of a discourse we only speak in feverish dreams cutting to shreds the feet of our waking lives.