Read Three Hundred Million: A Novel for Free Online Page B
Authors: Blake Butler
was like take all of the perfumes they sell at one of those department stores in those long glass cases and spray it all into the room together. There was even some kind of color about it. You couldn’t not breathe it all up in, and I have to say that once I’d smelled a little I wanted to smell more. I tried to not want that but the voice was all up in me.”
Name withheld : “Man no there were never that many people. Especially once dude started getting weirder and not giving drugs unless you’d listen to him less people were coming. Yeah he was talking to himself a lot and shit and thought the mirrors were alive but some nights it was just he and some nights I was him myself because I loved him so hard. I mean, I did this. No I really did. It was me. Please kill me.”
The band practiced long hours on our absence. They recorded new takes every night, where each take sounded like the old one but with new void in it, as I grew stronger. We were multiplying, every one of us, all overflowing with ripe brain beatbox. The endless angles of the mirrors made each chest become seven. Boys invited friend boys to the house and fed them what they’d come for and then they too would go on and take the sound to other houses. Some of the people were animals and family pets. I couldn’t tell the difference between a dude and an aardvark. They were all Americans. I wasn’t even never speaking any longer, but now so continuously you couldn’t tell it from nothing. My outgrown silence went on in the brains of two boys I’d asked to extricate their lungs on plates for me to coat with gel and wear as a ball gag. I’d sewn their lips shut. Their bodies worshipped outlet malls like anyone alive. In this new year I could already shrink down if I wanted, I remembered, and witness anybody’s most unfortunate fantasy. I was so busy and there were all those people out there and all these hours wired. I had to name two more boys to do my doll play for me and count my money and make up lyrics for my songs so that they then could be deleted and adhered to what the drums inside my wombs were doing. Today was our best day yet already: I had been saying this each day all through the year, and I would say it here tomorrow and the days before and when again it came into me the same thing again regardless and still every hour it held true. The worming word within me was wanting out even more now knowing exits in the day again begun again cut from the mother and she was only anyone. There were millions more, and just one sky. Under that dumb sky there, through the window in the kitchen where I’d cut into the mirror to remind it who was who, I watched the yard becoming spraytanned to match the shores of flesh the older gods had loved. Each new day that came and went forever gave the ground around us a riper shade. I began to wrap my wrists with wire. I heard Darrel in my knees, teaching me to kneel without actual motion. I heard him in the pistons of the car cold in our driveway, the keys to which I’d swallowed in my sleep. I set the car on fire by thinking of it only in one light in one way, like a promise. I heard the gas tank explode through the wall. Then the yard too was on fire. Then the windows and the roof, though it did not destroy our house as it could not destroy our house. It made us stronger and stunk like rubber. It added new black layers to paint I’d painted in my last days, bringing such heat down on the house that boys were fainting in droves, all sweating eons. My own sweat rained inside the home. It rained for forty days and forty nights, each new day finding more new gloss-unfolding persons arrived to become drenched and sewn into the fold. I had to touch each arriving body on the center of the forehead to hear what was in there before they could be pronounced removed from their past life, given over to the invocation. The band was really bending up the air. Their songs were changing even inside the
Name withheld : “Man no there were never that many people. Especially once dude started getting weirder and not giving drugs unless you’d listen to him less people were coming. Yeah he was talking to himself a lot and shit and thought the mirrors were alive but some nights it was just he and some nights I was him myself because I loved him so hard. I mean, I did this. No I really did. It was me. Please kill me.”
The band practiced long hours on our absence. They recorded new takes every night, where each take sounded like the old one but with new void in it, as I grew stronger. We were multiplying, every one of us, all overflowing with ripe brain beatbox. The endless angles of the mirrors made each chest become seven. Boys invited friend boys to the house and fed them what they’d come for and then they too would go on and take the sound to other houses. Some of the people were animals and family pets. I couldn’t tell the difference between a dude and an aardvark. They were all Americans. I wasn’t even never speaking any longer, but now so continuously you couldn’t tell it from nothing. My outgrown silence went on in the brains of two boys I’d asked to extricate their lungs on plates for me to coat with gel and wear as a ball gag. I’d sewn their lips shut. Their bodies worshipped outlet malls like anyone alive. In this new year I could already shrink down if I wanted, I remembered, and witness anybody’s most unfortunate fantasy. I was so busy and there were all those people out there and all these hours wired. I had to name two more boys to do my doll play for me and count my money and make up lyrics for my songs so that they then could be deleted and adhered to what the drums inside my wombs were doing. Today was our best day yet already: I had been saying this each day all through the year, and I would say it here tomorrow and the days before and when again it came into me the same thing again regardless and still every hour it held true. The worming word within me was wanting out even more now knowing exits in the day again begun again cut from the mother and she was only anyone. There were millions more, and just one sky. Under that dumb sky there, through the window in the kitchen where I’d cut into the mirror to remind it who was who, I watched the yard becoming spraytanned to match the shores of flesh the older gods had loved. Each new day that came and went forever gave the ground around us a riper shade. I began to wrap my wrists with wire. I heard Darrel in my knees, teaching me to kneel without actual motion. I heard him in the pistons of the car cold in our driveway, the keys to which I’d swallowed in my sleep. I set the car on fire by thinking of it only in one light in one way, like a promise. I heard the gas tank explode through the wall. Then the yard too was on fire. Then the windows and the roof, though it did not destroy our house as it could not destroy our house. It made us stronger and stunk like rubber. It added new black layers to paint I’d painted in my last days, bringing such heat down on the house that boys were fainting in droves, all sweating eons. My own sweat rained inside the home. It rained for forty days and forty nights, each new day finding more new gloss-unfolding persons arrived to become drenched and sewn into the fold. I had to touch each arriving body on the center of the forehead to hear what was in there before they could be pronounced removed from their past life, given over to the invocation. The band was really bending up the air. Their songs were changing even inside the