All days rolling into one. My wasted limbs grow smaller. I lock the door and sink into baths of
shadows, grip my face between my knees, knuckles drip sweat, bad tastes in my mouth:
butts of cucumbers and the smell of burning hair. Gun smoke under my pillow... billygoat with
horns running out the head ... bursting like the neck of a broken guitar. My nails are falling off.
I can hear the lake; decay fluttering out with black wings. I wake up spitting the scratches out
of my throat. I look onto the blanket and see bits of fingernails and hair moving around in the
spit. I hear a shrill tone coming up from outside. The clouds are sharp knives tearing the
throat out of the sky. I find it hard enough to express what I think I know. All these bunched
up faces, lost to the drunk spiders in the corner of my room, are not even there. Wretched
shadows playing around, trembling innards, my chest is a shaking bag of screwdrivers. My
eyes turn in the breeze, without shadow. Silence. The lake is slow. The sun is wet sentences.
The shore fizzes like soda. The bank is flooded and swamped with a heap of legs sprouting
from some seeds of piss, stacked up and poking out like rats eating their way through a pile
of apricots. Back at the house, in the garden, I see a frenzy of hands. The women smell like
sand and ham. The valley looks like piles of guitars. Off in my head I keep walking around in
the village; I keep walking around an old spacious museum of dementia. Dawn ... blood in my
mouth. I fumble with some toilet paper I’ve kept in my pocket, pull at the thin pieces and
press on the gums. The paper falls apart. Scummed in the beard of night, I move my hands
over the face bleeding in the hallway, smelling like a handful of coins. Body uncomfortable,
pink and limp, and I begin to remember my mother who died with no children. Walking around
the lake seemed like such a hazard; the air sweltered and painted a silver hell. I don’t like to
think of those years when everything changed. I want to wipe them out of memory like a bad
dream. Everyone suspected everyone else. It gets to the point where you’ve been up the
arse so long that all you’ve seen is shit. War. Drugs. What’s the difference? It all just turns to
noise: the noise of a steel hell being rolled up like a carpet. The night grinds out. A mute
television still buzzes, playing streams of inflamed coastlines. A bunch of different colours
bruise the sky. The lake folds with grey waves like fishermen’s nets, shimmering on the
surface as insects make knots in the air. On top of a blade of grass, a weasel sucks at some
eggs. An old woman stands in the doorway, headscarf wrapped around her face; she starts
crying, walks to the car to hold me. She cries more and talks in her demented half-language
that none of her children can understand – a series of strokes throwing her throat into the
darkest parts of her body – it’s as if she speaks from her stomach. She squeezes me tightly. I
feel my whole body swelling up. I smell perfume coming out of the back of my head –
childhood keeping its lights on. I can’t think much further than the front door. My lungs heave

like a T-shirt after a swim. I stand by the window and watch the silver hairs of the late sun
shake. We drink beer and watch TV. The old woman holds me with both of her hands and
won’t stop crying. My glass bubbles as my mother’s auntie keeps topping it up with beer. She
wears a camouflage shirt and pants. Another very old woman whose face is sculpted
sideways, with small raisin eyes and red cuts on her crumpled forehead, walks into the TV
room and hugs me. She shakes. I ask my cousin if this old lady is her grandmother; she tells
me it’s her mother. My mother’s auntie in the camouflage keeps changing the channel with
the remote, showing me how to use it. Plastic flower pot-plants line half the room. The old
woman in the doorway starts to cry even louder, and my mother’s auntie and my cousin tell
her to shut up. A white kitten with taut reddish skin runs around the perimeter of the room,
behind the TV and the pot-plants – an old woman gets out of her chair and paces quickly,
hunched over from her diseased brain, wanting to beat the kitten until it’s a pattern on the
carpet. Sitting back down, her lips start to chap like white lines splitting a hinge. She opens a
drawer and pulls out photographs of me as a newborn.
Wounds appear in the rearview mirror as it bends the road behind—one swirling waste in
reflection. More distorted sceneries: lakes drowning themselves, mountains seemingly falling
in on themselves; yet unlike most landscapes that are ever-vanishing, these are coming into
being. Not stiff or unshakable, the sun and moon less idiotic than usual. Articles of light beam
farther on into the unfinished distance. Debris piles up in scattered mounds. A car is wrapped
around the trunk of a tree. The land appears helplessly deduced to collapsible vitrines. All
there is is a layer of glass for protection. Glass walls, glass books, glass doors, glass bridges,
glass machines, glass gardens, glass harvests, glass organs, glass eyes, glass balloons,
glass skies, glass dreams, glass masks. A blind fury of consciousness laid bare, shattering
away in seconds. It feels as though I’m an already dead person who keeps trying to commit
suicide.