Assertions, 1.C.5, 900 words
Twill awakens in a strange room. Gray and pink spangles foil in a quiet vacuum across timeless and still passage of what has inexplicably replaced the entire valley. The fluid dreams of his body struggle to build a level floor of heptagonal tiles infilled with triangles that emboss his skin. He recognizes their impossible geometry. The tile is pink and all is marbled like secret bowels. Silence can be a buzz if it never ends. The lights buzz then grow quiet and the empty silence bears into flesh. Blood prickles the nerves against it. Out of eyes like grainy crystal mouths the rest of the ruined room quivers. Nothing vindicates its quiet perfection. It never appears in dreams. It may be necessary to compose an entire grimoire of poses and deviations before arriving at the pristine source of these messes. Objects leave routes in dust; stains on objects have directionality. For whom emptiness is possible, all is possible. Through the silent air conditioner below the window raven wing beats echo and the hot obscurity of the night sky pants into the dark corners of the room. We are overcome, stumble to our knees and adjust the knobs until the metallic blizzard of the air conditioner silences the universe. We trundle him to the far bed. Over the lavatory we skitter on a fluorescent light; in the room turn off the remaining lights and move the bedside lamp to the table in front of the window. He turns to the window from the far bed, atop the clothes, and curls up a cheek in half of a sighing smile. We pull the curtain open beyond the lamp. He parodies a drowning man as best saliva can replace black ocean. Bile from his spiteful sleep flows from his mouth in dreadfully copious tides until a glint of the vanity fluorescent catches breath ripples in a pillow reservoir threatening to consume his nose and mouth. We strip the adjacent bed and bind him on his back with bedspread, topsheet, and sheet in horsewhips that divide his body into four parts. The thick bedspread across his shoulders dams the beige mud that flows down his cheeks. The arrhythmic sputtering to light of mercury lamps outside show on him who looks arisen from the sea by the lipid lassos of bell-shaped jelly lanterns. We light the lamp blocking the window. Refrigerant dew is filling the room. The snoring and the closed-in dimness send our fingers hooking through bindles for small phials of acrid ruby wine. We rub the tincture on our gums and Fluxroot in solution into the soup of his mouth then sink into chairs, feet on the near bed and spin in the moan of the air conditioning. Our visions turn flesh-colored then brown and mosaicked. The floor is magnetic. We press against the carpet and slide the bible from the drawer under the bed like a trapdoor. The pages are obscure. We know some lines. There are many rooms. We pick the crumbling edges of the table to powder with our nails. Mounds of sawdust paste congeal from the glues rehydrated in condensation and grow like calculi. When his pulmonary effluvia laps over the weir of sheets and pillows it will catalyze a smothering tumescence of this fake little house. We haul the mattress from the empty bed into the wall and trundle the wracking box spring to the portal that lets onto the bathroom and seal ourselves into it. We fill the sink from the tap and mix our remaining tincture into a solution which we sit near on a luggage rack breathing deeply. The cool vapor prickles into our eyes. A weeping rose sheen emerges from the grain of the vanity to lubricate it in the glistening jelly of marbled meat. We use long coarse bath towels to bind soaking cloths to our noses to breathe and salivate and drown straight from the narcotic kiss. Punched into stars by that warm sand we sleep, enameled and alone. We reach out to anything bobbing and listing. The air has too much cold refrigerant in it to breathe. We kick down the box spring gasping. The lamps are out. His eyes are open moving slowly to decipher a memory puzzle between two paintings of running fences beyond us as if to him the potion had annihilated our shapes and we filled the room. We open the door. The wind takes it flapping at an odd angle against a sand drift and is drifted more by sand fanning up from the concrete. Sand moves into the matted floats of carpet nap. We look at him and he sees something in the vapor and sand causing him to moon. We turn on all the lights in the room and he falls asleep like a dead moth. We pull the door shut. Half a small dune is cleaved across the threshold. We begin setting the room aright as the sun rumbles distant impressions of light against the back of the mountain range. The near door bed is reassembled. The soiled linens go in the tub. His inundated linens go in the tub. We flush several pages of the phonebook down the toilet and turn on the television. It is snowing. A conversation crystallizes from tides of grainy blank beige on the shared wall. The night manager talks to two travelers. He lets them Twill’s room.
