Three Hundred Million: A Novel by Blake Butler

whitewash gored over the yard in the husk of moths that came to feather at the warmth our home birthed by all the flesh and homebirth. No one could see shit besides what hadn’t happened yet. Each of the boys carried long knives, which I had them select from the set of flatware in my heart according to their height: the shortest self carried the longest blade and so on unto there, where at the middle there had been the most medium of people, and the steak knife. I’d slit this middle child’s throat for being average, which seemed too real. His common blood spread on the tile and would be repackaged into little vials I would have the boys take and release into random containers of organic juice in aisles across our minor cities. For my own part I carried the weapon of my silence where the wet inside me would not end. The animals and instruments we’d lived in and believed in by memory alone and worn as skin outside our skin unfurled a silent canopy above our heads as we paraded quiet into all that old United air. I walked hid at the center of our swarm toward the neighbors singing nothing, keeping Darrel’s common brain poised in the Eye of our parade as words furled between us each to etch our presence totally common, beyond what the flanks of any municipal alarm might feel. The air I’d supplied in the boys’ minds could blow straight a dead bolt on our imaginary war. This was not hyperbole. We were the neighbors, however many miles away. The street we held our heads to was everyone’s. Their wish lived in my fingers as I pointed our way toward where was love. The current now-becoming-now was finally actually at last the instant it had always been meaning to act like.
     
----
    SAL : “We didn’t even have to kill the family next door to kill them. They would be dead the next morning regardless, only now they’d not be having breakfast. The radios played Gravey dictating the moves we made on the FM band so everyone could follow on at home, though to them it sounded like Madonna.”
     
    Name withheld : “I was involved. I was not involved. Both are the same. That’s no more of a confession than pulling your car up in the drive-thru at Arby’s and ordering just enough to fill you up in your imagination. There’s no need for threatening me about getting to go home for saying any different than I have already, a thousand times over, since I was born. I’m a fire. My body is my helmet. Bleat.”
     

 
     
     
     
    We used our knives to cut the wires down around the neighbor’s house. I ate some of the wire into my mind and felt it bake there, unto dissolution. It had a taste of smolder, its knotted innards fused and twined. The image of the hours burst into the house, laughing at us all forever at the seam of Exit Sky. What words those inches had accrued in shitting information back and forth between the people. I could taste where in the wire the neighbor mother’s speech and seeing, all her wishes her best guesses, had already been rummaged through her coilings hot and hard so many times she hardly had an imagination left. I could taste the remainder of the days of pregnancy about her where the babies had come out. Each of the babies had their own films in them like mine and yours, some of which the father in transcription of flash and mangy memory had tried to store as homemade media on versions of hard drives of the house’s machines before he was removed; the wire had eaten most of that too, by my order, encrypting its data into mental zits. It made the house’s body glow under no moon, feeding a beacon for us to flood forth toward as a beginning with which we could begin to make this home into more of ours. I heard the paint murmuring inside me, baking organs I could spoot into the gaps for insulation, the singing crease. The lawn beneath my body as I walked with arms down turned to velvet Astroturf. The dirt beneath the lawn turned to a putty you could use to seal a tunnel cut through brick. The