Three Hundred Million: A Novel by Blake Butler Page A

night sealed us inside it. Insects in its shitstorm murmured words the mother would have one day said had we not come, while in my blood the words she’d say instead became my torso. I had been carrying this moment’s creation in the curls of my black sacs for thirty-four years and a tight collection of horrifying months. Each hour I could not be here in the moment of the passing moment was a death I lived through and would never have again. The boys did not understand this, I knew, and did not need to. They had their own words and hours to carry thick, to lie down inside of without crying on the softest nights knowing what would come for them among some end. They were only partially eternal. They were not yet their own death, so could go on now into any other. As we crossed the lawn of our new victim toward the coming house I made our gang sign with my shoulder at the moon, the throat of Darrel, which could never be destroyed, no matter how much blood was hurtled through it, or what food the raining meat would ruin. The windows of the house our house descending in our vision above the neighbor house reflected nothing back at nothing. We did not appear in the smear, as we had had our own masks made of our faces and wore them now no longer left as masks but accusations of our heads. I could smell America warm for mating, like what else is new. Somewhere nearby men were carving ice into beautiful ideas. The glint of our knives against the window gleam made steam rise, become the planets. We encircled the house kissing the tips of blades. It made a hole around where we would enter. Through the rim of the house I could hear the fourth mother in preparation, rubbing her fingers, breathing the last gas her cells required to make her body’s shape and smell into how it would be when it became. There had to be the exact amount of her left in her and the exact amount left out. The minute had been decided. I led the song in singing as the throat of the moon disappeared behind itself and gave us grace, opened up our pure eternal vision, and in we come.
     
----
    FLOOD : Indeed, no evidence in the homes of Gravey’s victims demonstrated their penetration. No apparent damage to the sealing or the locks, as if the rooms did not separate their interiors from their exteriors. In cases where the homeowners had alarm systems or watch dogs, etc., the alarms were not reported tripped, nor were unusual activities reported by surviving neighbors, suggesting that Gravey’s methods for entry were unusual, perhaps verbally or otherwise coerced .
     

 
     
     
     
    We did not need the breath of keys or codes to slit the windows or the doors to allow our entrance. They already believed in us as much as anything could ever, without the necessity of will. All walls are permeable by simply wishing back against them hard enough to stir inside it the wish to be parted. Like this me and the boys came through the brick of any home, and found there the same objects of belonging, like a library full of shit. Once in, the boys at once dispersed into the house in shafts of their own need, bleating their organs on the peace. The gristle of their mind clung to keep their innards from wanting so hard they burst out through their holes as they overturned the furniture and air, sniffing for the remainders of historical calamity we could fuse to right now. Our shapeless song began to splay and flub out of the holes the ceiling owned, turning sudden sense of present tense of coming killing into the night of what had always been the past. The fourth mother had yet to emerge. She had not completed her unknowable, unmanageable mother preparation in skin and nails and hair in the bedroom of her last night with her children in their rooms asleep. The phantom presence of the father in her mind provided us a breathtaking Trojan horse; she lived as if he’d never died, as if he’d been there in the house like any other husband every day since and past, part of Our