An evil breeze, frigid and hissing, sharpness… slice… separation…, insinuated itself into the kitchen, strangely: because the windows were closed; as the telltale hairs on the back of my neck perked up like metal slivers reacting to the passing of a magnet.
Rest in peace.
I stood my ground in human warmth.
On the counter, in the cupboards and on the walls, the knives began to rattle, their steel cooling—rapidly, condensation obscuring their specular surfaces, except not water but blood—
The cupboard doors burst open—
shower of splintered wood,
through which the dripping blades drifted, joining their brethren, risen from the counter, skimming from the walls, their coldness evaporating: an expanding scarlet mist.
Blades down,
floating,
they in their flock reflected my own unblinking eye, by which I saw, and, seeing, inhaled the fatal vapour—
They spun; pointed at me.
They flew!
through my body, and in that moment of penetration, the taste of iron flooding my mind, the sound of glinting steel, I became madly aware of the impossible simultaneity of dimension: the world—the normal world—I understood to be at once of three- and sole-dimension: of depth; and utter, terrible flatness.
I ran to to the window, and from the nineteenth floor beheld:
a murmuration of knives,
a dancing synchronicity in space and sun/light so harsh it burned me to see
my neighbours gathered at their windows,
some looking,
some blessedly annihilated by the selfsame comprehension of compressed reality that flickered within me: on and off /and/ on and on /and/ off and off /and/ […]
As they ascended and dove, like some monstrous swollen accumulation of metallic dust, they left tears in the one-dimensional, like ruptures in a burial gown, revealing glimpses of what lay behind—
The corpse of reality,
an ossified once-was never-will of exhausted lifeforce.
Then what—I recoiled!, away from the window-screen—am I?
An insect subsisting on the last dried scraps of putrid flesh still clinging to the bone.
They churned.
In the air, they seethed.
People poured onto the streets, tears streaming down their distant faces.
Tears streamed down my own face.
I slid my fingers into one—the void-space where part of I used to was—now devoid of me. I am a nothing-fruit, peeled—tearing at the tears!—to discover myself as mere optical illusion: no flesh, no seeds, no pit. I cannot be consumed.
Yet the tears fall from somewhere.
From [my/our] eyes, which [I/we] see staring back at [me/us] from the glimmering murmuration.
My body, from the lower eyelids down, lay discarded on the floor, as I-remaining floated through the glass, through three-but-one dimension, depth transcended to a flat understanding of existence, whose blood, condensed upon the twirling blades, rains finally upon the illusion of progress.
I am eyes without [a face/: effaced]
Rains flatly, like water drops sliding down glass.
A house in the country.
No one inside.
A pale light flickers—before a blast of wind—extinguishes the single remaining candle.
A wisp of smoke,
dissipates… to nothingness.