Three Hundred Million: A Novel by Blake Butler Page A

the coming breed of mothers. Having had one I needed every, and even more than that.
     

 
     
     
     
    The beginning had begun and it was going and it was going fast and wanted more than what it had and more than what it wanted to want. I felt a continuous strumming connected in the fiber of my men. Our need made need need need. I shaved the hair off of my body so I could glide and do my best. I felt the rising hammer in my pudge where what I’d eaten all those years there sat upon me waiting to be fed what it had asked for every inch and hour in the theaters and the poll booths and the gas stations and the groceries and the houses of the other people who had let me down and those who had not meant to let us down, the same. It all welled up so fast between my heart and hands, in Darrel, in me, I could not hold it, so it flowed into the boys, and even then I had to teach myself to masturbate again by imagining the high mounds of our cities and the founts or mountains being lifted up and let to fall in fissure and land smashed into the earth. Through the window as far along the land I looked I saw more and more dirt, the bead of all the days surrounding going on in all ways and yet at the same time so hopelessly foreshortened and unexpanding it seemed to end right down the street. The dimensions had no dimensions and no dreamlife. The house was getting fuller faster yet, filling up with all our holes. Each hole could be the only one that led to what it led to. As they burst open, the earth spun. The distance between our house and the homes beside us seemed continuously to grow. I could see the lesions of the huddle of our neighbors spread like Pangaea in reverse to a new perimeter thereon, the bitchbrick of their sad fortresses unspasmatic as if right beside me. I could not keep still my aching meat teeth wanting more, a sweltering writhing so centered around nothing real despite the wars and wishing and the money and the motherfuckers and the cancer and what had I done all these hours until just right this second. Everything at once seemed so tired I could hardly hold my hands inside my hands, still colored in the blood of our first mother. I was grinding with impossible fury. The house asked questions. I went and set my drums on fire. I heard me call the boys in to surround me in the room to watch work burn and learn its tenor. It licked the walls and drums and left only the metal rims. The plastic stunk and got them high as fuck and then they like me were warm. We stomped the carpet clean. I gathered the ashes with a shovel and a blade. So all this black now. So our womb. I yelled over my yelling for the boys to go into the mirror room and bring the mother to me. Her body drug along the grooves between one mirror and another. I spread the ashes on the remainder of where I’d loved her, her posture firm, already of no smell. I tapped two boys to wrap her in a U.S.A. flag. The blue part went around her head so she could see the stars. Someone made a joke about a burrito and I punched him in the heart until he was no longer asthmatic. These were the stars we’d lived under as long as we’d been allowed to, wet with performance. The stars were screaming. The blue could no longer exist. I told the boys to lay with me now to listen near against the girl and learn the prattle of her linings through the American colors. I told them this would be the song they had to play to make the skyhole inside us all together want to be fucked and in reverse unleash upon our earth our worship, the heart of whom is not a kind of music at all but an itch that swallows one’s whole shape. Now I was the one screaming, with all the stars live in my shafts. I reached into my pockets and pulled out the teeth I’d removed from the girl’s head shaped like my mother’s and showed them to everybody. These are Darrel’s teeth, I said. Darrel no longer requires food to make his flesh. We are his mouths; he is our house. I put the girl’s teeth