Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Snaredrum

Someone keeps emailing me from an address that has the name of the name of the person I'd been in other years. They have pictures of my innards. My stomach is a pale and lovely yellow, but burnt black near my aorta. There are staple marks in the thin wrists connected to the hands I used for stimulation. Teeth grown into the window of the eyelids of my belly, where the baby burped, where I might simmer, where the doorbell rang and rang.

I found pictures of my rectum posted on a website I'd paid no small fortune to join in. I used my mother's credit card, a Visa. I printed out the receipt on translucent paper. In the photos my testes had swollen between my buttocks, basketball sized and brown and dripping. I clicked on the thumbnail and saw something other than what was promised. There were also pictures of a man. There were also pictures of no color. I saved to the hard drive and then deleted.

From the trash I dug out condoms full of sperm I had not yet sent. Some I'd been storing. Want for welling. Some sound of screeching in the rubber. I put one on my tongue and chewed. In the trash as well I found saliva: wrapped in baby bunting and off color like old coffee. There was so much mold I lost my arms. At the bottom of the can, under the brown bags, there was another man, who said goodnight.

In all my droning I felt an error, some speckled buzz like spayed cats fucking. My hair chock with static. My knock-knees numbing. I got down onto the floor. Against the floor I felt another cheek-to-cheek just beyond the other side. Some song vibrating each fiber in the carpet. In the carpet, all my hair. In my hair, the cells I'd grown out, the saturation, the soft blonde trauma. In the trauma, some insect squealing, rubbing its legs together that I might dance.

9 comments:

Josh Maday said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Josh Maday said...

Good blabber, Blake. I like this a lot. Snaredrum is a good title. Do you write to the music or the pictures in your head?

BLAKE BUTLER said...

ty, josh. music makes me shit. i like the sound of my refrigerator

. said...
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Justin Rands said...

Yes. I agree. This was really good Blake. Nice writing

BLAKE BUTLER said...

xox x2

brandon said...

gross

good job

Lyndall-O said...

I like this a whole heap. The part about the man at the bottom saying goodnight made me think of David Lynch. This thought may be a coincidence, a result of misfirings in my brain, but I think - I think you may have captured something Lynch-like here...

BLAKE BUTLER said...

lyndall making me smile