Free Three Hundred Million: A Novel by Blake Butler Page A

protected us. There was a ring around our house that made it look like anybody’s. Detectives with silver badges would see no air and turn away. Their bones would melt inside their hands if they came nearer. No matter how many of the boys slipped away or did themselves in, in fear of really knowing, the house held more still. Every eye led back to ours. All of the rooms were one connected, though the boys slept in the belief that they were not aging, gifted with the basked blood and the elegance into which I had enslaved them. We were growing our own film inside the house now, from the cells shucked off of foreheads or from the backs of knees. Each scene provided its own nourishment to make the next one. I did not consume water or eat beyond the victims’ bodies or the sprouts that grew up from their remainders in the locked room under the house. Sometimes I wore a headdress of their skin and sometimes gowns like a desperate princess. The smell of human leather made me erect, and I’d pinch the meatus till it disappeared into the future, for anyone to ride then. I needed every hour of me now for every mother. The boys shot my semen for me in the meantime, from our shared veins. They’d fuck anything that slept. Any flat surface. The house was coming open.
     
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    A. F. F. : “Yeah, a couple cops came sometime soon after the second set of girls. I don’t think the officers knew necessarily about what was going on but there’d been complaints about the black paint and the noise that would go on and on around the house, and the rising grasses, and man, just looking at the house, you knew. I went in the hall closet and hid and listened. I heard no talking. About an hour passed and nothing happened. I came back out slow and saw Gravey lying on the floor faceup with his mouth open. I thought he was dead but then I could see that he was laughing though no sound was coming out.”
     

 
     
     
     
    Inside sleep I placed my own head on the machine of movies we had made or we had wished for in time recorded. As they played, they lost their color, turned monochrome and shaking without horizontal hold. From the inside looking out the days of us were in perpetual fast forward. Our song was on so many stations on the earth already and always had been, slid between the shit. Inside the muffled light of the house when I awoke again I’d have the boys come gather at a speaker each and pray in the leopard language of distortion and human vocals as gasping passage, to destroy this music, these head colds passed as hope. The paper cones vibrated with the nothing so hard, in certain frames it split my teeth; inside each tooth another field unfolding into seven where light I’d need when sundials had no one left to speak to could wait hidden. Where on the transmit span our song had not appeared yet, the other songs that came through hissed head colds into everyone we weren’t. You could hear the bodies with their wires and beef chortle feeding each other right in plainclothes and getting paid to do it. The dance palaces of black luck collapsing in no rhythm as boys and ladies rubbed themselves ready for us to want them even childless. By now none of the boys had pistons left inside them to even laugh at what so much marketable prophecy had done to all their friends, the people they had been once. I listened to them fry against the light. I loved to hear them splitting down the middle, becoming many different people, more of us. The way a body loses the self it is in the instant of the self recognizing the leaving of the self had never been more clear as in the hour of us doing absolutely nothing in between doing the worst things we could think of in America, where more air begat more air. Meanwhile, I let these boys have love. I let them taste upon me the prior mothers by the cells their bodies passed not making children yet this month, and then the cells that held within them as the making of me hard and wide inside them tried to