Everending

Don't try to speak for there are no words left here. They have all already fled.

The Grandchild lives in a small room in a creaking tower in the Grandparent's dilapidated house from the Victorian period that looms on the high lonely hill outside the town and the Grandchild sits in a hard straight chair at a plain wooden desk gets splinters running hands across the surface all day and sleeps under thin blankets seeing spiders spin cobwebs over old picture frames even with both eyes closed. The house, the Grandparent's house (the Parents are gone) is not a house the Grandchild knows but just a house that the Grandchild lives, a house that has come to be inside and around the Grandchild despite every wish and plan; the house is the Grandparent's house not the Grandchild's and the Grandchild cannot forget it, and in fact always knows is always aware that the Grandparent walks and sits and lives anywhere within it, is at every window and behind every door and is watchful eyes in every smoke-stained painting hanging in every dusk corridor and midnight bedroom and the singular parlor on the bottom floor after the vestibule where the Grandchild was deposited by the officials of the town one day after every form had been signed and every fee paid and the Grandchild was no longer the town's concern, the parlor that was etched dreary moribund with limp hanging tapestries where the Grandchild stepped only once and never again, saw the marks on the upholstery and never again. The Grandchild is only of the one room in the creaking tower and not the rest of the house. The Grandchild is only looking out the window and running hands over the table and visiting the water closet down through the heavy banging trapdoor down the creaking stairs that the Grandparent can always hear and will always in response call to the Grandchild with old thin word-shapes that rub against the Grandchild like a bow against taut tuneless string, except the Grandchild stays quiet with all might directs all effort to suppressing the sound which begs to burst out and spill through the house and delight the Grandparent's ears with its anxious trill, and so for all these reasons visiting the water closet as little as possible. Instead as much as possible only sitting in the room in the creaking tower and feeling splinters looking out from the high perch across the town which the Grandchild is no longer a part of and hoping that in this way the Grandchild's memories of everything that was before and outside and not a part of this house can be held onto, can avoid becoming vapor and dissipating like everything it seems will always do someday.

The Parents are gone went the way of all flesh inevitably. Like all flesh inevitably their bodies filled up with tumors and lesions and cancers that sucked away their vital signs until their skin turned gray brittle and pallid and they were always sweating never warm and all their hair and nails and teeth turned rotten and fell out until eventually there was nothing of them left, so they were put in boxes and fed to a loud fire while the Grandchild watched and the Grandparent's arm was resting heavily on shoulder. There was no one else when they were burned no one but Grandparent and Grandchild everyone else had left the room or been carried out or had never been there at all. The Grandchild could feel the Grandparent's arm the whole time and the whole time it felt heavy in a way that the Grandchild thought was not how it should not how it was supposed to, did not feel safe or like comfort, but then nevertheless the Grandchild was sent to the Grandparent because there was nowhere else and the town had a procedure and the Grandchild could not be alone, sent to live in the one room in the creaking tower of the Grandparent's dilapidated Victorian house and only that room as much as possible, the house that was all the Grandparent except for that one room which was so remote and so isolated from the rest of the world that the Grandchild was able to feel sometimes like there was a way that it could become something else that was not the Grandparent's, that had no memories and no powers and nothing that held a meaning, that the Grandchild could make it become this through long concentration and careful attention of sitting still and the feeling from running hands across the surface of the table on which there was nothing but splinters the bed which was thin blankets that scratched like ghostly electric shocks.

The Grandparent is in the other rooms of the dilapidated Victorian house (all of them) with the creaking tower where the Grandchild lives and the Grandparent is hearing the ticking of the clocks that are all surrounding and encompassing and that are and always have been the Grandparent's center of existing and feeling the Grandchild above and knowing time is approaching, has always been approaching but is especially approaching now and imminently and is preparing mentally inside the skull and the gray wet mind for the next movement, the movement which is against all known things but which the Grandparent has always known and planned for making nonetheless out of (among other things) simple fear and need and most of all belief in the power and primacy and rightness of Will. And presently the Grandchild sitting very still in the room in the creaking tower hears the stairs creaking in a way which cannot be the wind and cannot be stray animals and cannot be a dream torn and pasted into wakefulness but can only be the Grandparent ascending the creaking stairs in a way the Grandparent never has before. The Grandparent rarely ever has at all but still enough that there is a way by which the Grandparent has always climbed those creaking stairs and this is not that way or perhaps it is that way but magnified and amplified and with all pretense and illusion stripped away. And presently the Grandchild hears the Grandparent stood beneath the trapdoor and not opening it yet but waiting for something or perhaps making final preparations or perhaps simply pausing because whatever is to come whatever the Grandparent's purpose is cannot be realized yet but must wait another moment still, the Grandchild does not know and cannot and it does not matter anyway when after all is said the Grandparent is still there on the other side imminently present with a purpose and a design the Grandchild does not know except that it fills the Grandchild with a feeling like every light in the world dimming and the world also progressively shrinking until there is nothing to it except this small room in this creaking tower in this Grandparent's dilapidated Victorian house where something is presently going to happen. And presently the trapdoor opens and the Grandparent comes through the trapdoor and is standing or perhaps looming in the small room before the Grandchild and says words to the effect of:

I am going to steal your body. You are going to be emptied out of it and I am going to take your place and live your life in your stead. You will go nowhere and no place because I have taken what you thought was your life from you and made it into mine. The clocks will turn backwards and the natural order will be reversed. I will make it so it is not I who begat you but you who begat me, and who will begat me again and again from the bowels of nothing where you will have always been, before and after and now, when I have taken you out of the thing you call yourself and made it mine instead. We will mix and flux for an instant that will infinitely regress into null dimensions and then you will not have been because I will have taken your being and made it mine. Don't try to speak for there are no words left here. They have all already fled.

And after saying these words during which the Grandchild sat silent and rapt and felt the blood pounding like footsteps in heavy boots inside the skull, the Grandparent took out a burnt and blackened shape and stepped forward and the small room into which the whole world had shrunk began to change its nature. The Grandchild felt a heavy pulling and a mixing that was not physical but something else both more definite and less, real but not happening like anything else had ever happened to the Grandchild, and it was clear that the Grandparent's process had begun or had always been happening but had no reached the point where it could not be disguised or denied, the point at which it has become real like spit boiling in the Grandchild's mouth, and the Grandchild felt mixing with the Grandparent, not physically but something more than that, felt blurring, felt suddenly the dissipation of memories which had of course been happening since the Grandchild went to the Grandparent's house now was not gradual and subtle like it had been but all at once like a stopper being pulled and it was like the Grandchild's eyeballs were beginning to see behind themselves in part, were no longer looking only outward but also somewhere else, some other place that was not a place at all or was every place which the Grandchild thought now was the same as being no place, there was nothing to distinguish them and in any case the Grandchild's eyeballs were not seeing colors or shapes or lights or shadows but just nothings, patches of nothings, but nothings that were not the same as the nothings the Grandchild had known before such as the nothing of being in the small room in the creaking tower or the nothing of the Parents being gone, but were not new nothings either, were in fact and actuality the opposite of that somehow and instead were nothings (patches of nothings more specifically) that were not even old but outside of age had no age whatsoever and they were like holes that had no shape but were just not, were just un-were. It happened, these patches and the mixing and the blurring, without a touch without the slightest contact of body to body just with the Grandparent holding the burnt and blackened shape in the small room and the Grandchild there in the hard straight chair not moving and losing memories and soon quickly it became apparent also thoughts, losing everything within the skull but the wet gray itself it seemed and yet somehow the Grandchild found this leading not to oblivion but to a concentration more focused and complete than any other the Grandchild had experienced before when alone in the small room in the creaking tower trying to make it into something else, a concentration that was absolute in a way that excludes all else, and it was clear suddenly that the process was not happening like it was supposed to and that the room is changing its nature in ways that the Grandparent has not anticipated.

The room was changing its nature and it was not something either could understand but something both were influencing were in fact deciding the very and exact and total course of although neither could know how, could actually make it become in one direction or another, the Grandchild because it was all concentration and patches of nothings and happening in a way that was not consciousness in any way except the most primordial like the first flickerings of electricity in a soup that had as yet no discrete character or nature or identity separate from the whole of everything which itself had not yet assumed the shape of even a halfway preliminary decision, that shape that allowed the growth of bodies and houses and towns and Families everything else that had formed the world of the Grandchild’s known that was now blurring and fluxing and changing and reducing into the only things so integral or impossible they could not be eliminated, the Grandparent because nothing with the Grandchild was like was seen in the precautions that came before, in the bones or in the waters or in anything else it was altogether a different sort of thing which was producing into the room a change which was not within the designs and not according to the plans and was forming with the burnt and blackened shape in the Grandparent’s hands a relationship which struck a fear within although of course in the changing room in the space between and across and within the two everything was so far beyond even fear as any other would know it that it was more like an empty shell lying dead and dusty in a perfect moonblack shadow than a real living sensation. And the room was changing its nature and sometimes looked like nothing and sometimes looked like a coffin sometimes looked like a great gray dome sometimes was filled with smoke sometimes was filled with blinding light and the Grandparent and the Grandchild were blurred, very blurred, like behind a rain-streaked glass and neither felt anything except the nothing and every other thing that was all around and in-between.

Meanwhile there was no meanwhile. While the Grandparent and the Grandchild were in the small room in the creaking tower and its nature was changing there was nothing else relatively and time did not move forward or backward but instead spread outwards like a cool liquid going nowhere coming from nowhere in a large basin simply constantly growing in volume and webs were spun and floorboards creaked and stars burned out and it all happened in no time at all, time was everywhere and nowhere around and inside the Grandchild and the Grandparent as they were facing each other the Grandparent in bitter spite trying to make the process happen and the Grandchild trying to resist and feeling less and less of things and more and more of nothings all at once, an experience happening not linearly but layered infinitely atop itself like gauze packed and piled atop a mortal wound, but somehow in this way feeling an awareness a concentration only growing more complete and more absolute and more sutured into the totality of the small room in the creaking tower which was right now it seemed all there was and which was changing constantly its nature in ways neither the Grandparent or the Grandchild could understand but which both could see was of every consequence and importance. And suddenly after ten thousand years or one fifth of a second there was a hole in the basin that time had been spreading out in and suddenly it flowed out in a decisive way and the burnt and blackened shape glowed unbearable white-hot in the Grandparent's hand and the Grandparent had no choice had nothing that could be done except to drop it and let it fall to the floor and see it burn a hole and sink there through the boards and into the rest of the dilapidated Victorian house, feel every room and hall and stairway and the parlor with the marks on the upholstery and the bedrooms full of whispers and the stairwells lined with gloom and even the outer vestibule where the Grandchild was deposited one day in some past by the officials of the town below the hill after all arrangements had been finalized, all of the places of the dilapidated Victorian house that was the Grandparent's house the Grandparent felt become scorched and burned and rendered into dead memories until there was nothing there anymore except the mark on the floor of the small room in the creaking tower and a burnt and blackened skeleton underneath. And finally the Grandchild saw something fixed again and it was an absence, saw the space where the Grandparent had stood, had definitely stood, and saw that there was not anything there anymore just silent air with no plot and no flesh. When the Grandchild saw this it was all finally decided again and the Grandchild turned back around and ran hands across the surface of the table and looked out the window and saw no hill and no town and just the infinite black expanse of outer space.