There is a layer of silence, peel it back, layer by lsayer, slipping between each with a fine blade, peeling them away, silence beneath silence.
When the atoms are still enough you can hear the not-silence, thrum thrum thrum, peel it away like skin on teeth, the silence beneath that, absolute quiet.
And the silence underneath that, the sound of the fuzz itself.
And beneath that there is an even deeper silence, your blood itself pouring through your tubes. Beneath that there is no silence.
Beneath that I am afraid.
Skin from teeth, you can pull back
the fatty layer of your cheeks,
gushes as you cut it.
And beneath the muscle, like the silence beneath the silence,
you can hear the bone of your skull,
and teeth.
The eye is held in place too tightly. Too much would need to be cut away.
The severing of the eye from its socket,
sight
to pain
to silence.
Death must feel like blindness, the detachment of the eye.
One eye is closed in a wink, like
you did as a child, holding
one eye shut the lids pinched tightly between
finger and thumb,
like
squeezing the head off of a bug,
with both eyes open and
one eye forced closed,
the bug's innards dripping down, into the eye, becoming part of the tears
the lacrima itself
otherwise.
You held shut your eye, your fingers tight vices,
until your muscles were strong enough to keep away the insects themselves.
We could always tell when the bugs were landing on the surface of our eyeballs, even if they were too close to see,
like searching for one lost balloon against the entirety of the sky.
You could have one eye shut,
like death,
like you were the one-eyed Allfather this whole time, learning and knowing about the world only through your ravens.
And if the ravens ever went for our eyes, it was
not because we were scared and alone. It was
not because they could read our nightmares the way one man might readddddddd another.
If the ravens went for our eyes, it was
to go after the bugs that we knew must have been there, though we could
not see them.
We had faith that the
ravens and rooks were
doing the right thing,
even as they
took their scalpels and their edged blades
and peeled away the eyelid
and sawed into the meat around our eyes.
The ravens spoke hollow riddles, and whispered myriad rivers, echoless against the balloonless sky.
We must trust them.
They will keep away the insects, from crawling into
our cavernous bones, ballooned inside like the brittle interior of the yeasted risen loaf.
We could shut our eyes against them now, first one, now the other. And
when we shut each eye in turn, the open was the only one,
the other side was not blackness or darkness, but nothing, as if the eye had never been there, and all along that eye was death, and the other eye was thought, and the other eye was memory.
And if we took our scalpels now, and plucked out the
offending
eye, would that be the feeling of death?
We would feel no pain, only the sensation to be dead.
Peeling away the skin, like thought
peeled from memory, like silence
peeled from silence, we
flayed the carcasses and harvested the fur, and the animals
the beasts
we left behind, they could feel
that,
the whole time,
and
they
were
screaming.
That is the silence underneath the final silence.
To have one eye closed, and the other, but
to have both eyes closed, that is death, and
that is what the ravens and rooks and magpies and crows know
that we do not,
and
that is why we worship them,
sacrifice for them,
drink the blood both hot and cold.
We skinned the animals
the beasts
in secret, away from the thought or the memory of the hoary black birds,
skinned them alive
dead
and felt the fur underneath our fingertips
and felt alive, alive where others were dead. To pet is to live,
to feel the slick feeling,
strand strand strand strand strand
each
individual so soft,
together a carpet,
of experience sensation.
I can still hear the silence.
But now the teakettle, as well, shrieks for me.
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