A BREATH OF LIFE -- CLAIRE LISPECTOR
(foreword; quote) "Last night I had a dream within a dream. I dreamed that I was calmly watching actors working on a stage. And through a door that was not locked men came in with machine guns and killed all the actors. I began to cry: I didn’t want them to be dead. So the actors got up off the ground and said: we aren’t dead in real life, just as actors, the massacre was part of the show. Then I dreamed such a good dream: I dreamed this: in life we are actors in an absurd play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this theater: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only die as actors. Could that be eternity?"

(foreword; quote) “I want the colorful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.”

"I’m hearing music. Debussy uses the froth of the sea dying on the sands, ebbing and flowing. Bach is a mathematician. Mozart is the impersonal divine. Chopin reveals his most intimate life. Schoenberg, through his self, reaches the classical self of everyone. Beethoven is the stormy human elixir searching for divinity and only finding it in death. As for me, I’ve got nothing to do with music, I only arrive at the threshold of a new word. Without the courage to expose it. My vocabulary is sad and sometimes Wagnerian-polyphonic-paranoid. I write very simple and very naked. That’s why it wounds. I’m a gray and blue landscape. I rise in a dry fountain and in the cold light."

"This is a fresh book—recently emerged from nothingness. It is played delicately and confidently on the piano and every note is clean and perfect, each distinct from the others. This book is a carrier pigeon. I write for nothing and for no one. Anyone who reads me does so at his own risk. I don’t make literature: I simply live in the passing of time. The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive. I lost sight of myself so long ago that I’m hesitant to try to find myself. I’m afraid to begin. Existing sometimes gives me heart palpitations. I’m so afraid to be me. I’m so dangerous. They gave me a name and alienated me from myself."


NEGATIVE SPACE -- B.R. YEAGER
"Outside the museum, a naked bronze man rode a horse, holding his arms splayed to his side like Jesus and his mouth gasping toward the curled clouds overhead. The building behind it was a pearl fortress. Inside, naked putty men and women with boarded up faces sprawled across rocks, or clubbed animals in blurred forests. Bleached tingly torsos twisted limbless. Brown fruits soiled forever. I’m not sure I’d ever been to a museum before. My parents pushed us through the Goya exhibit. They said they didn’t understand why someone would paint ugly things. Their knives sharpened on their cheeks. There was this one painting. Three half-naked figures with blotch faces floating in space. Sing-song pointed hats on their scalps. They grasped at a struggling man while another, with his head, shoulders and back covered in a white sheet, pushed through void with his hands out. I couldn’t look away. I wanted to live inside it. The floating people looked like my insides."

"We climbed to the top. Woods and mountains rolled out around us. Pulsing bulbs atop skinny, far off towers glowed red like dragon eyes. Tiny Kinsfield far below, a cluster of lights pushing against the night. Dark clouds moved in from the distance. I took a picture of myself and deleted it."

"Sometimes it seemed like I was the only person who felt anything when someone died. Everyone else made a joke out of it. So it had to have been me who was wrong."

"As long as I can remember there was that low hum of suicide ringing through my body. I’d close my eyes and have flashes of strange industrial machines punching holes in my skin. My form cracking on rocks beneath a jagged cliff. A thousand blades reducing me to ribbons. Rearranging my body in ways not available to me in life. Pushing me across a threshold to be reborn as something novel. That was one reason I followed the Forum—to see all the examples of brave individuals radically altering their state of being. Knowing that there was no chance of ever coming back."

"The boy’s body dangled just above the entrance. Eyes bulged. A tongue pushed through a distended mouth. His throat twisted through the loop of an orange extension cord. His pants smeared wet and brown, dribbling out the bottom of his left cuff. Flies already swarming. All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I’d ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you’ll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn’t miss me."

"We’d hang there on weekends and after school and all through the summer. None of us really bowled but the A/C worked and most of the arcade games did, too. That place was all dull, ruptured magic: Decades-faded carpet and glitching House of the Dead cabinets; strobe lights and a beat-to-shit air hockey table; wanky butt-rock pumped through blown PA speakers. Kids lost their blow-job virginities and sucked their first whippets in the arcade’s dark, cobwebbed corners. We’d eat bars and drink in the crackling bit-crushed oblivion, the splattered clusters of pixel and polygon. It mattered to us tremendously. We were children."

"My insides magenta and bubbling."

"I got home and went straight upstairs to my room. I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop. My insides bubbled. I took my left hand in the other and cracked my knuckles gently. Rolled my head around my neck, one way, and then the other. I reached my hands back beneath my shirt and scraped my shoulders pink. I took my right hand in the other and cracked those knuckles gently. If I didn’t do those things, it’d feel like all the Earth’s oxygen was tearing apart. I logged in and clicked open the browser. Clicked open the Forum bookmark. Black background. Red text. Green text. Grey text. Only a few new posts since that morning."

"I slipped out through the screen door like a c-section. The space empty now, except pine trees shuddering in the wind, sprouting tiny golden fireworks."

"The overheads were off. A couple lamps on, and a pair of novelty lights flashing blue and red in the corner. The stereo bumping horrifying EDM, sounding like two planets scraping together, a woman’s voice chanting who’s gonna get my honey jar, who’s gonna taste my sticky sweet. About a dozen kids folded their bodies over a pair of enormous velour bean bags, sucking face and fingering under blankets and throw pillows. A boy in a corner recording it all on his phone. The walls’ shapes drifted in and out of kaleidoscope. Flatworms beneath my skin. An encroaching loss of language. The vibrations moved outward from my chest to my sides and extremities. Throbbing open spaces ever slightly. Gradual expansion. Shimmers and trails, and boys and girls with pulsing wet slug skin. I closed my eyes and opened them, and it was all suddenly different but not."

"We kissed. A dark heat pulsed through his tattered, crusted lips, through his chest and ruined arms, engulfing my skin. A foreign landscape I was now a part of."

"The truth never makes sense unless you force it to, just like anything."

"Hundreds of tiny black strings crawled from his nostrils and tear ducts."

"I dreamt about him. That he was standing over my bed. That I was following him through an immense black woods. Floating in a black void sea. In a round, grey room. Walls gently expanding and contracting. Shallow breaths. A rotted-out hole in the floorboards, opening into a stagnant, obsidian pool. He knelt at its lip, reaching his hands deep into the water. The water reached back. It stretched upward into a small, whirling torrent, up into his mouth and down his throat, until it was all the way inside him. Then he turned to me, found my eyes, and smiled wide."