Really hopeful for this one, sent through to the most prestigious contest I could find in the horror genre. In the effort to polish it up I also had a lovely first collab with an editor. Let’s hope I’ll have a reason to write back at her.
I no longer know or want to know. I no longer want to know what I don’t know.
I no longer resolve to stay in my room, to grasp hopelessly at nameless things. Or defy the concession that there is a limit, that the human should only stretch so far, and that beyond that, beyond the limit, lies only insanity and death.
For if I do, if I concede that there is a limit and a stretch, an inside and an outside, then I must also concede that, in the middle of my notebook, that notebook I’ve hardly ever written in yet I carry around like a promise, like a talisman, in that notebook’s middle pages where the cloth bookmark falls along the spine, these words I never wanted to hear again and never repeated to anyone, whispered to me in the dead of night as I lay paralyzed on the bed, a bed of nails if you will, if you care for cliché, these words whispered to me in a singular voice like poison honey, a voice seductive and dangerous and unquestionably a woman’s, are written here in pencil in handwriting that doesn’t look like mine, yet cannot but be mine, I cannot let become my whole world, these words, for only I could have written, written but forgotten, perhaps written when drunk, perhaps even sleepwalking (why not, it’s a good story — Hitler even said, “I walk with the certainty of the sleepwalker”), no other hand but mine could have scrawled these words across the middle pages that read: We are perfect together.
True story bro? Who knows. ~ [ [ i know ] ] ~
the Budafoki amended 