Limping.

a/n- from inside the asylum Darl Bundren glimpses his family. no idea about this!

disclaimer - none of it is mine; 'As I Lay Dying' is by William Faulkner.

It is Darl in the wilting absences. I can see the tranquil stone of domesticity burning delicately in the gramophone mixture and the tools of carpentry and the eager occupations of animation that mother the second fixates on like a small moon nervous of its planet. I curl my fingers like white insects around the bars and roll Darl's eyes as Jewel rears and bucks on the pale outside of consciousness and Dewey Dell gradually balloons and the body of Cash see-saws across a length of wood and slices it against his hip and shoulder. Cash, my brother. All the world now limps.

Vardaman cools in the sun. He accrues misapprehensions with the movement of his eye, left to right and back again, the landscape multiplying with each ocular sweep, screwing its pieces into his agglomeration of inconsistencies, all of which he attributes to the sun, its angle, the time of day and shadows, yet a small belief tells him that in fact the earth is rearranging itself secretly, and that the light is a frail religion of aquatic entities that he, son of a fish, translates reality into. I can see him thinking this in a shirt too large for his body, scuffing the dirt, hearing in his mind the chunk chunk of the adze as if its blade still instituted death, clunked "death", worked at death with incessant groaning; a death into which his mother might slot.

Behind him Anse sits slumped, his eyes drooping, his new teeth gleaming horrifically out of a face too lined and actual. He has developed a habit of licking his tongue over them, fleetingly, giving him a strange reptilian air, or suggesting an appetite. He licks them now. The gramophone enacts its diversion. The phantom adze chunks.

I cannot quite see Dewey Dell, or Mrs Bundren the duck, though perhaps they are listening to it too, relishing inactivity, or perhaps they are skeletons, or perhaps they have gone on the air like birds, or perhaps they have expanded and burst and are now spilled contents mingling in a bucket for Dewey Dell to cook, though it is she herself, and it is she they will eat, and, upon ingestion, they will birth her private offspring, and all but one will be gilled, and the one who is not will be an ungulate, and he will flourish in the wild and heat and grow to proliferate and murder.

Darl follows Cash with my eye, Cash the gentle dog, Cash the good carpenter. Cash. His movements whisper incapacitation. He is slow and easy. Darl follows Jewel with my eye. Of Jewel there is no sight. They do not think of their brother. Vardaman spits in the dirt. The bars are not white. The hands are white.

It is Darl in the wilting absences.