drawing by Meghan McNealy

Here’s a bit from the novel, Little is Left to Tell, by Steven Hendricks coming out in September from Starcherone Books.

Help Starcherone (non-profit independent publisher) promote this work to the world…

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE SUN SINKS. One sees landscapes encircling creatures who want only to leave this cold night. I have resisted grain and water enough to die before the week is out. I disperse like angels around a grave. Solemn rail, it sheds black hair, such feet, such a purse, hairy cheeks, a pacifist’s chin, before a banquet of dust. …in slippery satin, sea-green women condemn me… a square upon the oblong… here are the stones that wither beside the smooth stream, where fish sink, sea-smitten, almost gods, bearing fruit and blossom. I take them from you, mended to the sky and to the distant shores, my fortune, my fortune of stones. I watch the cool wells, I walk the roads. I will remain in this landing between stairs, looking out upon dead lands, where nothing moves. I will hold on, I will not let go. I will consume and be consumed. From the air that forms in the heart of the earth, into the air that forms the breath of me, I cast my stones, my curses.

Virginia the Wolf was a fractal. If one looked closely (if one were able) at the composition of her flesh, one would find them, hundreds, millions of wolfish jaws gaping, and there in their throats, a veritable plague of bacteria-like Virginias, smaller than small and wandering about, prowling and sinister ornaments that knew all she knew, waiting in their own wild orbits. Every moment, a nation of them was sloughed off, scraped against a wall, shaken into the distance when she was cold, when she scratched, and they formed infinitesimal piles of life all over the house and grounds—every moment, yet they would never be used up. The whole world might already be filled with her, inside and out.

So, to meet her was to meet an earthly deity, though her manner was restrained, even withdrawn. Withdrawn as she sat at the window as if waiting; withdrawn as she did her typing, in the early dawn before breakfast and from the close of supper until darkness had risen. The deity appreciated the echo of her own slow keystrokes. She gave her commands to the elders among her many servants, who all obeyed a formalism of task and communication that kept them occupied: this, that. The few with whom she spoke hovered on her words, as if her breath were delicious viscera. Picture them in brown, male or female, shiny as Labradors but with noble, dispassionate eyes. Many of her commands, she would admit, were useless, that is, they were already the daily machinations of the house and grounds, but in maintaining her right to command the details, to alter them slightly, to be the finest but most decisive gear in the watch-works, she maintained her authority in the house and her right to anger at whatever she pleased.

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(opening section transmuted from a  passage in The Waves, by Virginia Woolf)