Status Updates From La disparition d'Heinrich S...

And she hid her language under her tongue. When a word
wanted to wriggle out, like a worm, she swallowed it quickly and clamped her lips shut. Words slithered back up her throat and into her mouth. She kept her teeth pressed tight together, so the wriggling words wouldn’t show. [...] When she received a lesson for breaking a rule, she hid her throbbing hands in the slow and steady ticking of the tall clock.

In the remaining pages of his journal, every day he wrote the hour at which he got up and the hour at which he went to bed. These tiny entries framed the muteness invading him.

His true desire was for someone to feel exactly as he did, so perhaps it was best that the others were absent, leaving him free to imagine the precise quality of their delight.

There were moments when Heinrich imagined that he was being supported by a huge hand, and that from his perch on the broad palm of this enormous and benign hand he could see in all directions, so that time no longer frightened him. Were a great gust of wind to blow him over the edge, he’d fall willingly, feeling content to have gazed in all directions at once.

When Heinrich thought of his mother, her beautiful head, severed from her body, would go floating through a room full of people who didn’t dare move, who waited. They waited for his mother to speak, to offer a revelation.