Quentin.

a/n -for 'the sound and the fury' by william faulkner. quentin compson on the bridge before the suicide. (or, the really unfortunate result of reading william faulkner for the very first time on a rainy day while under the influence of gillian welch songs!)

discalimer - nothing of it is mine.

The water is calculated and clear like the option I once held to your throat and I cannot constitute agony I cannot see where it originates I cannot make of it a mouth into which we might breathe like the sleeping stain and even now at this second time in its dubitable constancy cannot vocalise any note more redoubtable than that which hushes in the damp and says "I'm stronger than you" with the high laughter of the dying that I cannot understand now that it is quiet and the water reaffirms itself like a compliment and I think of factuality as you die, for you die languidly, a shy disease, the dilatory orbit of its infirmity enlarging beyond you, you Caddy, you Caddy, "you, Candace!" our mother says. Caddy you are the king but I have destroyed you.

I tongue my name like a bolus in my cheek and think that it holds vacancy like the water holds everything in suspension as if the air had grown glutted and thickened to such an extent that it became a shivery liquid that now I might enter and wind into like a tough knot that not even you will shake out, not even you, for all your strange gentleness, your lancinating heart, your contraries, but you are pure but what is pure

Caddy.The honeysuckle grimaces in the breeze. I swim in the nausea of its smell. When I drop it is into honeysuckle. I will flicker out in honeysuckle. When my body is lit with disintegration it will flourish in my putrescence like a deceit and spill with private fragrances like your shadow in the living bright and I will say you, Caddy, you, Caddy. There is nothing else.

But the water now. The water is made of mothers and fish and bodies and children and bread and I want only this, this--

and when the world is made of dogs you might come to me in the rising gold and mention the tiny word we held vaulted against the flat ocean that day that day when it was colder than usual for the season and your face was thin with sweetness and i said i do not want this dumb endurance, this hem-hemming perduring wreck, and i do not want your sad nerves, your violet nerves, for they play upon my tragedy like i have seen your digits do, like i have noticed in the stage dark, when the world is all of hands, for it is too much for me now, and the memory isolates itself, and i die somewhat. i die somewhat to you and to the quivering. i was not made to be an irregular vibration in the ear of someone else but if not that then what

if not that then what you say

if not that then what

when the mouth makes the shape of what it wants and blows that shape into the air so that it manifests in beads of oxygen,
if not that then what? but did you ever have a sister

yesterday in the foliage black i saw my animal gritting its body like a weapon; i saw its eyes like twin monsters in the leafage dark; i saw its ferociousness; i saw it like a predator; and such fear i have never felt, for i stood and stood and was almost blotted out with it, with fear, and then it was over and i could not stand up and i knew nothing, nothing at all, only water.