Three Hundred Million

by Blake Butler

I do remember. I know I do remember. I had in the world before this had a wife. I had known a woman who I had loved and had asked to share her life beside me. We had been together several years. We met in a small room near an ocean. I knew her already before I did. I mean that in the way you could ever know a person because they are a person who is another part of you, and who you also are a part of. It is as if you have been split, and have been walking around in long dementia wide apart, each containing in your own body parts of that person they will never have again, no matter how hard you try to spread it back into them. Through where you try is where the color grows and melds you to something beyond the world, beyond the videos and language, beyond the silence of us. These colors fill the air among us. It wakes among us beyond skin. The changing light in layers laid unto no ending, despite the body’s softing, and the mind’s white. I knew already that my wife was sick when we were married. I knew that a thing unlike the thing we meant had chewed into her frame, and taken place inside her brain, and grew and grew against the growing of the colors we had saved, and though it could not deform the colors, it could deform the shape of her I most knew. It took the skin from her, the blood from her. It worked all through her in the night while all I could do was lie beside her, and in the day I left to go about my work, as to have the time to live beside her I had to go to gi...