Page 34, Paragraphs 2 - 4; Note

Page 34, Paragraph 2:

It looks like he's coming back here through the reeds, so I bend down behind the wall and crawl on all fours like a pig to the little branch-hut, but I don't go in. I pull the straw above me to get warm, and look to the sky, where the sun-blood has dried up and become all black, like with my knee.

Paragraph 3:

There is a path, off out in the dark, which is made of strange sayings. It goes from the edge of the world to the edge of the world, and many sons have been sacrificed to make it. Perhaps their bones are set beneath the path, all around the world, so that the bones make a ceiling for the world below us, where the shagfoal tread through the dark, with little Urks sitting on their backs to scratch the boy-meat off the bones that hang above them.*

Paragraph 4:

This world has become big and dark all around me, and the pigpen wall looks a long ways off. I hunger for the girl, for her to lie here by me, like my mother but better-smelling. The world makes me little, so that I'm so frightened I can't move or do a thing. I shut my eyes, and the sky goes away, and the world goes away, but the dark does not - it stays here by me. There's no way to stop the dark.


*That's the part that Benny was talking about several posts back. My God! What a startling image - like something out of Baudelaire's nightmares.