You first drew breath as you were then in a den of ruined shelves, where the bindings had grown to drown the structures of the shelves like skin grown over a skeleton, the skeleton being the shelves, the wood, and as well over the flesh, of wood pulp, that is the paper pages. You were, prior to that first breath, slashed and rifled, as gravity had been permitted by some agency to draw your pages to earth. You were always remote from earth but all the same still as connected to it as breath, for example, is to earth.

That was you then, that emerged the night of the death’s heads ritual games. Those cuts in the skin widened themselves somehow, with a steady crackling like a fire smouldering, the fibers popping apart one by one, and then you sluiced out with a motion that would require many pages to describe; you were quiring up papers as they tumbled down, all to your white body runnelled with creases. A ragged, ribbony body dripping with thick water, you abided there under the hood of ruptured leather like a saint in a wall sconce. Your angular head was slipcovered with thin and drooping white locks, and you were all over just as white and wrinkled as the head of a molar, except for the black ribbons beneath your fingernails.

Your eyes were running pits of ink, black and sparkling, and glue trickled from your nostrils and filled the pleats to either side of your lipless mouth, fringed with hairline wrinkles. You drew breath at once, not to breathe, but to began to speak, and since speaking and vomiting always go together with you, so that to speak for you is also to vomit if to vomit is not always to speak, as you always vomit whenever you speak, the fragrant black ink ran in curds down your chin and spattered down your front, where your body folds like lapels and like clothes. You spoke clotted words in a ripely decayed tone, like a voice out of a hive. Your lips flinging out a froth of black spray, your lips writhed around long white needles in black gums between which your succulent vomit slid and behind which your tongue, like a larva, slopped and coiled.

What did you say? The letters dripped onto your white paper body from your drawn back bowed black mouth.

You were talking hands, and so you had two good long hands; you talked legs and there they were, not so good. You talked feet and they came out worse still. Then your hands waved feebly at you from the floor, and you talked arms and shoulders to connect them to your lean serpent’s trunk, since that seemed appropriate. There they were. Hands were content.