David Vann

“Please,” Gary says, his voice really pleading, desperate. “Please try. I know you can get back to your old self.”
“I’m sorry,” Jim says. “I’m not trying to hurt you. But there is no old self. There’s nothing to go back to. That’s what people don’t understand. There’s no self at all. There’s no one home.”
A kind of groan then from Gary, a sound of despair, nameless.

The dust floating thick above the carpet throughout the entire house, up to perhaps knee level in high concentration and thinning above that, an atmosphere in different bands. The nostalgiasphere first, the layer most dense, where he's lying now, a region of immense weight where time can slow or even stop moving and echoes of sound and smell and feeling can travel forever. Catfish with their wide tendriled mouths patrolling here as leviathans, fallen birds and smell of gun smoke and blood and everything grown larger. A place intent on suffocation, place of Bible stories with children ripped in half, towers falling, tongues without words, locusts descending. The sea parted and held back by a single human hand and the weight of that ready to rush in again, mountains of water overhanging and bending light and even the water smells of blood and can transform, all mutable here, nothing remaining separate or safe.