Toplin

I sometimes am a step or two ahead of my mind. Not infrequently I can predict what my mind will think, conjecture, conclude.

My brother spat out his soul between his parched, lacerated lips.
In a puff of oily smoke it rose up to the ceiling, hovered a moment in a corner, frustrated of egress. It left a stain, but the nurse and the doctor, when they came, did not notice it.
The ceilings of hospital rooms are stained with the oily residue of souls spat out of dying patients' parched mouth.

Humanity, in stultifying waves, surged over the dunes toward the beach: screaming, sweating, bearing furled umbrellas before them like lances, with baskets that seemed more likely to hold ammunition than provisions, hauling infants under their arms with an absence of tenderness that suggested that the children were to me no more than cannon fodder. I expected every moment to hear the noise of gunfire.

I no longer saw the colors as before. The intensity had faded dramatically. It was as if before I had delt with a spectrum several meters wide, and now all the color range I had would fit onto a graph not more than a few centimeters in width. Everything— excepting blacks and whites— was only various shades of grey to me. The whole world looked washed-out, faded, as if every object, every plane, every vista had a hole in the bottom of it out of which the color had seeped for a long while, leaving only a suggestion of the brilliance and variety of former hues.

J’ai des miroirs partout, de toute une gamme de taille, de toutes sortes de formes, et d’un large éventail de cadres. Les miroirs, on l’ignore en général, ont différentes textures. Je suis conscient de cette propriété des miroirs, mais elle ne m’affecte guère. Quand je regarde dans mes nombreuses glaces, elles me montrent toujours des images de ma perfection avec d’infimes altérations. Il n’y a là rien de déconcertant.

If for some reason a book other than a cookbook comes into my possession, I destroy it. I have no compunction when it comes to fiction, history and philosophical speculations. Fiction I tend to burn, history I simply discard, philosophical speculations I rip to shreds, signature by signature.

I came around to the foot of the stoop. There were her prints, glowing up the stairs. A deeper, shimmering puddle right in front of the door showed where she had paused with the keys.

I sat and drank my coffee and laid the plans for my great project.
I would help this young woman. I would wring my heart and sprinkle the pity of my heart's blood on her parched life. I would validate my own perfection, and at the same time I would ease her out of her trudging misery.
I would help her die.