Now she hates me. I have taught her that$$$ at least.

Some days in late August at home are like this$$$ the air thin and eager like this$$$ with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...

My$$$ my. A body does get around.

She was the captain of her soul.

. . .in August in Mississippi theres a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there's a foretaste of fall$$$ it's cool$$$ theres a lambence$$$ a soft$$$ a luminous quality to the light$$$ as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece$$$ from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two$$$ then it's gone. . . the title reminded me of that time$$$ of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.

I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

My mother is a fish.

At first it had been a torrent; now it was a tide$$$ with a flow and ebb. During its flood she could almost fool them both. It was as if out of her knowledge that it was just a flow that must presently react was born a wilder fury$$$ a fierce denial that could flag itself and him into physical experimentation that transcended imagining$$$ carried them as though by momentum alone$$$ bearing them without volition or plan. It was as if she knew somehow that time was short$$$ that autumn was almost upon her$$$ without knowing yet the exact significance of autumn.

Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates$$$ cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering$$$ which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit$$$ soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh$$$ and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.

The clock tick-tocked$$$ solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself$$$ after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.