The killing floor

non-fiction, an update on the state of my heart

Jul 16, 2025

I’d estimate I’ve hit a kill rate of 66 an hour, give or take; it’s the most productive I’ve been in weeks. Every individual body flattened by the force of deliberate impact is a dull thrill. To know I’m ending a life for good, for another being’s good. It’s cruel but I cannot relent. This evil of mine is necessary.

It starts with infestation. A burial for later life. Then a period of dormancy in which everything grows cold and still, and I grow complacent. Impossible, in that quiet, to imagine what will rise in the future heat. But they rise, each year without fail, and subject me to such torment that I am twisted into something I do not like but regrettably recognize more than my real self.

Their bodies are so small, I cannot feel their death. I must check for black blood on my fingertips to confirm I’ve hit my mark, and in its place comes yet another and another. I cannot see where they begin. They are deep beneath the dirt feasting on root and tendril. They emerge first as tiny white crystalline dots only seen through the squint. The infant body elongates and hardens to form a tiny grain of rice. And by the time they’ve grown wings, their bodies darkened to a period on their growth, it’s too late. They take flight.

I don’t know where they first came from—store-bought dirt most probably—but they live here now, in the wet soil of my plants. Fungal gnats, often mistaken for fruit flies. I’ve tried everything to rid my plants of them but I have so very many plants in every room and I’ve found the most effective method is to simply squish them with my fat thumb as they crawl along the sides of the ceramic pots or make leisure of my walls. They’re slow. It’s easy. Probably just born days before, I am sorry to teach you this lesson so early: cruel things happen beyond our control and sometimes we are crushed under the force. I am glad that it is you and not me.

Everything eats and is eaten, Adrianne Lenker said. I want them to die hungry. These plants of mine that stretch toward the sunny corners of rooms, they are exempt from the circle of life. I will not allow for them to be used for another’s gain. These leaves are free. I need that to be true.

In the summer, everything I stuck to the walls months before starts peeling. Wind, through newly opened windows, presses its fingers beneath scraps of paper and lifts them toward heaven. Posters curl and flutter to the floor. I apply new adhesive and the wet air licks it to uselessness. All of the stability I’d thought had been solidifying turns out to have been temporary. The seasons take all things in their hands and play with them like putty. Life is not solid. It wriggles and squirms, grows and aches, gets tilled and turned.

Every day when I go down to the reservoir to look for understanding I pass an advertisement plastered to a trash can for Fast Weed Delivery Now. Every day I must not cave. When I was a drinker I had to maintain a holy triangle of liquor stores wherever it was I lived, keep in mind my last visit to each, rotate with care so none of these cashiers would catch on to my evil habit, so I could project a sense of normality. So the only shame I felt came from me and no one else. Of course I still imagined they knew. Of course I would have drank regardless. There was no other way to squash the feeling.

The tremor lay dormant for a while. Through seasons cycling, people coming and going, new meds, quit meds, job change, routine reformation, I felt the ground grow more solid beneath my feet. At times I even fooled myself into believing I knew what I was doing, I’d obtained some unshakable wisdom that would follow me toward any horizon. The ground has dropped out. All that remains is the blade of this knife I walk atop each day and I can see straight off the edges. On either side is a swollen sea of imagined peoples and they reach from the dark with the thoughts I invent for them: they are cruel because I am cruel. They threaten to send me toppling. My skin crawls and gasps and warbles through a hundred different shapes that do not fit. Like I am vibrating.

This killing seems to be the only thing I can focus on. I can lose an hour to watching the soil churn impossibly with larvae and performing indiscriminate killing. Anything else is a pit of perfect possibility. Can’t seem to linger on it for more than a fleeting glance. But the killing is easy and it never ends. In the killing I can step outside of myself for a moment and let my animal take over, some dormant paternal instinct to protect the green that I raise. The vibration stops for that short time. I can breathe, slow through my nose like a predator. Still, my muscles are coiled tight, still the stillness will have to come to an end and I will have to confront myself again. Every day I must not cave.

On a good day, in a relentless heat wave, I bought some books I’d been long wanting from a store I’d like to have my own books in someday, and when I boarded the train to go home with hope tucked in my tote bag, there was an older man bent over in his seat in the middle of a medical emergency. I was useless, truly paralyzed by his fragility, but a handful of good people already had the situation as handled as possible so all I had to do was go far down the other end of the train and crane my neck to see.

The old man was shaking and afraid, he couldn’t seem to overcome the feeling of his old body breaking down to explain what dying felt like. A woman in a sundress crouched low so she could look up at him, nodded along patiently with whatever he was trying and failing to say. She cupped his chin so lightly, delicate as silk, and held a water bottle to his pale lips as he took small sips and struggled to swallow. A young man, sweating through his tank, ran across the street in this heavy heat and returned with ice in a 7/11 cup which he bagged and held gently against the man’s forehead, the back of his neck. Emergency services took a long time to arrive. It was one of those events where the seconds ticked by like handfuls of dirt being tossed aside to open up a new grave and though there was nothing the rest of us could do, we couldn’t look away, as though we were afraid to miss the moment he died or maybe the moment he was able to keep living.

I wonder now how terribly anxious I would have to get for it to become visible, for my inner emergency to become one which warranted an ambulance and the care of strangers. I suppose if I stood and shouted ‘help! help! help!’ some kind people might swarm for me too and look up at me and touch my face and offer me water and I’d be just as unable to explain my inner state as the old man. There is catastrophe pounding at the walls of my chest—I feel like I’m dying, I feel like we’re all dying, what else is there to say.

The ambulance did arrive and he was still shaking when they carried him off the train and loaded him up like cargo. I won’t ever know what happened to him. The train unceremoniously rolled on though we could have paused for longer to consider what happened and I don’t think anyone would have complained. It was the sort of routine-breaking occurrence that should have made me feel momentarily connected to the people around me, the we all experienced something together frequency, but if anything I felt more distant and displaced than before. I’d only watched other people share the experience. I wasn’t there at all, I was far off perched on the blade of my knife wondering how long how long how long ‘til I slip and get gutted by my own inaction?

What I fear more than anything is that there is invisible death occurring inside me at all times. Bone cancer, tapeworm in my tummy, bacterium chewing at my brain matter, my very ability to think only days away from disconnecting like a TV unplugged. Entropy is inevitable. I push it like a boulder up the hill.

In the evening, when my muscles are all worn down from a day of worrying, I lie down flat on the hardwood floor of my bedroom and stretch my extremities to their limits, arms back behind my head, and feet all the way levelled out, fingers and toes wiggling to feel where my body starts and where it ends; I am not everywhere; I am here. I kiss my shoulders, my knees, my hands and feet. It brings me closer to a sense of stillness. The vibration quiets, I am where I am, and I see my murderous streak for what it is: like the rest of my life, the uncontrollable thing I cannot stop trying to control.

The impulse exhausts me. Down on the floor where nothing can reach me, I am able to kill it for a moment and see only the light playing shadow tricks across my ceiling where the paint is peeling in the heat, the blue jays screaming out the open window, the heat spilling in and everything fluttering. Movement is the natural state. I cannot resist it.

Another hot day, but a simple one: I took the train down to see Kelly and Matt and we drove out to World’s End, a strangely named nature reserve more full of life than the ending of it. We followed the walking trails, dipping in and out of the dappled shade, craving the sun on our skin and wishing against the heat, watching the gulls and egrets feed on a dried up lakebed and circle up toward heaven.

Passing a lush hill rolling down toward the busy Atlantic Ocean, I spotted a ball of fur perched on a dead branch in the tall grass. I just pointed at it. I’d never seen a baby bird so round or so precious. He was shaped like the breath he took in; it was all he could do is fill himself with breath and use it to make tiny, desperate calls for his mother. She was there, swooping down from the canopy above to show him what to do—up, up, up. His feathers were fresh and new and he didn’t quite know how to use them. We watched a while as he struggled and grew tired. There was no course of events in which we did not eventually help him.

Kelly and Matt are bird people—our boy was instantly identified as a young warbling vireo—so the decision to touch him with our human hands was not made lightly. Matt urged him into the palm of his hand and he gripped Matt’s finger with his tiny, fresh feet. Matt placed him as high as he could in the tree which was nowhere near his nest, but safer, maybe. His mother was able at least to bring him food there, from her mouth to his, and we could do nothing more. We walked on and talked about him the whole way. Down by the water there were small black crabs skittering in the rocky sand and all life was sacred, the world was not cruel. When we circled back by him later he was still exactly where he’d been left. Sweet eyes closed, trying to rest. What else could we do. He’ll die when it’s his time to die but while he can, he’ll keep living.

God—is everything in the process of dying; is everything trying so hard to live anyhow? Is this what trying feels like? I’ve known not trying. I’ve known resignment to any manner of apathy and malaise. I’ve laid down along the knife’s blade and let the discomfort become the frequency of my hated days. Trying is the foreign thing to me, the shape of it alien and confounding in my hands. The days slog by, hot and wet, and my heart beats against the knife and I fill my body with breath anyway because there is more life to live and I have to live it.

I think I became a bug for a while, wriggling in my damp sheets waiting for god’s great thumb to descend from the heavens and crush me for some sin I can imagine but he will not confirm. I am shedding the carapace now and reminding myself that I am human. A network of neural wirings and ancient impulses and generational deficits wreathed in fallible, destructible skin. No amount of sureness can keep me on solid ground forever. If I stood still and confident all my life, I can’t imagine I’d ever learn anything—and I am here to learn. I’m here to infest.

I caved for a time—I’m terrified to admit that. The feeling in my chest, this cave system collapsing, it became too much to bear. I spent a long, syrupy week blowing smoke out the window in my sunroom, beating the urgent ache into submission. Do I feel shame about it–yes, I feel shame about everything. It is a weight I place on my own back. But it got me through. It was a period of dormancy required to molt the sickly skin I’d coated myself in. I’m wriggling up through the soil now, I’m extending to my full length now, I’m sprouting wings from my tectonic shoulder blades now. I’m about to take flight now–please, God, don’t strike me down. I’m just trying to make life from this life.

And if the tiny, bothersome bugs who I have decimated had time to wonder too, what sin have I committed to deserve this, I hope they’ll forgive me, for the sin was living and I was only envious at how easily they find it when I have to fight to stand atop this cutting knife and see through the pain to understand it won’t always be like this—I’m trying to make it different. So today I make it different. I take the knife from beneath my feet—I’m the one who put it there after all—and I point it high toward heaven like a challenge. Just try and crush me now.