4. Millie Smith, housewife. Her husband's at work again and the neighbors at church, but she gave up on God a long time ago. She's sitting there thinking about the last moment. She had just returned from her hourly shopping excursion with a bag full of fascinating new trinkets and objects; gemstones and diamonds and a clairvoyance-machine; but she tossed them all aside and the crystal ball shattered and filled the room with black fog---she pulled out the most exciting object of all, multi-colored popcorn seeds. Dancing nymphs erupted from the stove and she placed her finest metal bowl above them. She poured them in. The multi-colored popcorn seeds. She sat in wait, staring ahead as though spellbound by the spiral impasto in her commercially painted walls but really deep in the deepest corner of thought, gazing out from the peripherals of her mind into yonder lands; trees covered in iridescent dust and wind forming visible spirals of foam and sand and the popcorn, which was in all shades of blue and orange and red, like the kernels.
millie from biblical tales
4.2 Millie went to check on her popcorn and saw white. Then she saw white. Her vision faded in rage and she grabbed at the pot (charring her hands in the process) looking for a single one in the shades she'd seen in her vision, but there was nothing but white, corn, consternation, and she stumbled and fell in yet another attack of hysteria. She reached to phone her psychoanalyst but she passed out before she could dial two numbers. Unconscious, she was transported to the land beyond she saw before. She walked around the impossible trees crying and her tears floated off her face and evaporated into the wind; she sobbed and sobbed until the disturbed wind, collecting around her hair, formed a tornado and swept her up to the top of the atmosphere, where she saw the sun get caught in the spiral and fling God's light all around to the darkest corners of the world and enflame everything at once with His resplendence. Where before was darkness Millie saw demons and amalgamations of discarded flesh, trisected quadrapedes and strange worms recoiling from the light, and she felt herself drawn to them and away from the light. She realized, that the light of God was the radiance of an atomic bomb pulsing down from the heavens and leaving everything in its wake skinned and burning, the hair on her body and the skin on her spine. The colored popcorn was nowhere and not for her to see, nor for the creatures that lurk in the recesses of heaven and hell and her mind, and she realized that God must be absolutely hostile to her.
4.3 Millie woke up feeling more lucid than ever before, as though she had removed the eyes that elevated her like a cockroach with a pen, and could finally see with the flesh and veins that lay underneath. Her eyes, she felt, or touched, were a distraction from the true sense. She pulled out her finest metal spoon and felt around her eye socket, carefully, pushing deeper and deeper until she took the plunge and scooped out her eyes at once, and scraped away all the flesh that remained in the sockets. The world was dark, but it was the most beautiful darkness, and she laid on the ground and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, feeling heaven in her hands and she squished and stroked the gouged-out flesh and for the first time, truly felt.