ifsixwas9

he has not slept very much since wednesday, and now wednesday has come and gone again, though he does not know it. when he thinks about time, it seems to him now that for thirty years he has lived inside an orderly parade of named and numbered days like fence pickets, and that one night he went to sleep and when he waked up he was outside of them...

he felt no surprise. time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness. it would be either one now, seemingly at an instant, between two movements of the eyelids, without warning. he could never know when he would pass from one to the other, when he would find that he had been asleep without remembering having lain down, or find himself walking without remembering having waked...

after a time, two negro children appear around the curve, approaching. they do not see him until he speaks; they halt, dead, looking at him with whiterolling eyes. "what day of the week is it?" he repeats. they say nothing at all, staring at him. he moves his head a little. "go on," he says. they go on. he does not watch them. he sits, apparently musing upon the place where they had stood, as though to him they had in moving merely walked out of two shells. he does not see that they are running.

-faulkner, light in august