IN THE SAND AROUND A HALLWAY
The son could not see right & yet he felt his body moving. He felt the air corral around him, days. He felt his feet ascend some stairs. A tugging on his arm hair. Field of moo. A beeswax blurb. Hello. He put his hand into it & was swimming. Something fell out of his mouth. He was above a lake then. He was floating. He could not make his eyes come open. He didn’t want to.
The air was flaxen then — was rubber, then was wetted, then was cream. The air was nothing. There was all — some thick black crap crammed in around his head. The son began negotiation. He found that with his sharpest teeth—more knives—he could bite in and to and through the nothing air. The son bit & chewed & swallowed. He saw a crack of light. In the light there was some of somewhere. The son chewed & chewed & chewed & chewed & chewed & by each inch through which the son chewed he found no matter how much he could swallow,
his
mouth
was
al-
ways
full.
NOTHING YOU EVER, NOTHING NOTHING
The black creation that’d been seated on the neighbor’s house’s front lawn all this time had by now spread around the structure, further on. It had covered over the old doors and windows with new doors and windows, such as the one the son had come to stand in front of, sopping wet. The son did not see the swelling structure. The son did not see the street, nor his own house there beyond the pavement—the same house they’d lived in all these years, they did not know they’d never moved. The son couldn’t see much for all the glaring—even if he had seen, even if he wanted, his house would not be there. The son felt sure that he’d arrived.
Yes.
Yes, in one of the windows in the house’s face he saw the girl there smiling. The girl’s soft head, shaped like his. He waved. He waited. He knocked and knocked and rang the bell. The girl was no longer in the window. The house was all around.
The son thought maybe there was something he had not done. Some invocation for invitation. He took out again the girl’s directions. In fear unknowing, he’d stuffed them down his pants. He found now in his running, all his nowhere, the heave and screaming, drenched, the paper had adhered to the son’s skin. Stuck to him, hugging, tingle. As the son pulled the paper off his body the paper ripped and became paste. It left small tattered patches near the son’s navel. On the son’s stomach the ink had transferred backward. The son could read the symbol words. The son spoke aloud each line, tasting language. In the list now the son found an instruction he hadn’t read before, writ in new blue markings on his belly — a new tattoo.
The son did exactly as his skin said.
ANOTHER FUCKING BOX
Out in the street there, hours over, among the mist of night the father came upon a box. He could not remember the box he’d seen out on the neighbor’s lawn all those days or weeks before. This box here was much like that box, of the same texture and shade, except bigger and giving off a stream of steam, sent out to mesh and branch upon the night.
The box here, in the middle of the highway—how had he hit, at last, a highway? where were all the other cars? — took up so much of the six lanes heading south—six other lanes blockaded off beside them heading the opposite direction—there remained no room on the blacktop for the father’s car to fit around it. The box seemed to give away its own light, in flux of concert with the row of streetbulbs and skyspots overhead.
Under the loom of lamp the father slowed the car approaching, stopped before the box, got out. He left the engine on behind him, burning power.
Up close the box smelled like the son. The father had never had a particular stench he associated with the child’s air, but here it was the first thing that he thought — like charcoal and like money, cake batter or a freshly painted wall. The father put his head against the surface, listened. Inside, he heard a motor, churned — the same sound as his own motor, there behind him, clearly repeated in the box. As well, the sense of something softer hovered, inches from his head there, ear to ear.
Hello, he said aloud and heard the words come out all from him, and heard it also in the box repeated back. Hello.
Oh, he said, realizing. Oh.
He peered up toward his car. The windshield had fogged over so thick he could see no longer in. Something hulked behind the shading. Heads. He felt his eyes move in his head to see the sky above him, flat clean black.