The girl just showed her teeth and winked her eyes.
A VERY SPECIFIC WALL
The girl moved to stand against the wall. She turned and looked at where she was against the wall and moved a little to one side. They were both quiet for some time. The house was quiet. The same air in and around the house.
The girl wasn’t holding the egg anymore, at least not where the son could still see it. The girl was chewing on her lip, and chewing hard. She had a new bulge to her belly. In his own mouth the son swallowed and felt something go down. The son looked across the room. The girl was there. She had something written on her face. She saw the son watching. She pulled out a small white stepladder and climbed up on it and did a dance. Her belly from this angle appeared caving. She grinned and hulked it in and out and out and in.
One of the room’s white walls began to shake.
So what do you want to do now? the girl said, bubbling above the sound.
PORTAL
The father opened up his eyes. What he’d made in the wall where he’d located the unwanted indentation was like a puckering, a way out or way in. The father punched the center of the shape with his fist and listened as it fell into the hole. Then the wall was open. The father put his head inside and peered around.
Inside, the space was roughly large enough for an average-sized adult. There wasn’t enough light to see much else. The father pulled his head back out and took the hammer and began to jack at the opening with the butt-end, ripping away chunks of sheetrock in showers. The head of the hammer, cold. The hole began to widen, its pucker yawned. The father dropped the hammer and pulled at the flaky edges instead with his whole hands, dust falling on the carpet, on his shoes and in his hair. He flung the pieces behind him, yanking and sweating, ticked up in some kind of bizarre joy. He could feel the particles in his nostrils, down his throat — bits of the house.
On the stubborn pieces, hung with nails, he pulled harder, at one point ripping a long cut down his forearm. His bright blood dripped in neon light. The color wept into the fiber, and the wood beneath, another layer. The father didn’t stop. His heart throbbed now more than he could last remember. He felt good. His head was light.
He picked the hammer up again and set it down again. The room spun around the father as if on an axis, some translucent wheel. And the music. He heard music somewhere — inside him — a song he knew he knew he knew. So much music, the father thought. He touched the wall.
The father laughed.
QUEEN
On the floor above the father, the mother had risen up. The mother knew she needed something but could not think of what or how to name it, how to put her hands in a way that would bring that something closer or quell the ache. The mother did not realize she was naked. The parents’ bed had moved. The parents’ bed sat against the wall opposite from where it’d been last. Their sheets were wet and upside-down. The designs on the sheets — same as those in the son’s room, and the guest room, and elsewhere in the house — showed backward through the fabric, becoming something.
The mother moved beyond the bed. She went into the bathroom where the sink and bathtub overflowed. The floor was slick with wet from both. The water had not touched the bedroom carpet. The mother stepped into the water. She did not see anyone in the room. She did not see the father or the son or the other father. The mother walked back out into the hall.
The mother went down the hall to the door to the son’s bedroom and put her hand against the door. She beat the shape and knocked and called his name out. Name! Name! she said, croaking. Son! Son! She shook. The door would not come open. Her wet feet had not left a trail behind her on the carpet.
The mother put the lock against her eye. Through the lock she could see nothing. She took her eye away. She replaced the place where her eye had been with her mouth and blew through the keyhole into the door. The mother had learned this trick. Her breath was made of air and water, laced with house dust. The mother touched the knob again. The door came open. Inside the son’s room as well the bed had moved from one wall to another — through the wall the parents’ and the son’s beds had come to kiss. The wall seemed to bow slightly between them. There was a sound but not a sound.
On the floor, bunched on the carpet, the mother saw a box. The box was neat and had black coating. The box did not have seams. The mother moved. The windows rattled. Her cell phone rang. She could not hear it. She could not hear. Her neck muscles pinched, contracting. Her right thigh began to spasm. The mother stood above the box. She nudged it with her foot. The box didn’t move much. In the grass below the window something thrashed or rattled. The mother squatted on her popping haunches. Her nails and hair were getting longer. The box rotated. Her eyes burst vessels. There was a sound but not a sound. Around the house the trees were bending. The mother took the box and made it shake.
THE HOUSE WAS GETTING WAVY
What was that? the son said, slurring. What is it?
He tried to hide behind his hands. His mouth filled with a thin, translucent goo.
The girl kept looking at him.
The son could not blink.
COPY HOUSE
Just past the short, brushed shaft he had uncovered behind the wall there, the father found another house. An exact copy of their own house — a copy kitchen, den and bedrooms, and so on. The replica connected in mirror to the air where during the day they ate and night they slept. The copy house had the same furniture and junk as the other — same pictures, carpet patterns, rub marks, dishes in the sink — though here their personal adornments, family items had turned a smoke-licked shade of black. Black bulbs, black quilts, black clothing — black food cartons, utensils, mail. Only the doors, floors, and walls — the body of the house itself — remained the same as in the other, if made paler by their darker contents in relief.
As well there were no windows in the walls where to look out onto a light. In locations where in the first house there had been a glass pane, instead the house appeared fully sealed. There were no keyholes in the doors or ways to peep through. No vents or holes beyond the way the father had ripped in. The black clocks all read a certain number. Each black bowl or black glass left out had been turned over upside down, holding its air.
The table in the dining room was shorter, stacked with clean plates, finger bowls. A square black cake — oblong, like an office building. The father touched the icing. Smoke rose in sigh, and stunk. The father tried to wipe the icing off. A tingling. It clung hot to his skin — to his fingers and his shirtsleeve and the tablecloth and air. He rubbed it on the wall there, his fingerprints repeated, smudged.
The father tried to call out into the house around him but his air would not come out — the quick words caught inside him, wobbling. His breath burned in his holes.
In the hall, along the long wall, someone had made a mural of, the father surmised, the sun being crushed into the moon? It was hard to say what was there exactly, but something bright and muddy. Words were written in the pigment’s ridges that the father could not read, or else the words were numbers, small directions. Some seemed to shift when he turned from them. The small door that had before opened into the hair closet was no longer there. The father’s nose began to bleed.
The guest bedroom door was locked. Behind the door, some muted choral moan: low tuba, a beaten box, a gong. Blood from his ears now, too, a little. Throbbing in his eyes.