As the father turned from the house, someone behind the door watched through the window.
The father loped back into the high grass, grown even higher since his arrival. The father fought to forge a path. He toppled forward with the bulb off-balance. The grass cut tons of tiny marks across his naked arms and legs and belly. The father’s testicles were swollen. He had a limp in both his legs. The father’s legs were now prosthetic, as were his chest and lungs and muscle — as was the vast majority of the father — though the father felt the same.
The father tottered through the growth with his head half at his knees. The bulb kept sweating. He could hear dogs around him packed in masses. He could hear a billion humming bees. All through the grass, hung on the blades around and on the house, the bugs were scumming up a hive. Countless interlocking pockets wet with bee grease, clasped in combs — each hole an eye — each eye a yawning. One long buzz. As well, in the soil below the swim of hive stuff, the ants were laying bed foundation — dirt clipped in piles and stacked as turrets, torrents, entry gaps large enough to suck around the father’s foot. The father danced and leapt and rolled along and through the yard with welts already forming on his knees — pocks on his sternum — chiggers kissed inside his ankles. He felt dizzy with new data. His mouth began to foam. In the foam his words popped as bubbles. The LCD clicker ran up and up. With each curse word, use of god’s name, or fault of grammar, the father received a cram of shock.
POPULATION
The father came into another clearing around the house’s right side. The paint on the house here peeled in scores. The curled paint resembled larvae, and so that’s what they were. There was a window looking in. The father moved to touch the window with cramping fingers. He clanged his metal forehead on the glass but it would not break. He clawed the glass and got some wedged under his nails.
Through the eyeslits the father could see somewhat — into the TV room, though there was no TV now, no other stuff. The TV room had not had a window on the inside, but from outside he could see in. The room contained ten to twenty people — on second thought, more like fifty or a hundred — on third, more like five hundred or ten thousand — teeming like ants, colliding, impossible to count. The father saw himself, the mother, and the son therein among the mingling, chewing cheese and crackers off tiny plates. Others also looked familiar. With each new head the father felt his recall swim for some connection. The whole room overflowed. Keys and eggs and blood and money. Thinning wives and headless men. Young boys with rings and electronic money. The father saw the man and woman who’d appeared to buy the house and recognized them, though he had not been home when they’d come to see the house before, and he could not see how both of them resembled younger versions of himself and her, whomever, and here their heads were tied together by the hair — they had one set of hair between them. The whole house did. They were all speaking into cubes. Everyone with his or her head against a black box, skin growing fatter on their heads. A mush. You could see transmissions on the air — could read the baggage hanging on the slow slopes where all together we were breathing in and out. The rooms not rooms but years. Along the walls the new wallpapered shapes repeating: O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O.
O of go and how and nowhere.
O of house and son and door.
O of O.
From outside looking in, the father beeped and banged against the glass. No one would look toward him. They all were asking. Inside the house the boxes rang, and heads made laugh and bees barfed buzz and long dogs barked and babies babbled, while inside his bulb the father began to shout a semi-prayer and the bulb zapped his skin and skull in hot correction and across it all there was a wind and no one would.
COCOON GAZEBO
In the backyard, high as ever, like long blank curtains to the sky, the father swung and bit and bashed his head cutting a pathway in the green. His tongue had begun to gather in his helmet, dislodged somewhere way back down his throat, the weird mashed meat surround-compiling in the space around his cheeks. Likewise, his breath had begun building layers on the bulb’s condensation-proof glass. The father tried to wink his cheek to rub the glass clean, but that was hard.
Somewhere in the yard among the fallen clothesline and loops of dead brown meat once trees, the father came to a gazebo nestled in the growing. A tall thin black corrupted structure, thick and pointed though dented in along the top as if something large had had nabs at it. The father did not like its sweeter smell, etched with the sickness, the surrounding air suffused with more mosquitoes, wasps—had you seen this air here, you could not see—the father tripped his way up beneath the errored awning and into the dark shell, buzzing, smoke.
The father knew that though he’d never seen it, the gazebo had always been in the yard, and always would be, in any yard. The father had had long dreams of coiling in a hammock, eating. Here. There were many things the father had planned to do — in or around the house or other — lists of lists of lists of lists — this gazebo, too, was those. The father walked into its mouth.
From up inside the structure’s bleach-burnt stomach, the father could hear the mother somewhere shout. He could not make out what she said — her voice compiled of several others — a thousand tonalities at once — heads surrounding the gazebo, skin on skin, and air on air. The gazebo walls were screened completely and hung with new-car-scent plumes and bags of rice. A sheet of pupae blocked the holy wire scrim. They were crusted on so thick—such dedication—the gazebo’s size quadrupled, like a crown.
The father could not stop with turning, turning, seeing the same few feet of textured surface, until he fell dizzy on the wood.
BAG
When he could think again, the father saw a long black bag hanging from the gazebo ceiling. Hung above by strands of hair, it had a name tag and numbers that the father could not read. The father sat up and reached to touch the bag. He felt it warming under his rub. He felt the wets and bumps and whorls. Kick. Kick kick. Kick. Somewhere the mother went on shouting. On certain words, the father’s language tally meter would mistake her words for his. Zap.
BLANK
The father unzipped the bag. The metal teeth moaned. Inside the bag the father saw the son curled and snoozing, his hands folded at his face. The father felt a wash of whipping through his back, throat, and aorta. Hey, the father said. He could not recall the son’s name. He tried a few. The current scourged him. The hair grew on his face.