HEADS
The family sat around a table. The father sat at the table’s head looking straight ahead at no one. Behind the father’s head there was a photograph of another man’s head, hairy. The man seemed to stare into the father. The father had not noticed this picture. The mother had taken the picture without asking, and hung it without asking, and if asked she would not be able to say when or where it was shot or whom it pictured. The only person at the table who knew whom the picture pictured was the son, though he would never look at the picture long enough to see.
The table was filled end to end with food. There was so much food on the table that there wasn’t any room for plates. The family picked the things they wanted out of the serving dishes, some of which were larger than their chests: pink meats and bruised fruit, slaws and sauces, all soft enough to eat without the teeth, pervaded by a common smell. No one knew who cooked the food. The father assumed it was the mother. The mother assumed it was someone else. The son didn’t think about it — he was already saying his own prayer in his head. The mother and the father waited for someone to say grace. They’d been saying grace for years together though they could not remember who mostly said it for them. They each kept waiting for one another to begin. Each time the father thought to speak up he’d feel like the mother was about to speak herself and so he’d stop and wait and then she wouldn’t. Under the table, the father rubbed his crotch seam with his thumb. He ate.
They ate. They were so hungry. There were all these hours. They chewed and chewed and then they swallowed. The food moved into the family through the flesh made from older food.
Some dishes were so hot no one could stand them. The son used his ring finger as a ladle and got scalded. The mark resembled the impression of a missing, inch-thick wedding band. The son sucked the finger with one side of his mouth and stuffed cooler food in on the other. He did not want to slow down in fear he might not get enough of something.
ANOTHER ROOM ON THE SAME EVENING
In another room, a room without the family, an indentation grew into one wall — a new pucker wide enough to fit a wire hanger, a pinky finger, something lean — a rip someone could breathe through — a hole for seeing out or seeing in. The home went on in this condition.
THE SKIN OF GOD
Outside, around the house, birds were landing on the roof. The birds could not stop shitting. The sun grew upon the white waste’s sheen, showing the shrieking sky back at itself.
AFTER DINNER
The family all felt so stuffed they could not move. Though in their minds they were not full yet — had there been more food they would have ate and ate.
They had to crawl to the TV.
Usually the cable’s crap connection delivered all the channels with a rind of fuzz. The screen would sometimes spurt and bubble with long rips of swish, often in the most important moments of a program, or at least the moments the person watching would most like to see. The cable company had sent several repairmen with no success. Several of the men had fallen off the roof, cracked bones or bruises. One of the men had lost his thumb.
That night the set kept changing channels.
They’d be watching Trading Spaces and the set would make a sound and the screen would blip to channel 48, a station that ran live feeds supplying info on local traffic and weather. Each time the blipping happened, the cameras seemed stuck above their very neighborhood, their street. There in the center of the screen they could see their little house with the blood red roof with the strange pattern and the mold.
They’d be watching reruns of The $100,000 Pyramid and the set would make a different kind of sound and the screen would blip to 99, an adult pay-per-view-style station which for some reason came in clear. The family could see the rhythm and the thumping. They could hear the lady squeal. The son sat with his head three feet from the screen. The mother did not turn away. She heard her eyes move in her head, like mice, the pupils widening and resizing under the insistencies and contortions of the replicating light.
The father turned the set off and sent them both to bed at 4:35 p.m.
AN INVESTIGATION
The father started in the corner behind the front door. From hands and knees to tiptoes he combed the walls’ perimeter inch by inch. He took down the still-framed photos, dragged the TV stand, the bench. At the windows he felt for errors in the glass, anyplace where fingers or wire or some other form or fiber could slip in. He dumped the cushions off the sofa and pet the frame seams, looking for bumps or tears or places sewn up, anyplace something could have been hidden.
Every few minutes the father went to throw up again in the kitchen into a yellow trash bag over the sink. Each time he tied the sack and sat it nestled in another, building a tidy, plastic nest. His arms seemed muddy. Seeing made him weak. The father had been feeling sick for several days now — it got worse the more he moved inside the rooms. Most nights since moving in the father dreamt of his skin peeled off in leagues — a surface pale enough to write on, wide enough to wrap the house.
In the kitchen, bedrooms, and bathrooms, he followed a similar procedure, removing the linens from the closets and the foodstuffs from the cabinets, running his hands inside each blank space over the flat surfaces of its innards. He petted the carpet for slits or patches, the way he’d hid certain photos from his mother as a kid, self-created creases in the house. He squeezed seat cushions, upended desk drawers, took the sheets off of the guest bed. He dumped a whole box of cereal out into the trash can and sniffed the crumbs. There was a ring inside the Corn Flakes, the inserted surprise: a black ring, gleaming, his size. He put it on, with all the others—his huge hands. He poured a carton of orange juice into the sink and watched it drain slow. He tapped the mirrors in the bathroom for hollow sounds behind the reflection.
Each thing the father touched became new things.
The father had all night.
LATE LIST
In the silence left over after, the father went around the house and made a list:
— Unknown long scratch mark under recliner
— New bubbles in glass of guest room bedside lamp
— Did fan always spin counterclockwise?
— Son’s dolls in storage: more than a few are missing both eyes
— Garage bees
— Marks of insertion near top of wall in hallway. Larger than a pushpin? Who hangs things up that high?
— Handprints in the dust on top of the bookshelf by the mirror
— Initials and phone # in address book: RPT 515-3033. Who is this?