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By Root 573 0

equaling a certain modest percentage of the remainder outstanding on the house. The agent acknowledged—at the mother’s prodding—how such a payment plan would never actually get the house paid off. Instead, an endless minor diminishing toward zero, a payment scheduled to be terminated after both the father and the mother’s passing. The couple was not willing to involve third parties such as a moneylender or the like, the agent explained, as they were private with their ways of living and to get a loan you had to tell a lot of people a lot of shit. The agent actually said the word shit into the phone hotly, using a tone laden with some strange amount of venom and, no doubt, spittle, at which point the mother terminated the call. When the phone began to ring again immediately, she took the phone off the hook and left it that way for the remainder of the day, so that whatever sounds the house or family made were broadcast to an open line.

REDRESS

The mother spent the next several hours with her head against a wall. She tried to push with sufficient force to make her face join with the house. Instead she learned to smile a little wider. In the backyard she could hear what seemed a hundred screeching, squealing dogs and car alarms. Some people singing, maybe. An implosion. The mother went to the window and saw nothing but bright light. The mother stared into the light until her pupils zeroed, until even when she turned her head the room was washed. Washed. Worked white, dewormed.

Seeing white, the mother put herself to work. She began first mopping the kitchen, sloshing soap across the blinded tile. In other rooms she grunted on her knees with brush and carpet soap, stench expanding in her head. She washed the floors in every room the house had. In certain rooms the mother found infestation. Not leagues of ants, the way the son had said, but little trickles invading through small cracks, creating grainy graded torrents and tiny turrets. The ants crumpled on contact, tidal, their tiny bodies sloshed in venom. Closer up, the mother found, pinching one’s thorax between her two longest fingers, these were not ants but something else. They had a different shape of head and tiny patterns on their bellies, which almost looked like words. The mother swept the tiny carcasses into a dustbin with one gloved hand. She cured the sodden carpet on her hands and knees with the hairdryer and combed away the smell. She did not want the son to know.

In the son’s bathroom, where she’d not been since the sales show, the mother came to stand before the hole in the wall between the bathroom and the son’s room where the veiled woman had cut through. In the gap between two walls, she discovered, a thick clear gel had been stuffed into the air—had been stuffed, or always been there—always in the house. An odd shade for insulation, she imagined. Plus it was cold and had a throaty smell, like chowder.

Through the hole the mother could see into the son’s room from a new angle, to the bed. The room looked differently from this perspective: smaller, taller. She could not see the other door, though it should have been right there on the wall cattycorner. On the bed, a mirror facing face-up, toward the ceiling, its surface bending slightly in.

The mother walked from the hole back through the bathroom to the son’s door set on the hall. The door had been left wide open. The son was not there in the bed. There was no hole there where the hole was, from the bathroom—there instead, the mirror hung. She closed the door behind her, nodded. There were two rooms.

The mother closed her eyes. She walked back into the bathroom feeling her way. Back at the rip there, the hole, the pucker, the mother worked with eyes still closed. The mother spread the wall with putty over the new hole, sealing it full whole. The first few blobs went hot and runny and sank into the surface. It burned her on the hands. She had to reapply the substance several times before it stuck and even then it slid and bubbled. She sang inside her, making silence, rehearsing lines from a play