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FILM

The son followed the

man into the cabinet,

down another

hallway, also shaped

like him—though this

one was much shorter

than the others and

there were little

nodules with TV

screens on them

playing films.

Some of the films the

son had seen, though

others were unlike

anything. Some of the

films looked like real

people doing real

things, walking,

eating, taking a

shower, laughing,

playing video games,

brushing teeth.

Some of the films

were quite obscene.

There were films of pigs and dogs being exploded—films of women giving birth, and films of men with women in the stage of birthing preparation (one of the couples in the films looked most exactly like the father and the mother but much younger, the son thought), and there were films of milk pouring from another familiar house’s windows and its girders and its seams (what house? the son could not remember any house but this one he walked and walked and walked in now) milk that on contact with the air and sky around it turned to mildew and to cheese—cheese that would be someday soon sold and then eaten, sent back into other bodies, carried on. There were films of the son watching a film inside a film inside a house (that same house again, what was this? what was the son inside there doing with his eyes?), there were films of the son falling through a great and endless air, the rip of wind and endless light greasing his body, pulling the flesh back in his face, making him look older than he’d ever looked, even in the deepest hours of the night.

Each film looped forever unrepeating, roaring on and on inside its frame, watching the son pass with its blank eyes, negotiating light.

The son saw and did not see.

The son’s eyes were changing colors.

The son turned his head to concentrate on following the back of the bobbing head of the little man with all the food. The man had a tic in his neck that made him spasm so hard the son thought the man was going to drop everything he carried, but just as the tics began to get most convulsive, knobby knots, skin-held explosions, the man’s neck and back and spine at once shaking so hard he hardly seemed to touch the ground, his skin as heavy as the sky—inside the room then the films went off and there they both were, standing face-to-face inside a cube.

ROOM

This room—made from calming—was

stuffed full of flowers large as the son.

Some of the flowers formed a chair.

There was a gentle music

playing—tones that raised tiny bumps

under the son’s hair.

The man motioned for the son to sit down on the flower and when he did the man sat the tray down on the son’s lap. The tray was hot and heavy. The son could hardly move. He looked up to the man and as their eyes met the man bowed low down to the floor and as the man’s head touched the floor the flowers rumpled and the room went superdark.

PHOTOPERIOD

Inside the father’s eyes, white. A gold of many glows.

xxx xxx

Around his head, a second head. White-on-white-on-white.

xxx xxx

a hunk of blank space, meat or ceiling, a white of darkness inside the son,

mask or fervor, him or he, or she: they scourged and beeping, gone, going

xxx xxx

A gold of man glows, unfolding. In stereo of stereos, so wide.

xxx xxx

[Inside the second head, the father [Inside the second head and house, a

watched the space around his body city spinning soft. A sea which in the

shuffle, open, like a deck of open caused a closing, a collapse of all

decks of cards, into a house.] that ageless air same as it came.]

NIGHT

The mother grew, filled up with nothing—cells in cells on cells, a house.

CONSUME

In the light from off his forehead, the son still could see his hands. The dinner plate was larger than he’d imagined. Some of the dishes were labeled with square brass placards, many of which, by handwriting or in translation, the son could not at all read: pink meats and bruised fruit, slaws and sauces, all soft enough to eat without the teeth, and such reek.

Several