Who was that? he shouted into the air around him, fraught with black laughing, though where the words were there was sand, and each grain of the sand was him repeating each word we’d ever found, strings of syllables crammed between the Cone and its unending ending, the coming instant at which the words would close and there would be no more said beyond the blinking in the blinking in the blinking in the blinking in the…
BLINK
The father threw up in his hands.
In the throw up, had he looked there, he would have found a map of all of where he’d been, but there was so much other crud covering it over, so much hair and wet and dark black eggs.
Back in the house, Person 1180 appeared coiled on the carpet flexed and stuffed. She did not realize she’d been gone for several days—days which in the house did not last so long — in which a league of moths had stuffed down the chimney and now were building more space in their sleep — in which someone had come to the door and knocked and knocked and buzzed the bell in patterns and begged and cried into the keyhole.
In her absence 1180 found the light the house held had brightened by degrees. She could see soil and crap and crystalline things crawling off in corners of the room she’d never noticed rounding out the space — new indentations in the hull. She felt years younger and a little dizzy. Her belly bulged larger than she remembered it’d last been. She was naked and had not been naked as she last recalled. She had been wearing a long blue gown as big as the whole house, stuffed all throughout it. There was something else inside her now. She pinched her chub and felt a lurch along the lining, murmuring like shafts. Her gush caked on her neck all full of speech.
She took turns sitting in the seven chairs around the kitchen table looking for the one that held her well, the one that made her sit straight. Having found the perfect chair at last some evenings later she did not sleep or close her eyes. She held her smile. Inside her head she made calls to every old phone numbers she could still remember and breathed into every silent, paused machine.
The mother could hear the baby screeching from upstairs as the tone’s latest long stroke dissolved around her. She kept trying to run to help her son but instead she felt her body going backwards. Several times she ran into the kitchen’s plate glass window, through which a mob of pure white dogs had gathered and were milking up a lather. She popped one of the panes out with her elbow on accident and immediately the dogs flew lapping at the fracture. On their breath she smelled her own breath but interlaced with blood. The child’s voice bruised the inner layer of the mother’s head. She closed her eyes.
She had to imagine she was moving the wrong way to make herself go toward the child.
Upstairs she found the baby had stretched and fattened, its belly bulged as if also pregnant, the skin stretched on its head an unlit bulb. Several birds had convened around the child and were pecking at his flesh — the same white birds from the stairwell, made of language, though she could no longer remember from where they’d come. She had no idea how birds had gotten inside the house and upstairs to the child as the nursery’s doors were locked, the windows held unshattered, sealed, the air vents blocked with grate and wire. From small holes in the birds a shrieking waffled in the white webbing of their muscle and their lard.
She grabbed the axe Person 811 had hung over the bedside—their boy would be a fireperson someday, he swore — when the fire station opened up again — if it opened — it would — it would open — there always would be fire. She chopped and ripped among the air. She squawked back at the birds in their same voices, surprised at how authentic she could sound. She chased them out into the hallway. Their wings knocked divots on the walls. They shit behind themselves in long leagues, streaking wet white mountains into the mother’s hair that caught loose feathers like a skin. The stink made the mother see double, then double double, like a lyric. The room began unveiling. There were so many birds inside the house and always had been.
She swung and swung the axe at all the air there hitting nothing. She threw it down and used her free arms then to scoop the birds down into her from the air, to press in clumps the thrumming meat against her thick chest, the milk inside her turning hard — the birds spreading out around the rind of her now from the outside speaking in.
The mother returned some hours later to the bedroom to find the child grown even larger, heavy white. He’d sat up on the fat crib mattress, fresh with bloodburst. As she rushed forward in the room to smooth and touch him, the child moved his hands across his face as if to hide, but really hide — not the gamey crap-move the mother and her boy had not yet had the chance to play in fun, but truly, to make as if he wished he were not there — as if now he mistook the mother as well for one of the long, winged things that had come at him — as if there were some other place he could move into beyond the room behind his skin. She prayed into the child’s ears in the book’s language. She kissed his lips and called him son.
She fed the baby frozen cream. He could not keep it down. He puked and puked it. She tried and tried and the baby’s eyes just went on caught with old spin. She wiped the child’s suddenly enormous forehead. In the child’s eyes she could see something moving even when the air between them blurred.
Person 1180 carried the dish of regurgitated milk spew into the kitchen and stood with it there before the window. Having come up from the child, the chocolate sheen had turned a little moldy. My growing baby, she heard herself think. She stirred the sputum with her finger, felt something rising.
She couldn’t crush her urge. She ate the pukey ice cream and felt it slide inside her. She threw it up again. She ate it down and threw it up again. She ate it down and threw it up again. Each time the color changed what it came back out as. Each time going in it had new flavor. She had been to college once. She’d kissed a man she’d seen on the TV. She put the ice cream inside the microwave and watched it melt in sputtered waves, watched it evaporate, become dust. Now the room felt very small.
In the child’s head his cells were spinning — his pupils wide with what inside or outside him must arrive.
Through the evening the mother slept hugging her chest. The child had stretched so much in several hours he fit a full man’s shape exactly. She’d tried to coddle the child, breastfeed him full of her again there through his now large mouth, but he refused to stay in bed. He still smelled like the birds. He paced the rooms downstairs and smoked long curls of his own hair — he ate the melting crap plastered behind the peeling wallpaper, his stomach snarled—he sometimes would walk along and on into the wall still there as if unseeing where the house had ended and he was held. The warts and ulcers already broiling up from his sternum would seize and pop in little rhythms.
1180 felt afraid. She saw an age reflected in the full-sized infant’s eyes — hardly infant’s now—were they? — she could not relay contact. She did not know what had come into the son to make the scaffold of his creature.
From some short distance, she would have surely mistaken him for 811—sometimes she did regardless — her body sometimes burned. Through long afternoons she locked her door and stayed in the bed watching the ceiling — waiting that it might crack open and offer her a way. She licked the pictures taken of her and the gone man gushing together before the son, in that old air, then, and she stuck them to her body that they might sink in and reconvene.