On the night it happened, my son asked me to tuck him in. It did not sound cute or small, it did not contain the faint echo of what his voice as a baby had been. Instead, it twisted into what it would become: I heard its rigid hardness, the rigid hardness of a man. It was like the voice of a twenty-year-old calling his mother to tuck him in, and it unsettled me.

Mother has been sewing near-constantly for weeks, digging out our old shirts and smocks and going at them with her needle. Once they’re in shape she pulls them over our heads, and their cool linen smells like mildew and winter. When we complain she tells us to go outside and run around in them, and soon enough she's right, the sweat and sunlight chase the smell away. Later, when it's time to come back, they ring the bells in our village and all the villages up and down the valley. Without that we'd play half the night, never know when it was time for dinner, the sun still lighting up the treetops on the hills across the valley long past our bedtimes.

The ancient facade of the big house loomed grey and gleaming over the wild verdancy of Cyan’s demesne. The walls whistled, low and long, whenever the wind blew. Cyan had filled the house with imported brocade throws and beautiful rugs, but they did little to tame the toe-biting cold. The Berber carpet in the great room claimed the most space in my memory. It bore vivid saffron linework cutting through a field of oak leaf green, lit by the glowing blue screen of the immaculate console we’d all been forbidden to touch.

One evening there are simply strings. Suspended from the sky, undulating on the currents of the air. Thin, ethereal tentacles like pendulous orange nerves draped between skyscrapers. Moving on the wind, but not just on the wind. Searching, groping of their own will. Like maggots in the dark.

As the screen door slammed behind us, Momma called out a warning about swimming in the creek. “You’re likely to fall in and drown,” she said, “or get eat up by a cottonmouth.” She’d worried about snakes since I was six and she’d found me in the backyard hugging a rattler like a doll. “A miracle you didn’t get bit,” she’d told me over and over since. “Snake bites are mean; their poison seeps through your veins to your heart.”

Viviane watched from the end of the aisle as the child hid inside the racks of clearance-priced clothing. She watched as the girl’s mother stretched a long spindly arm between the folds of tweed and cable-knit and pulled the kid through as if from the Narnia wardrobe.

His mama’s red hair falls like a curtain around him, hiding him. His mama’s hair has always been long, but now? Now, it spills across the floor, a burning fire, a warning sign, a bloodbath. And he, fully grown, can hide himself within it. He dares not touch. Not with bloodied hands. He does not look down, but he can feel the slick drag of blood across knuckles, dripping from empty nail beds. His hands flex with aching listlessness.

A calloused fingertip catches at my coiled skin. I shiver then hum, my voice a flat warble. A screw turns, stretching my sinews.

Cindy didn’t have much, but she had a book. Every night Cindy’s mother would read the book to her and show her the pictures, pictures of stars burning bright, meteors roaring through space, and far away planets where no human had ever been.

The television blares at me from across the room. Judy’s got it cranked up way too high again. It’s like they’re yelling at me. I look around. The remote’s missing.

“Judy, you seen the remote around?” I shout toward the stairway behind my chair. I wait a moment for a response. “Judy?”

A door creaks on its hinges.

crouches in the corner

stares at your internal organs

through a ninety eight cent pair

of comic book x-ray glasses

asks if you’ve taken care of your liver

googles recipes behind its back