The next day there was nothing wrong. No one was coughing. There were no bills. The sun rose in the morning and felt warm and not oppressive. The yard looked bright and clean. The mother made the son breakfast and drove him to where he was supposed to be and she came home alone and felt okay. The father called her twice to ask how she was without any preamble of suspicion.
The mother made herself an egg sandwich and found just enough hot sauce in the bottle to make it tasty, eliminating the chance that she might overdo it and make the eggs too saucy and thus inedible, as she had a tendency to do. She solved the newspaper’s word puzzle in record time without even really understanding how she knew the answers.
The father’s stocks went up enough to alleviate a recent downswing since they’d moved into the house. The father sat in his office with his stock tracker open, watching the numbers replace one another on the screen. He masturbated in the handicapped stall without any other person coming in. His size felt fine.
At school the son made a friend. A new girl in town from out of town. The girl resembled the son in many features—skin, lips, cheeks, hair, teeth, build, height, sound—but because she was female he did not notice. The girl was very rude to teachers, but in a way the son found wise. The girl wore long black gloves. The girl had two different colored eyes, one of which would be looking at the son and the other eye of which seemed to toggle. She would not tell the son her proper name. She had a lot of nicknames she liked for him to say aloud. The girl ate with her mouth open and the food all falling out.
The son enjoyed the girl. He felt happy to have a friend.
When the family got home, all at the same time, they gathered around the kitchen table and played Monopoly. They all landed on FREE PARKING every other time around. Everyone was able to buy the properties that they needed, and the bank ran out of money, and the game ended in a tie. Afterward the son did a stand-up routine he’d written at school from a deep sleep. The parents were impressed by the breadth and maturity of his jokes. They couldn’t stop laughing—it made their heads ache, it was all so funny. Even when the son cursed the parents didn’t mind because it added. Our child is . . . child is . . . entertaining! one parent told the other, fighting for breathing, though later they could not remember which had said and which had heard.
For dinner they ordered pizza and it arrived a little late and the pizza guy refused to take their money though he did accept a small tip and the pizza was still warm and even more delicious since they’d had that extra time to let their stomachs think. Instead of TV or closing themselves in their individual rooms the way most nights went, they sat around the table long after dinner and talked about things that made them glad or things they wanted to become in the future or things about themselves and one another that they liked. They found themselves saying things that they wanted, things they did not know they wanted—the mother candles, the son a black pen, the father a new pair of working gloves—and therefore felt the bloom of some new direction.
They went to bed together, all at once, without discussing, and they didn’t feel the need to lock their doors. They fell asleep quickly without thinking and their dreams were full of bliss or magic, some kind of wondrous unfamiliar which in the coming days of daylight would itch and itch against their lives.