In the morning, crushed with a warm air, the mother could not think of where to hide. She’d been left alone in the house again, like every other day—the father working, son at school. Usually the mother liked to be alone, swum in the peace. Sometimes she took her clothes off and went out into the backyard and stood and sang and walked around, performing common household habits like any other except with her boobs and ass hung in the sun, as she had when she was teenaged on strange beaches on vacation from her childhood house. The mother felt young out in the wrecked light naked. The mother could spend years inside those days.
Today the mother’s spit was brown like coffee. She ground her teeth, felt them diminish. She could not shake the sense of someone there behind her. She kept feeling something brush against her back. In all the rooms the curtains seemed to rustle even when the a/c had been turned off. She’d been finding keys all around the house. She’d found a key in the baking powder. She’d found a key taped to the window. A key inside a certain book on a certain shelf. A key tied into her hair. All the keys unlocked the house, though some had no teeth. The mother hid the keys in certain places. Still she kept hearing the front door open. She heard something moving on the roof.
She tried to hide in the hallway closet but something kept rustling in the towels. She tried to hide in the washing machine but it kept turning itself on. Even when she stood and watched the room in a long mirror she knew things happened every time she blinked her eyes.
Cramped up under the son’s small bed, the mother found a purple folder full of photos of women ripped from magazines. Naked women—glossed and healthy—each much older than the son—their bodies seemed so clean. The son had adorned the women’s heads with extra eyes and horns and speech bubbles saying awful things—text that went on and on for pages, cramped tight to dark black—text that should have been destroyed. In many of the drawings, a smaller version of the son crawled on or in the women. The mother replaced the photos as if she had not seen them. The mother went into her room and drew a cold bath, watched it wait.