Over many weeks, once they had settled, their copies nowhere, the house fell into feeling, often, fine. The house had an oven, stairs, some ceilings. The family began to loosen. They put their things where they belonged in this new system. They unwrapped the crap they used the most first, then on to baubles. They changed the grade of light in certain rooms. They hung up pictures of things they wanted to remember or identified with or just liked to look at while passing in the hall. The family tried to make the house their home.
As weeks gathered, passed in packets—days that often seemed of no uniform length, one unto the other and again—the house took shape around its new contents in nameless ways. Some nights the family would be woken by long bowed tones from all around—their whole house surrounded by an edgeless, shapeless singing; a sound that had an eye. It never seemed as though the family all heard the sound on the same evenings. Sometimes it would stir only the mother or the son. Sometimes the tone seemed, to the father, just inside his eyelid—therein, he could not stand up from the bed, his flesh repelled upon the air as if by magnets. Some nights, the whole night, the tone would row, the mother and father there frozen side by side in bed together, seeing one another, not a blink. In the mornings, one or the other might mention how they’d heard it—the loudest droning—the father thought it was a D flat, though he could not sing it back in tune—and the one who’d heard it the night before would say, Oh, I slept straight through the hours.
Down the street three feet, or just above it, the sound around the house could not be heard.
Some nights, the son, awake well beyond both parents, would shake inside his skin. The sound would form around him, like cold clothing, threading on the night. The gong and organ in his chest would chime right in—repeating, harmonizing. The son felt words along his tongue. In the mornings, trying to tell the father or the mother of the shape growing inside him, all around the house, the words came out as something else.
Panes kept falling out of all the windows. Sometimes the sand that’d made the glass became apparent, insects sprawling in the grain. The tires on the family car would have flattened many mornings. The welcome mat would melt in too much light. The birdbath teemed and toppled. The dishwasher would seem to speak. Nothing ever seemed to line up with one another. The son could not walk from one room to another without bumping his elbow, nicking his shoulder. He often heard people speaking in the vents, grunting or gunplay on the roof. The house would not stay still.
The father and the mother tried to go on, despite the headaches and morning pus. They fixed the windows and kissed the son. They kept their cool. They did not scream at one another when the garage door came down on the car while they were backing out. They did not panic when the front yard flowerbed spat the bulbs out of the ground. They did their best just not to think. Relax a little. They found themselves repeating it: RELAX. RELAX. They slept with their eyes open, all at once.