Beside the man, the mother saw, as the strong door revealed another hole, there stood a woman, too. A woman about as tall as the mother, a small taut belly protruding from her skeleton, petite. This woman wore a veil—a white bride’s veil, the mother noticed— certainly a bride’s, it had to be, the color shifting, pale, with long dark driving gloves, like those the man beside her wore, covering her skin’s arms. Through the veil the mother could see the semi-outline of the other impending mother’s face, the features meshed in, fluttered. She had a mouth and, somewhere, eyes.
The mother smiled. A new young starting, she thought. One for another. She felt her skin inside her, warm.
The mother watched the other woman reach slowly on into her pocket, as for a gun. Together they inhaled, then.
The mother closed her eyes. She felt the warm air blowing somewhere high above her, though down here the air was still. She swallowed and she swallowed.
When she looked again, the other woman had a piece of paper in her hands. At first glance, it seemed blank, then it seemed to show the mother her own head back. The mother’s dry eyes swam. She craned her neck in, stumbled closer, looking for her age. Up close, she could read there, a description of her house—the ad she’d placed just that same morning, black-and-white. How many bedrooms, their dimensions. How many fireplaces, baths. Kind of siding, year built (left blank), a/c presence, names of nearby schools and roads. The mother wasn’t sure how the ad had already made print. The paper people had said it would take at least three days—days the mother had planned to use to clean the house, to mow and mow the grass. Most days the day was always over before the day began.
And yet here was this young couple, local people, at the front door, for a view. They looked clean and kind, dressed and possessed of a certain manner that to the mother suggested money, which suggested therefore that if they approved they might buy quickly, and then the family could move even sooner to a new house, which was beginning to seem more and more exactly what they needed. The mother did not feel at home. At night in their bedroom she had dreams of such condition she could hardly bring herself to go to sleep. Dreams of fissure, squashing, oily sneeze. Dreams of the son screaming and on fire. Of the sky above them melting like a raw egg and dripping down to crush the house with them inside it. During the dreaming the dreams seemed very real, not like a film at all, the way some dreams often would.
Though the father, in more recent days, had sagged in their decision to get out. Sometimes he seemed concerned with the same fervor as before—the sooner they were somewhere else, the better. He was not sleeping so well either, he complained, though through the night, when home, he snored and snored and did not shake. The mother stuffed her ears with plastic and still could hear him blowing up with sound.
Other nights the father would shake his head and stomp for her even mentioning their moving, then wouldn’t come to bed at all. From their room the mother could hear the father moving around inside the down and upstairs, banging and speaking, the sounds so faint at times they seemed more far away from her than the house was wide—the father barking in wordless fury on his way in or out the door. Some nights he’d bark so hard at such high volume he went hoarse and could not speak again for days. Other times no sound at all would come out, despite the fervor, all the wanting, in his eyes.
The mother’s own eyes now in the yardlight stung, wet and glitchy.
The mother’s body unlocked, unlatched, and opened up her mouth.