Somewhere sometime along the box shape, the father found a divot in its face—a small nudged spot where the flat black surface interrupted and gave the father’s body space to stand. Looking from the divot back along from where he’d come, the father could no longer see the box’s end, where he’d left the car alive and running—and still there, the other way, the box continued on—the same dimension stretching both ways out there from this divot, shaped distinctly in his size.
Above, the sky was shuddering with light. Day soon again already, the father thought, and felt the box sway, the ground beneath him skinny, pale.
The father turned to face toward the box. Black and flat, twice as high as he was, hard to tell when there was no light where box ended and sky began. There in the grain of it, some language. The father leaned his head close up to read. Instead the words were little pictures—the father standing in the house, the father coughing, the father holding a hammer toward a door. In each picture, the father appeared so much clearer, tighter. The father tried to turn away. As he did, inside each image, the other fathers turned first, and then he himself could not. He closed his eyes.
Overhead the light was gone again, hid behind lids. A flesh or floor or wall behind the father moved around him, sealed him in—the box around him eating the air up—the same blank sort of air that filled his house’s vents—washing in around his knees.