The father came out of the bedroom into the hallway and started down the stairs and then the stairs beneath him seemed to crimp in some way they had never before right there. The stairs seemed to cling against the father’s feet and also were crumbling in. Even as he stepped down onto the surface of the landing in the foyer where the stairs had always ended—there facing the door into the outside—the father could not help but feel that the room he was in now at the bottom of the stairs was not the room that had always been at the bottom of the stairs, but another room of the same shape and make and color—slightly off. Something about the texture of the wall or the way the window glinted or the way the light came in from outside and graced the ground. Something about the words that had been said in that room before then not quite sitting.
The father put his foot in certain places the way he had so many other days and felt a different feeling than he’d felt then. His right eyelid again twitching—inner houses. The father pinched and prodded at his skin. He punched himself hard in his chest, his gut, the sides. The vibration flexed through his body in other places: between his toes, against his scrotum (vessels), in his knees. His other eye sat waiting, clean.
The father moved from the landing to the next room, which on most days was the room where the family ate. They had just eaten there today, had they not? Were they not eating there right now? The dining table still sat smattered under the bright red tablecloth curtain, stained in all those places that would not wash out. It seemed slightly larger than it had once been, or the father smaller. The chandelier the father had hung himself there to replace the prior lamp—a lamp that refused to quit cutting in and out, the sockets zapping when he touched them—the chandelier was still intact—though this chandelier’s crimped metal arms hung so much lower—the father could step right up and take a bite. He could fit the tiny frosted bulb glass into his mouth and huff it. With the glow washed up inside his cheeks the father looked upon the room.