ANTECHAMBER, SECOND ANTECHAMBER, SHAFTS

The father left the room with the table and entered another room that the family did not have a name for. The father did not like the way he felt while standing in this room but he also felt that he did not want to ever leave it.

The father craned his head into the next room, which was a hallway, and the father looked and looked. The father closed his eyes. He thought he heard someone else enter the room he’d just come from. He felt light bending around his back.

The father looked again and closed again. He had to leave this room, he knew, but he did not want to touch the hallway carpet and he could not go back the way he came. The hallway carpet had a peculiar pattern.

The father held his breath and jumped across the air.

The father landed in another room. There were tiny holes in this room that looked out onto exact geographic coordinates of space. The father opened up his eyes.

The father had aged by eighteen months.

The father was at an age when eighteen months would not vastly change his outward physical appearance greatly, though some more of his hair had fallen out or molted white. His joints creaked in their gristle. His skin continued to sag. The father’s teeth bent slightly inward and were corroded slightly in color and dimension. His vision degraded enough to make him ineligible to pilot a motor vehicle. His other insurance premiums increased by 18 percent. His intestines loosened and the tapeworms inside them multiplied and slithered in their widths. The father’s brain blew fat with wrinkle.

Around the father in the house the rooms were there. Through the years these rooms would fill with things and some of those things would stay and remain the same unless moved or acted on by outside forces and other things in the rooms would come and go—this is what science had let him know. For the majority of their existence the rooms would contain nothing, and the nothing would not change.