Outside the house the grass around the house—the dead and endless grass the mother had mowed and mowed in begging to keep down—the grass with no roots left to mention, their butt ends frayed into a mush—roots that once had spread embedded underneath the other nearby houses in a network, a scumming labyrinth, a kind of whip—by now this dead and pure white groan-grass had grown up a few feet high. It grew to just below the house’s windows and grew up around the doors and at the outsides of the walls. It grew up beneath the house beneath the father and the father could feel it tickle, screaming, other language, through his chest.