The mother stood on the back lawn. The grass grew to her waist. She had her wet arms up over her head. Something flat above her—something there—she could almost touch it—could almost pull it down. A kind of skin or greasy fabric. Gash. A veil. She kept reaching. Her arm muscles began to stretch weird. Each time she brought her hands back down from reaching she felt her elbows bobbed a little further out. Bowed. Redistracted. Her pupils spacing outward, going lazy. She was so big now. She couldn’t keep her hands from making knots. She couldn’t keep her knees between her legs. The thing—perhaps an awning—was flattening the house.
Like the mother’s body, the house all seemed to sag. The roof slid sloppy. The doors expanding. In countless windows the glass reflected the grass and gravel back onto the yard. A dead horse appeared in some parts of the reflection, its horseflesh buzzered and warped to gleaming waves from nonexistent heat. The mother’s mother crouched down on the horse’s back, holding the egg against her chest. The egg glowed, singeing the night. The mother shouted at the mother’s image, seething—all those years and years buried between—the mother’s mother having made the mother and then left her in the air of every day, such silence—the new flesh they had made, in passing on.
From the mother’s throat, instead of voice now, up through her chest there came a key—another key that opened nothing—smooth teeth—each further word a key and key again, their metal raining from her mouth in exclamation to click against the ground—and in turn to turn to further birds there, bursting, one and another, a white excrement, alive—each bird flying right after the other straight up and head-on into the thickening awning of the sky.
The mother shouted at the awning, keys erupting, uncounted birds in muscled shriek. She needed to pull the awning down, she knew, and knew she knew she would not. The stink of skin coursed new all through the air just beneath the edge of air where the long sky grew, growing hair, a body, trust.
Among the birds, the mother screamed another name. Her nostrils made little rooms for sluicing, her throat skin rawing into blood. Her skin pocked with insects that poured out from her brain, born from other, tiny eggs. There were gnats and ants and bees and beetles. There were flies of every color. These too flew to become something—of the awning, and the ground. The mother could not count herself, the shake inside her. More insects settled on the air—insects both from her and in the world compiling. They made it hard to blink, or want. Each little tic of need and knowing begged so much thought. The mother—she could not—hardly—inhale—she could not—see. She pulled her outermost clothes up over around her head, a mask. She breathed into the scummy cloth. The mother reached for names she’d heard there, those women and those men. The mother reached.