The father moved to stand in what remained of his only home’s cracked driveway, holding his head up with his hands. The bulb was very heavy. Inside the bulb it smelled like meat. Outside the bulb it smelled like meat. All air was meat now, as was water. The meat was see-through, at least, thank god. All on the air the bugs were crawling—the caterpillars, the ants, the geese. Most geese aren’t bugs but these were. The paint on this side of the house had now shifted in its tone. It’d grown to match the grass that’d grown almost above the father’s head. On the roof there was an enormous blanket half-tied down. It looked like the baby blanket the son had slept with for years and years until they’d had to take it away for quarantine. Massive cameras hung in the ozone, aimed directly at the house, spooling film down on the planet, long black translucent ticker tape splayed like raining.
In the sky above the house it looked like any other day.
Outside the house the grass was growing. The sun was smuggy. The street was gone. The neighbors did not mend their houses from recent damage. There was too much on the news. Several shopping malls went bust. An ocean liner ate its own weight. The library of the son’s school filled up with dust, though only in the evenings, so no one could know. A theme park became a peach and had a bite eaten in it where kids fell in and drowned. In the sky above the house there was a smoking but it was also clear, and it also smelled like endless beef and yet dogs stayed hidden, cowered. A moving van grew fat with girls. There were other people in their own windows, though they did not know what they were looking for. Gun shops did their business and did it well. Several popular websites were replaced with blocks of color. The grocery stores did not have eggs though they paid their men to stock them. The druggists were on drugs. Something had chewed on the largest building in the downtown district. Populations sweltered. The text in all the books in all bookstores increased in size by millimeters. You could not take a bath. The magicians were disappearing and not coming back to smile and swing their arms to end the show. Stores opened in every strip mall selling only handsaws. Babies came out with pubic hair and tried to crawl back inside their mothers. Women were older much more often. Email servers learned to laugh. You could not press Save on your MS Word files, only Save As . . .—unto all things a new name. The ocean grew a tumor. The moon grew a tumor. The president grew a tumor and ate it on TV into a large microphone, making the sound of years to come. You couldn’t sing or cry or chew or want or listen or know or sneeze. This all happened in one wrecked second. Where were we then?
The house remained the same.
The father trampled through the tall grass looking for a way to the front door. He could not quite aim himself toward the destination. The grass flapped at his hair. He could see the part of the house above the doorway where the night lamps glowed now a little bright. The father hacked and hacked the grass down with his sore limbs and walked and thought and looked and moved and walked and thought and thought and walked and looked and moved.