By the time the father found the front door it was locked. The naked father did not have his key. The men had kept it. The welcome mat was gone. Ants swarmed the stain on the concrete where it had been fed the residue. The naked father touched his flesh as if it might have hidden pockets—and though it did he could not find them. The father beat the door and rang the bell. The father browned his fists. Sometimes the buzzer shocked him. Sometimes the buzzer played Brahms, sometimes black metal, sometimes the soothing sound of rain-forest water or a shriek of someone being burned. These windows had been painted over or blocked off. The father put his eye up to the spy hole. Peering backward through it he felt a squirt. Inside the father’s chest was also squirting. He pulled the knob until it came off. The knob cauterized his hand. There’d also been a key under the plant box, though its base had been cracked through. The soil spilled out and ants had ravaged that, eating innards out of the leaves and leaving strange veined wire. The plant’s roots grew into the concrete so deep the father could not lift the box up. Some of the roots had little pods like eyes. So much movement—little sound.
As the father turned from the house, someone behind the door watched through the window.
The father loped back into the high grass, grown even higher since his arrival. The father fought to forge a path. He toppled forward with the bulb off-balance. The grass cut tons of tiny marks across his naked arms and legs and belly. The father’s testicles were swollen. He had a limp in both his legs. The father’s legs were now prosthetic, as were his chest and lungs and muscle—as was the vast majority of the father—though the father felt the same.
The father tottered through the growth with his head half at his knees. The bulb kept sweating. He could hear dogs around him packed in masses. He could hear a billion humming bees. All through the grass, hung on the blades around and on the house, the bugs were scumming up a hive. Countless interlocking pockets wet with bee grease, clasped in combs—each hole an eye—each eye a yawning. One long buzz. As well, in the soil below the swim of hive stuff, the ants were laying bed foundation—dirt clipped in piles and stacked as turrets, torrents, entry gaps large enough to suck around the father’s foot. The father danced and leapt and rolled along and through the yard with welts already forming on his knees—pocks on his sternum—chiggers kissed inside his ankles. He felt dizzy with new data. His mouth began to foam. In the foam his words popped as bubbles. The LCD clicker ran up and up. With each curse word, use of god’s name, or fault of grammar, the father received a cram of shock.