In the backyard, high as ever, like long blank curtains to the sky, the father swung and bit and bashed his head cutting a pathway in the green. His tongue had begun to gather in his helmet, dislodged somewhere way back down his throat, the weird mashed meat surround-compiling in the space around his cheeks. Likewise, his breath had begun building layers on the bulb’s condensation-proof glass. The father tried to wink his cheek to rub the glass clean, but that was hard.
Somewhere in the yard among the fallen clothesline and loops of dead brown meat once trees, the father came to a gazebo nestled in the growing. A tall thin black corrupted structure, thick and pointed though dented in along the top as if something large had had nabs at it. The father did not like its sweeter smell, etched with the sickness, the surrounding air suffused with more mosquitoes, wasps—had you seen this air here, you could not see—the father tripped his way up beneath the errored awning and into the dark shell, buzzing, smoke.
The father knew that though he’d never seen it, the gazebo had always been in the yard, and always would be, in any yard. The father had had long dreams of coiling in a hammock, eating. Here. There were many things the father had planned to do—in or around the house or other—lists of lists of lists of lists—this gazebo, too, was those. The father walked into its mouth.
From up inside the structure’s bleach-burnt stomach, the father could hear the mother somewhere shout. He could not make out what she said—her voice compiled of several others—a thousand tonalities at once—heads surrounding the gazebo, skin on skin, and air on air. The gazebo walls were screened completely and hung with new-car-scent plumes and bags of rice. A sheet of pupae blocked the holy wire scrim. They were crusted on so thick—such dedication—the gazebo’s size quadrupled, like a crown.
The father could not stop with turning, turning, seeing the same few feet of textured surface, until he fell dizzy on the wood.