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large hands I saw the wrinkles of other ways that I had known.
    Soon he was a man.
    Already he was grown so large I couldn’t fit him in my arms.
    I called him different names for each occasion. He responded to them all.
    It was cold in the apartment. The heater mostly did not work. We could see our breath in long shapes, crystallizing. The freeze air made him violent. He unstuffed the sofa and ruined my magazines. He took the heads off all his dolls.
    Such a busy child. So eager. He didn’t mean to bruise my face. He only wanted, like me, something he could hold a certain way.
    In the evenings, once he’d grown worn out, the apartment again reduced to shambles, I put my hours towards attempting to teach him how to speak. He’d already proved a want for learning. He liked to watch my tapes of old TV. I’d spent hundreds cataloging my favorite programs back when the broadcasts were still on air: the answers and storylines of which I could not at all remember. The people in those pictures seemed very different from people now. Their eyes were slightly wider. Their skin offered a sheen.
    My son could somehow see them through his barbed hair, which no matter how quickly I cut it from him, would grow back straight and further black.
    In the newsreels I’d acquired, letting the VCR spool on through the night, I let my baby witness the swan dive of our destruction as arrayed in mini-clips—the anchors with their powdered jowls and immoderate narration; the chapped condition of their smiling as they spoke about the way the world had come to rash,
    and how the ground would split apart
and spit up blobs of black and ooze and stinking
and the missionaries with their long tongues
and the steaming craters of the moon, and
the pastures of dead cattle already rotten within hours, the
beetles and the fungus spreading over,

the mayonnaise on a sandwich no one would ever eat, and the
babies with their hair tongues
like my baby here
like mine
    More than the programs, my boy liked advertisements. He liked to hiss or sing along in faction. At first I’d fast-forward through those sent from late night, the 1-800 numbers with women moaning, but then I began to find
    that in those moments
    he seemed most pleased,
    most still and God-blessed,
    and so I let him go on watching,
    while outside the tides broke and swallowed cars,
    and on the beaches the bloated continued rolling in, rotting even in the sun’s absence, clogged and ripped and lined with tumor.
    These were other days, these ones prepared for us.
    In these new days we no longer had to watch the mobs of wrecked men with their machine guns, ten-thousand piled up on sheets of concrete, the splintered knobs of bone so hushed,
    the scum caked and ever-growing,
    and all those thoughts of what for which I’d never get the time.
    The words I could not somehow pass to baby. I’d wield a ball and call its name, coo it cutely for my young one, B-A-L-L, and he’d shriek back, KA-KEESH!
    I’d put a finger to my forehead and say, MOMMY, and my child, taller than me, went: PAWOOO PAWEEEE!
    Stubborn, like his father, with the straight white teeth to match.
    The things I knew he’d never be.
    There was something ever coming, I said inside me, and it does not have a name.
    At night I locked the front door and watched for hours through the peep. I locked the door that blocked the hallway and the one leading to my room.
    So many doors forever. There never were enough.
    Each door had several locks.
    One lock was combination. Another required keys. Another was simple slide-latch. Another was strictly ornamental.
    Another you could open by whispering the right thing to it at the right time, which is the type of lock most humans have.

    CATERPILLAR
    They slung in wriggling ropes of segmented flesh: fat and spiny, bright with mold. Some squirmed big as my forearm. Some small enough to creep inside an ear. I’d never seen so much color. The leaves of trees were eaten, stranding craning skeletons in