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the TV room, as far as the father could rightly see. There was a smell that curled the air. Some color not a color. The TV lay turned over on its face. The father called the mother’s name several times into several cracks the room had and left his voice wedged there behind him.
    The door to the son’s room was closed and locked and inside he could not hear the son up or moving. Asleep, the father assumed, as the son would not answer, not for anything. He tried the knob again, again.
    The mother was not in their bedroom. The bed was made and covered all with crumbling crap that’d come down off the ceiling, plaster popcorn. Something had been making the ceiling shudder in the evenings. The father’s feet felt triple-sized. The father sat down to take his shoes off, glowing. The father said the mother’s name some more. He was so tired. He knew that he should find her. He knew he couldn’t just go to sleep, though he felt the feeling flooding through him, weighing his limbs down, thickening his blood.
    The father leaned back on his elbows on the mattress, nodding. His head felt wide as nowhere. His head had so much in it.
    The father heard someone rummage in the bathroom.
    Ah, there she is, the father said, relaxing.

OTHER FATHERS
    Outside the house inside the night beyond the father, the mother stood in porch light, in a gown. The mother knocked and rang the neighbors’ bells. She banged and clapped and tried the windows. People , she thought. People who can sleep . The mother moved from one house to another. None of the houses looked like hers, nor the house she had grown up in, nor the house grown up in by the son. From house to house to house to house to house the mother knocked and crossed off numbers on her arm. She’d woken up and found the numbers there delivered, formed in the patterns of the clogged pores where her hair would no longer grow.
    The mother had some idea of what she’d say when asked, if ever. Some homes had bells that shook her sternum, or would play a song she knew she knew. Some homes seemed to quiver right along, as would their home, leaning. The mother imagined herself inside each home’s walls as she touched them—inside not sleeping, hearing herself at the door. At certain doors she tried the keys she’d crammed fat in her pockets, but in the locks they’d spin and spin.
    She guessed men’s names into the crack, a string of fathers’ names hidden inside her, names of those who too had lost . She tried Antoine, Paul, Stanley, James; she tried Tom, Kim, Ken, John, Jim, Ray, Edward, Robert; she tried a name she could not quite name . The names stuck to her mouth. These names came from somewhere in her, she could hear them, coming on and on, and trailing off . . .
    The mother tried her name, then her mother’s, then the father’s, then the son’s. No one would come. The homes went on hearing. The homes would stand there. Overhead the sky cracked up with old light—light that sometimes seemed to form a map. The neighborhood went on regardless, even when the mother hid her eyes.



THE SON’S PHONE
    The son lay with his cell phone between his pillow and his head, the way the mother had made him swear he would. She’d bought the phone in case of relapse— but relapse into what? The son could not remember. He had to wear the phone on him at all times. What if he could not find her? The mother could not stop thinking. Sometimes in her thoughts the mother would explode as balls of heat and crud and light.
    The son’s phone was purple by most opinions, though sometimes it might appear blood red or translucent.
    The son had set up a mirror at the foot of the bed that he could look in and see himself, as well as what might be in the room around him. So much of most rooms were never watched. Many people had used this room before the son, the son knew. Sometimes he felt they were still there. Some mornings he would wake up and the mirror would have turned slightly, rotated to one side,