A structure of ants, wasps, caterpillars, crumbling wings, crickets' eyes, fears and nightmares…
The roof sheds its tiles. Yellow and red, they land on the ground, ushering in the fall.
"For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death", is carved on the trunk. Among the roots, the first child was buried.
* * * *
Every Sunday he turns into a birthday balloon - smooth like the brain with no convolutions - to hang over the growing bold roof, vexing the pious wasps in the niches. The diggers-ants take him for a cloud and encircle him like a vignette when the wind sways him in the hammock of dried branches showing through the chimney. The exterior is constantly in motion - ants, wasps, caterpillars are the facing materials of the mosaic walls. The house squeaks, threatening to collapse one day when the gusts of wind achieve the power of a wizard who knows how to turn the fallen leaves into flocks.
* * * *
His eyes are two glistening webs with curious little spiders-pupils. Whatever is caught in the webs becomes their property. They take it underground when the sun is cut from the day like the head from the body. Then the day turns charcoal, and there's no more Sun-day.
He percolates through the ground, too, crawls into the cradle of roots, curls up, and waits. The little spiders begin to examine their catch, sucking all the microscopic details, and so he dreams.
* * * *
He dreams of the fluff on the legs of a dismembered grasshopper and the multicolored fibers falling off from a dried bee. He dreams about butterflies' crumbling wings, and the cold, hardened onyx of crickets' eyes.
Upstairs, his Mother is walking inside her wooden prison like a pendulum - back and forth, back and forth. The house sways and cracks, tearing apart at the seams.
* * * *
It seems she suffers from insomnia.
He wants to know why, but the house slightly rocks, lulling him, so he forgets his own thoughts, falling into a lethargic state.
His body, a mixture of anaerobic bacteria, larvae, and released gases, slips down, and the phreatic waters carry it to most dark and obscure places, saturating it with interstellar hydrogen, nebular matter, and something else that burns and erodes his memories.
He, however, is not aware of it; his gauzy spirit is released, and, liberated, it lingers upstairs, above the chimney, levitating across a glowing bubble with a wide-eyed embryo inside.
* * * *
The embryo looks familiar. Every time he sees it he tries to remember where he met it, but his memories are gone and, instead, he has odd recollections of lives whose meanings are unclear to him since all the connections are lost with the memories.
The embryo stares at him, slightly stirring in the bubble, and they study each other for some time, separated by the spherical membrane, while the worms downstairs are squelching in the bloating slush with the traces of his DNA.
The trunk vibrates as if trying to connect the disconnected worlds beneath and above. Inside it, his Dad groans in his sleep. The interior of the house is formed by his nightmares. They must be contagious otherwise why wouldn't his Mother ever join his Dad at night?
Catching a nightmare is her biggest nightmare. It bores the house from within like a beetle.
* * * *
She hunts after the beetle with a swatter all day long until the day gives up light so she can't see anything anymore. Then the beetle hunts after her.
He could never understand why she was so scared of the beetle. It was cute, like a toy, with glossy scarlet wings in black and white dots. Flies often took it for the fly agaric mushroom, but it didn't care. Flies are stupid. All they do is gossip about nothing.
He used to play with the beetle before his own body was broken down into elements and the flies began to lay eggs in its tissues. He watched their suspended emerald bellies fibrillating like worms above him and he dreamed about the beetle.
His dreams became his father's nightmares.
* * * *
The beetle had been taken underground by ants. Its sprawled darkened body resembled husks of a sunflower seed flattened by a heel. The ants thoroughly cut it to pieces and their kids played with it for some time. All he'd managed to keep for himself was a tarsus that he clutched between his fingers until it merged with them and became a part of his body.
* * * *
"Wash your hands, wash your hands," his Mother yells hysterically inside the trunk when he knocks on it on Sundays.
"I have, I have," he rustles.
She doesn't believe him, she runs back and forth, and the house shakes and squeaks.
His Dad appears with the broom, holding it like a rifle.
"How are you, Dad?" he chirps with a ligamentum vocale of a long-deceased cricket, once caught by his little spiders.
His Dad only goggles, snarling. Does he see him? He's never sure. His Dad is confused. He's been confused for a long, long time, since he left his own mother and met the mother of his child. He'd been promised that the confusion would go away. He's been still waiting.
What's he been waiting for?
Dad, what are you waiting for?
His Dad squeezes the broom, getting it ready. The wasps watch him closely. They know that when he was a child he was sentenced to death, too.
* * * *
