CAMERA

Abiogenesis: a son will appear between those legs as meat left in the sun turns to maggots. A son will peer out from between those legs, a son who is all eye. A blink, a shudder of the legs. They fiddle together in silence. The son wants to cry. His lacrimal lake already full but crying implies a face. The son knows this, knows it in the way bivalves know food; not in the way the mother knows bivalves as food, as aphrodisiacs. She rubs the eye as she brings a bivalve to another orifice she can’t see but knows is there. She knew it before the mirror confirmed its absence. An absence to slide bivalves down. The son, being rubbed, is negative light as rods and cones turn tactile. In the light there are shapes the son knows. He tears as pulses create the depths across which they travel. The son wants the shapes. The mother thinks back to lying on her back on a hillside covered in non-descript flowers. How the clouds inevitably became extant: sperm whales, their geysers too obvious. How naïve, she thinks, and drops another bivalve into the hole she can’t see to celebrate her lost ingenuity. She can’t see any of her holes. She cannot see the son. He cannot see her either, though her legs brace his field of vision. She stops rubbing for a moment, and the son opens to the world again; a subconjunctival hemorrhage lazily forming around his iris. What does he see, the mother wonders wrong-headedly. Eyes don’t see. Minds see. The raw eggs arrive, and she goes back to rubbing, careful not to gouge the son in some imitation of an obvious act of creation. She sucks the eggs through pinpricks, sucking until the surface gives, and the yolk gushes like dirty sunlight into her. All the while a phenakistoscope persists along the surface retaining the son’s aqueous fluid. The shapes more real to him than the shapes made by refracted light on photoreceptive cells in a manner consistent with their proper design.

PROPERTIES

The mask. The mask may not inflate, though blood is flowing to the mask. Please secure your own mask before masking the consanguineous. Your eyes will blood-blind, do not be alarmed. Blood will spill over your breasts as you gag foolishly against drowning. Do not be alarmed. Simply compel the consanguineous to rub the viscosity into your flesh, paying particular attention to the porous nipples. Take him by the hand. He will oblige; the blood you share seeping under his torn hangnails as he guides it down toward the doorway of his one-time home. You feel it like a knocking. Do not be alarmed. Open the flooded airlock. The bends of shared blood bubble through you; champagne-like sensory failure. The labyrinthitis of the world.

The dress. The dress undresses itself. Those buttons running up the back are bone. They pop off, roll across the floor in search of their body. Follow them. The bone corset-stays writhe free and slide down your thighs fingerlike. Crawl to catch them. The leather strap unbuckling, bucking against its stitching. Your hands grasp for cloth yet find only flesh, yours. Unseamed, unseemly, you are open on your hands and knees. Behind you the flesh red dress rises, its button eyes of the dead.