C4 antho - Chamber Four

Eupcaccia ~37~
tantalizing view up all four nostrils. His face goes through
surprise, happiness, anger, confusion, frustration, and contemplation.
Look―here’s his mother, a slanted doorway, and
a hand goes up to block her face. Out in the living room,
there’s a matchstick swizzled in candle wax and a partial fingerprint
marring a photograph of a large crowd cheering a
car race. The velvet backing the photograph is the darkest
black there is. Suddenly there’s a hot flash of fluorescence,
followed by an examination of the faceplate of the light
switch, its screw heads perfectly vertical. Droplets of moisture
define a half-destroyed spider’s web, shown with the
light on and then off. On. Off. On. A painful minute focused
on the spider’s leg, jerky, electric, disco.
A close-up of something sways like a worm, and when
the camera pulls back it’s a loose thread from the elastic cuff
of Mrs. Chicken’s shirt. The tulip pattern on the fabric. Suddenly
the camera is jerked as if hit by something hard; it’s
Mrs. Chicken’s rings as her hand wraps over the camera’s
head. Mal’s hand peels hers away. The camera tumbles to the
ground.
The latch of the bathroom door going in and out looks
like a darting fish. The cheap gold molding still looks cheap
in black and white. Inside the bathroom, there are mineral
deposits clinging to the showerhead, the bleached corner of
the bathtub where the soap lives and slowly decays, dark
patches of grout between linoleum squares from spilt iodine
or hair dye. There’s a tangled wad of hair near the corner of
the tub where the caulking is riddled with spots of mold. Up
near the lunar surface of the ceiling, there’s a vertiginous
moment where the self-leveling camera wheels around violently,
followed by a millisecond flash of Malchicken’s face,
off balance.
A crack running along the bottom of a picture frame
merges into the etched image of a perfume bottle and its