An ordinary evening at home. The smoothness of the countertop and gleaming drops of water along the sink, the flickering of a silent television set, the softness of carpet underfoot a familiar comfort in the stillness. A blanket folded back across a wooden chair. A grove outside steadfastly safeguarding a clutch of rustling animals. The hours here are nebulous and shift through spectral colors so slowly that any attempt to determine the edges of a moment can only result in a smearing of the present into a shape too long to be apprehended and contained. But as eyes fill with a migraine or the shimmering heat of a sudden stand so too does space contract around the head and pulse with a gentle hot glow, a halo with the narrowness of a line drawing but into which a three-dimensional space erupts with only the most innocuous coaxing. A half-hidden face glaring through the glass of a second-story window. Like a dream sometimes it comes unbidden, and like a dream sometimes it passes through the membrane of useless and settles into sinew with the persistence of a poison, shards of a figure hiding in a hall closet with head in hands, hostage to infinitesimal human sounds. Glittering eyes in the window. Another night approaching with such infinite care that without the occasional creaking of the floor it might be possible to imagine it will never arrive. The room crushing inward at a glacial pace, the deliberation of the rack, the stress in bonds ever increasing until they break with a sudden snap -- the point at which the eye begins its seizure. From beyond the door, suspended in the dark among hanging articles and occasions, awaiting the ineluctable humiliation of a death erection, the rest of the house becomes intimately accessible: the grease of a countertop and the gleaming drops along the sink, the blood of a plant past a sill, the softness of the carpet perfectly primed to muffle footsteps to the point where they are only possible to discern against the stillness because no other sound, other than breathing and the occasional scratching of wool against face, remains.