Exactly three weeks, six days, seven hours, and forty-two minutes before his sixth birthday, Nathan Front announced to his mother that he was going to die. They had ground to a halt on the road that overlooked the coastline. At noon the tide was so low that the tips of the seagrass emerged through the surface, and the surfers sat idly on the edge of the cove, waiting for the tempest that the wind foretold. Some of the surfers were so still that seagulls landed on the edge of their board. The sun beat down on the car, and the stuffy air from the A/C was at last cooling down. Nathan had lifted the net shade across his window to prevent the sun from sinking its teeth into his albino skin. “Have you ever died before?” he asked his mother Shelly Front. An itch coiled at her chest, and she straightened her posture.

“Even if I could, I wouldn’t make a habit of it,” she said.

“What do you think it’s like?”

“I don’t know.” The little flea inside her stomach buzzed between her loins, as do those of most parents when their child learns that they are not all-powerful. To settle down, she turned the radio on and watched the beachfront downhill. Sunlight stained the glass. There were no clouds to filter it, and it painted the sand with diamonds and sculpted the water with refracted light. Buried in the sand were half-eaten pigeons, and man-of-wars beached onto the shore, tangled among flotsam and dead seaweed. Children and seagulls played with the dead, an unspoken rivalry between them akin to wolves and coyotes. Shelly Front beheld the beachfront from behind soundproofed glass and the only sound was the hum of the news radio. When the traffic got moving again, she suggested that they stop off on the way home for a cup of ice cream. Nathan, twirling his hair in the dim rear of the car, widened his panda eyes, and his imagination had been revived for the remainder of his time in the car. When they stepped into the cramped stall for their food, the monkey hand of fate reached back into his skull, and he fell morbid. Yet he had not lost the supernatural curiosity that orbited his omen. It glowed inside him when they were savouring their ice cream by the window, looking out at the beach, and he asked whether ice cream was really made of ice or cream, to which Shelly Front replied that he should eat his ice cream. Hours into the evening, it surfaced once again during dinner; with a bowl of salad in the centre of the table alongside a meatloaf before him, he enquired whether it was food of this sort that was slowly turning men into monkeys, even twisting himself in his chair to check if he had grown a tail. In response, Shelly Front told him to eat his dinner. Finally, tucking him into bed, he asked whether there was a way to quiet down the stars. This time, acting on the heightened and sleepy imagination, Shelly Front answered that they were waiting to be counted before he falls asleep.

Nathan Front had had the gift of sleep since birth. For his mother Shelly Front, sleep was a sound that was dissonant to whatever key her body and her mind functioned, and she lay on her back in the dark that night with her Saturday seashells plugged into both of her ears in the hope that the sound of waves could humble her faculties to the tender hand of sleep. But her son’s omen would not leave her. It buzzed around her head and the heat of the dark kept her shuffling in her sodden bedsheets. She pictured it so clearly: her son hearing the knock of death at the front door and nudging his gaunt frame through the latch that was chained to the frame, and leaving without remembering to say, Bye mum, I’ll be back for dinner, and she would be too panicked, too depressed, to emerge from her sewing chair and prepare her coffee, and she would perhaps be suffocated in the tears that would open in her heart. Inasmuch as she knew, she could separate herself from the complaints and tantrums of her child, but never from his laughter or his gipsy behaviour, which he claimed had forced him to wear clothes that were far too big for him to make room for his personality; it was a trait he had inherited from his father.

Laurence Front spent the first day after being discharged from the Navy perusing the coastline back and forth when he met Shelly Whittaker bathing in the sunlight, boasting her supple shape and the tender tan that ran along her stomach, and he announced there and then that he would marry her. At the time, he was already registered for the bootcamp at the state police academy, and he divided his day between training at night—which he excelled in thanks to his years in the Navy—and making love with Shelly in the day—the curtains closed in rebellion against the sun. Laurence had the habit of predicting small events around the house, like a piece of cutlery would fall off a table or that a magpie lark would peck at the window he pointed at. Although they came true, Shelly attributed the miracles to perceptive observations rather than prophecy, and she thought it made him clumsy in love. After graduating from the police academy, he would return home decked with his silver badge and his medals on his chest, and he kept the Glock 17A semi-automatic issued to him under his pillowcase at night. He justified this radical and esoteric decision by saying it was his weapon in an ongoing duel with time. “If I’m lucky,” he told his wife once, “then we’ll both make the French decision.” Lying in her bed then, she wondered whether her marriage had been an act of choice or the authority of prophecy.

“He told me he would marry me,” she muttered to herself.

Nathan Front woke up his mother at six o’clock on Sunday morning. She noticed quietly that he didn’t protest their going to Sunday mass as usual. She noted too that his expression resembled a crocodile in the middle of a drought, carrying itself down a barren river gutter, driven only by the hope that a torrent of rain would come soon. After dressing into their Sunday outfits—a polka-dot shirt for Nathan and a white blouse for Shelly—they tossed a handful of chestnuts mixed with possum kibble into the courtyard for the kookaburras.

In the spirit of his expression, the summer heat was dry, and the clouds resembled a herd of elephants in the sky. A dry wind carried iron dust from the west, which gave their driveway a red tone. “There’s elephants in the sky,” said Nathan as he dressed his arms with vetty leaves to protect his skin. “It’s going to be a savannah day.” Shelly’s sallow expression shocked her as they got in the car. She didn’t throb in the stuffy interior as she throttled up the A/C because she was so preoccupied with the heavy notion that her son, with his morbid prediction, could say or do anything, regardless of the presence of God, because not even God can cheat children, she thought. She wondered whether God or death took up more space in a child’s imagination. The car sputtered fumes and started on the road to church, its pigeon-flutter engine quickly humbled by the smooth but powerful falconry of other cars. Or perhaps, Shelly thought on the way to church, the ability to see death was part of the nature of certain children.

When the clergymen ventured around the pews for the first donations, Nathan and her mother took the idle time to light a candle at the votive. Nathan, with the playful humour of a raccoon, ran his finger along the row of metal knobs and lit the candles before them. Shelly kneeled on her left knee and lit one candle in prayer.

“Do you think God will sing me a happy birthday when I see him?” she heard Nathan say through the fractals of her closed eyes.

“Quiet,” she replied. “Show some decorum.” Opening her eyes moments later, she saw Nathan pressing more knobs and lighting more candles, and the flames went from soft sighs to flickering wails, and the more candles were lit, the more feverish their Pentecost became, for the portrait of Mary above them maintained her portrait expression and did not sigh at the sign of worship. One of the clergymen then snuck behind the two and whispered that they should refrain from lighting more candles, quietly panicking from the thought that Nathan’s antics may bring the church roof down upon them mid-prayer. The two returned to their pew and Shelly gave her son a cheese stick to make him docile, while the priest gave a sermon about the smells of the sea. “If it gives off the smell of yellow dahlias, it means you have been chosen by the Lord God,” he said. “You’ve connected to his Wi-Fi network in simple terms.” While the crowd gave a deadpan, obliged laughter, Nathan slumped in his pew, confused as to how death possibly resembled something so fickle and invisible as the internet. When he reached the priest during holy communion, after being blessed, he asked whether dying was as simple as that. “I’m going to die on my birthday, and I want to know if it’s hard like the maths tests at school.” Shelly and the priest both shamed him for the omen that had branded his tongue. The priest went so far as to suggest that his enquiries were the result of mad heresy, for meeting with death violated the laws of the Bible. Shelly did not give him any food back in the pew.

By the end of the procession, the sultry heat beat down from the high beams and no one sat within three feet of the windows, and it was so intense that people rolled up their sleeves to find red marks that stung worse than sea wasps, and the clergymen handed wet limestone pebbles along the pews. Nathan and her mother tailed the priest and the altar servers out of the church and rushed to the car, but the heat had impregnated the car and they felt sweat gather on their leather seats from their thighs. “In this heat, some of our food will have spoiled,” said Shelly before deciding to go to the supermarket. Upon arriving, Nathan perused the aisles ahead of his mother, who calmly filled the cart in the order that she had engraved in her imagination, and he returned with various cans of tuna, beans, and sliced pineapples, each set to expire on his birthday. “I know you like these,” he told her, “so I thought they would keep the blood moving in your heart.” Shelly, at this point vexed by the purgatory of prophecy she had found herself in, prayed only that his moroseness, the dominion of his intuition, would soon be punished by a candlelit birthday cake. In the days of her husband Laurence Front, she could veer his preoccupations towards his ambitions or an unattended practical matter or the most recent challenger for his supremacy of muscle. While Nathan Front lacked this impression of the art of men and honour, instead directing his focused obsession to that of plush animals, his taciturn, calculated panda eyes had garnered the clear lenses for his dreams. His albino skin was so sensitive that it could not bear even the noise of pepper. As such, Shelly struggled to redirect his focus or enter the forests that he resided within, and it caused her heartache that was to keep her up for many nights in the leadup to his birthday. Nonetheless, she bought the various goods that Nathan filled the trolley with. If nothing else, she thought, they were a reminder of how delicious life can be. They rushed home in the sad heat after their shop to get their groceries in the fridge.

When Shelly Front, then pregnant, moved into their adobe house with Laurence, the aroma of Marlboro and the crows of the roosters were so overbearing that they spent the first few nights in the car wrapped in a sleeping bag. “This cannot end well for our son,” Laurence had told her while cramped together in the back seat. Six years later, when Shelly and her son walked in carrying the groceries, the smell was gone. The hallway drew a T-shape in the floorplan; to the right was the kitchen, which differed from those Shelly was familiar with by having a flat electric stove as opposed to the manual gaslit stoves, and she still stared in astonishment at them as she packed the groceries in the fridge; to the left was the dining room, which led out to a small garden through full-size glass doors. On the porch were stacks of wooden crates where the old rooster coup had been left dismantled since the early run-down days. Against the perimeter fence was a cubby that Laurence had built from the wood from some of the crates for Nathan, and together they overlooked the pond in the middle of the garden, where a fat water dragon lived with the attitude of a mangled hermit. Back in the dining room was a small white patch of paint in the roof over the table; above which was the master bedroom, where Shelly kept to her side of the bed and sewed a sparkling shroud, only to then tear it apart and remake it, and where, on March Fridays, she lay with splintery slabs of ice over her eyes and dreamed aloud towards the empty side of her husband’s. Beyond his side was the door to the atrium of the second story, strung asunder with strands of nets and sewing material, household debris, and old tools. Nathan Front’s room was on the opposite end, where he raced to upon arriving home from mass, and where he went on to spend the nights leading up to his birthday facing his solitary omen.

Nathan Front kept to his room in the days leading to his announced death. Over time he had turned it into a small lab for alchemy, and he wrapped himself in life’s fantastic secrets. His desk was decked with magnets and small towns of flasks, which he filled with various solubles and fruit juices. His toys found new use: teddy bears guarded the flasks; a plush octopus kept the magnets separated; flimsy plush dogs protected Nathan from the slimy tricks of death. One Friday, Shelly came home from work to be staggered by the smell of fly spray. When she entered Nathan’s room she found the floor strewn with leapfrogs, which he justified as necessary to keep the demon Beelzebub away.

“You are becoming a gipsy!” Shelly yelled as she left him shut in his room for the night.

His mystic preoccupation made him unpopular among his classmates. On one occasion, after a great deal of bring about your time faster, stay away from us or you’ll be meat, kid, and tripping over his footing, Nathan had to take a week off school after a group of boys fired a cap gun too close to his right eye, the sound needling his pupil with surgical animosity. After the doctor bandaged his eye, the cushion applied was so large that it covered his left eye too, and even after they removed it, the pupils would not dilate in harmony with each other. While the sight troubled Shelly, this vision impediment, Nathan claimed, cultivated his vision with such clairvoyance that he could see with a newfound clarity the secrets of the universe that his absorption in the science of alchemy had veiled from him. He spent the following days sauntering downhill to the beach in the mornings to watch the coastline with his mother, who brought two cigarettes with her to better feel the purity in the wind. While there, as Shelly smoked, Nathan noticed the Filipino cargo ships that always peaked just over the horizon: “It would be nice to see the ocean clearly just once,” he told Shelly whilst kneeling in the sand. At that moment, she looked him in the eyes—one pupil was smaller than the other from the injury, but they still looked like a panda’s—and fell to the sand and drenched it with tears.

And so Nathan Front’s delirium persisted, untamed and unwavering against any suggestion of reality imposed upon him, and he remained isolated in his room, although he no longer engaged in his experiments or alchemy, courtesy of his elevated spiritual vision at the cost of his right eye, and instead declined himself to his bed and moved so little that his mother fretted that his bones would fossilise under the weight of his solitude. As his birthday inched closer, he grew more morose as his mind dried up and, when he was out of bed, would wander the upper story of the house, groping the walls and groaning to the elf king or to a phantom in episodes of demented hysteria: “Thou, cursed muse, grant me bliss, bliss against the dying day! Who has submitted himself before death, to be abandoned by Thy grace?” Shelly, disturbed by this new symptom of his foretelling, was left dumbfounded by her son’s words and hadn’t a clue how to help him, for she had not practiced Shakespeare since high school. There were no partitions in her mind. Gradually, the patched hole in the roof, the dust settling on the porch in the hot sun, the wind raising the blinds and settling in the corners of the rooms like flies—every trivial piece of the house found a way to associate in her intuition with the invisible force of time that threatened her son, and they chewed at her faculty with the energy of a shark shredding chunks of metal. She scavenged for any sense of reason that might dull her state: in the laws of the Bible, in the sound of the curlews and in the maze of her memory, but the patterns she gathered oscillated and rose the tide of gloom in her mind, growing until the wave inflamed her gut and crashed on the eve of his birthday.

The night in question was heavy. Rain beat down upon the roof and rattled the house and dampened their autumn souls and harboured the haunts of frogs under the soil and gathered the worms together in pools. Nathan Front sat by his mother’s side for dinner underneath a scanty light and reserved himself for his fate, which by then covered his eyes as a dark cloud, so much so that no landscape or portrait of reality before him could overpower and bring him in harmony with his senses, and he had an anaesthetised look on his face as though having invested himself, absorbed himself, in the pages of a book; his imagination, at this point bonded with his omen and cursed to tumble in orbit of it, inching ever closer to its horizon, had become impenetrable under the gravity of his solitude. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“You will be fine,” said Shelly. But Nathan cried, and she fondled him over the dinner table: “Oh, my beautiful boy, my little sparrow, my precious special little teacup, if you keep this up you will make me as miserable as you. We don’t want to be sad on the night before your special day, do we? You should eat something. You have an eel’s body; you could slither through a bullseye.” She stroked his hair and untied the myriad knots from Nathan’s fiddling with it and all the while his wintry skin was deathly cold. Shivering, he buried himself in Shelly’s bosom and wept that he did not want to leave his mother and for time to freeze them in the safety and the love of their solitude.

“You will be fine,” she repeated. “Please quit this nonsense and eat,” she added, squeezing him tighter and opening her heart to the sighs of frustration and despair that his induction of his fate had brought on. “You will be fine. You are not your father. Mercy, you are a child! You will be fine, so help me!”

“But I can hear it,” Nathan wept. “I can smell it; Dahlias are coming in from the sea. Help me, mummy!”

By now, hearing this and terrified of the alternative, Shelly became convinced that his imagination, once the source of such innocent happiness and humour, had peeled his brain and driven him mad. He had proven impenetrable to empathy, and while she abhorred any action that could hurt her precious, delicate boy, force was the only option she could think of that remained unattempted. She gripped his loose pyjama sleeve and twisted it to wind a tighter hold of his arm and dragged him upstairs as he wailed, that hurts. Please listen mummy, stop, I don’t want to go to bed! His feet stubbed against the steps once or twice as Shelly lumbered up the steps, tugging him behind. They staggered around the second floor to the front of Nathan’s room, where she stopped.

“I’ve had it with this stupid prediction of yours!” she yelled as tears streamed down her blazing face. “I want you to get a hold of yourself, and you can start by walking into your room of your own free will and going to sleep. When you wake up tomorrow you will come to your senses and stop this buffoonery, this gipsy nonsense, and you will grow up.”

Nathan stood in front of his mother and faced his room for a moment before waddling in, still affected by the burning grip on his arm and unfamiliar with the mechanics of reality. Shelly shut the door behind him. The sound of the latch slipping into the wall polluted the household vibrations and cast a spotlight on the quiet that followed—at times peaceful, at times shameful for its peacefulness, and at times despairing. She stayed before Nathan’s room, aching for any noise to slip beneath the door, but was met with a silence that knifed her throat and slid down to her gut. As the sole audience of this silence, she was overwhelmed and loved the boy opposite the door all the more. Nathan Front was a beautiful sick boy, whom sickness made more beautiful; what was wilting away the bud in his flower created wisdom as glass becomes malleable when it is smelted in flames. Shelly longed to have her boy in her arms and to guide him into the future that his stubborn foresight prevented him from seeing, and so long as he believed his madness, he would never follow. This apprehension was enough to keep her from opening the door, and the rain outside broke the silence and her dreadful chain of thought was enough to bring her downstairs, where she poured two shots of rum and moved a chair beneath the patch in the kitchen roof to stare up at it in reverie. It existed in a bubble from the rest of the house, ignored by Nathan and her son, though with an aura that was unshakable and pinned their hearts here and there, condemning them to an unspoken limbo of solitude.

After drinking the two shots at once, her head was shot upwards as though being struck, and the rum’s smell, upon having been drunk, strengthened as that of a candle after the flame is blown out, and she stared at the patch in the roof, mapping its existence and studying how the single blemish of the whitewash affected the wider infrastructure, as though she were looking in a speaking mirror. It was the result of an accident two years prior, when Nathan, having been awakened by a nightmare, groped into her and Laurence’s room to stay with them until morning. Sleep was still resting over the house, and he had followed various intangible shapes and colours and his memory, filled with sand, to reach their room. Shelly and Laurence slept on two pillows each, Shelly lying on her side with the duna up to her neck, and furrowing downwards as it reached Laurence, who lay on his back, his arms by his side over the duna, which was folded underneath his torso, making him resemble a soldier in sleep, ready to pounce upwards when needed, or conversely, a body at ease in a coffin. Much of his life had been spent at sea and this conscientious habit was sculpted in the tiny bunks below deck and, courtesy of the military’s disenchantment of vigour, was unbreakable on his return home.

From an early age, Nathan Front was sensitive to pressure on his skin, which made his authoritarian imagination all the more visible, panicking at so much as a photograph of a snake, feeling it crawl against his skin and the vibrations of its flickering, parched tongue against him (yet he would remain apathetic towards the sight of a snake in reality; its closer proximity to himself, he felt, diluted its danger). As such, he refused to lie on a bed if his head could not sink into a pillow, and, standing by his father Laurence Front’s side of the bed, began pulling the bottom of his two pillows out from under him, hoping not to wake him up, veering left to right and giving quick tugs to snatch the pillow. When it drew loose, the strength he was pulling with catapulted the loose pillow over his shoulder, and Nathan felt a heavy object slip out of the case.

Nathan Front could only compare the thunderous roar that followed with firecrackers he had seen other kids play with when Laurence’s gun went off as it hit the floor, and the wind escaped his heart and he panted in panic. Laurence’s legs flung up, his learned instinct compelling his spasm, as he rolled out of bed and wrestled Nathan under his body. Shelly, still on the bed, scrambled beneath the blankets, weeping that no harm be done. Meanwhile the bullet wrecked through the floorboards, ricocheted off the marble kitchen tiles, moving like a hornet with a rabid appetite for war, and passed through the cabinets in the lounge room, turning one of Shelly’s butterfly vases to whispering dust. First it woke up the crickets, then the kookaburras, and finally the rest of the neighbourhood; the possums and owls, with a flash of sun in their eyes, fled their turf and abandoned their dens. Laurence Front, fearful for his honourable integrity, grabbed the glock and fled the house, leaving his wedding ring behind on the bedside table. Nathan, then only three years old, never visited his mother’s room before sunrise.

“That son of a bitch,” murmured Shelly Front, still gazing up, her Wednesday mint leaves resting on her forehead, and her mind sailing off in the rhythmic silence. She had not seen her husband since, aside from the shadow he left behind to wander to and fro, from corner to corner, in the dark rooms—a migrant memory that sutured the household together, blinking in the patched roof, the scraps from the chicken coup, and in the panda eyes of her son—and its presence set her stomach ablaze. Her hatred for Laurence made her love Nathan more, the sole inheritor of her affection and purpose. And as she fell asleep on the chair, the thought of him flowed into a dream that she was not to remember upon waking up.

On the morning of Nathan Front’s birthday, her mother Shelly Front woke up from the kookaburras laughing in pensive expectation for their morning kibble with her fingertips touching the glass on the floor, still with a lick of rum inside. After washing up, she called for Nathan while tossing some kibble into the garden and began breakfast preparations, but after finishing her twenty-second pancake, he had not emerged from his room. Her anguish staggered her, so sudden and so intense that she slipped out of sync from her senses, for her cynicism towards time’s opacity was obliterated by the ominous silence upstairs. She ventured up to Nathan’s room, opened the door, found him in bed, and she did not need to touch him or hold him to see he had died. The morning glow did not colour his skin or rub him awake, and his eyes had sunken into his skull to fill the void his soul had left.

“No.”

Shelly Front fell to her knees before the pale body and crawled towards it, veering from side to side on her weak arms, grovelling at the lifelessness of her son’s room; there was no vibration, no heartbeat, a breeze haunting his window, dark aside from the slits of grey light pasted on the wall from the blinds. Her depth perception lengthened, and the room felt like a tunnel repeating itself endlessly, mirrors facing mirrors, until she reached her son. She rose at the edge of his bed, fell over the body, and cried. Panic-stricken, she attempted resuscitation, pumping his chest until she heard muted cracks inside his body and his stomach swelled and shrank now that his ribs were broken.

Why she did not call an ambulance right away she could not say, out of shame and confused anguish. The responder was matter of fact, nonchalant: “The paramedics are on their way. Don’t move the body.”

Waiting for the paramedics, Shelly Front catapulted into a limbo. The threshold between her feverish confusion, her sense of unreality and her despair collapsed, and when she looked in the bathroom mirror, her features seemed distorted on her face. From the bathroom she returned to Nathan’s room, staring at his body and then at his toys one by one, each time her sight paused and the light outside blurred, waxing and waning in focus. Such irrational behaviour usurped her control as she returned to her own room and stood on the balcony outside. She began to sweat, both from the overcast humidity that foretold a torrent of rain, as well as from the shock and anxiety that dictated her faculty, and she went back inside, leaving the door to the balcony open; the outdoor stuffiness and the noise of the sun trailed behind her and turned her brain round, and she vomited on the carpet of the sewing room. Concluding that she needed air, Shelly returned to the balcony and inhaled, then remembering I should clean that mess up; her thoughts staggered on ice, and they came to her incomplete, out of order, indecipherable—a vase overflowing with senses and feelings, sounds and climates, sights and visages, with which she hadn’t a clue what to do—her heart had lost any direction in the solitary anguish, unable to point at any person of affection or object of passion. She wandered downstairs to the kitchen for the spray and paper towels, returned upstairs, and placed a towel over the vomit to soak up. Waiting for them to arrive, time slowed down and she was carried on by her senses and her thoughts.

When the paramedics arrived, they inspected the body, buffed and varnished their tools, performed compressions, whispered to each other, pumped respirators, checked the colour of the veins, looked at each other, and finished up, all the while being careful not to misplace the many toys on his floor. It was painstaking: Nathan was dead.

One rose from the floor and spoke to Shelly, who stood against the doorframe; she paid no mind to what he said, staring at Nathan’s body, the soul and the stories it once carried, until he rested his hand on her shoulder. “If it’s any comfort,” the man said, “he would have died in peace asleep. In the meantime, I think you should have some water and don’t disturb the body.” They spoke softly with scripted experience and went on their way.

The house was silent again. Shelly Front faltered downstairs and downed a glass of water from the sink. A clock impregnated the silence; its deadpan ticking subjugated Shelly to the anguish of every second and every heartbeat, unable to flee into the labyrinth of the future or the compassion of nostalgia, and each tick from the clock and groan from the fridge agitated her knees that still trembled for her to do something when she realised how hungry she was. Like a gleaner the idea lit up with a burning intensity, igniting the furnace of her imagination and smelting her miserable thoughts and the nostalgic waste in her heart to fuel her hunger. She approached the pancakes, still waiting on the kitchen bench, and stuffed several in her mouth, chewing them and dropping several scraps across the floor, before she remembered the various canned goods Nathan had collected in the early days of his omen, each set to expire today; they were stacked in the pantry, draped with a mournful shadow, and she carelessly picked them off the shelf and spread them across the kitchen bench and carved them open with a knife, all the while repeating in tears, “You beastly creature, you beastly creature.” Each lid had the expiration date stamped on it; the numbers separated from their meaning after seeing them repeatedly, and they registered in her mind as a marker of sorts, a point that needed to be reeled from, or else be forgotten and discarded. There were pineapples, sardines, sliced tomatoes, peanut sauce—a city of tin cans. Once they were opened, she ate out of all of them in random order, almost choking on various occasions. Shelly recalled her son gifting her these cans as condolence for his foretold passing, and in the wake of his death, it was the only thing she could do with conviction, with power and thought for herself.

By the end she was still famished and resorted to anything she could to satisfy this unexplainable, supernatural appetite: she ate the candles in the dim front hall, chewed her Saturday seashells and her Wednesday mint leaves; she scraped the paint off of the walls and sucked it off her fingers, licking beneath her nails to not waste any scrap; she then moved outside, dropped onto her knees on the porch, and licked the solar dust off of the floor and sucked the water from the humid air; and finally she crawled down the steps onto the grass, still damp from last night’s rain, and began to eat the dirt in her yard under the grey sky. After chewing three mouthfuls, she lifted her head up and wept, worms and lizards dangling from her mouth, stained with black soil, and she cried for her son. The soil left a harsh aftertaste behind on her tongue and a sediment of peace in her heart. This act of demented catharsis planted the seed of power back inside Shelly Front, crying under the sky as the first drops of Thursday rain began falling, and the rain helped to fertilise her soul and release the bitter parasites of paralysing powerlessness that had been eating away at her previously.

When the neighbourhood heard of Nathan Front’s death and of his mother’s intense hunger pains, they brought various fruits and casseroles out of concern for her life. But Shelly Front lamented that, of all things detestable, no priest would attend his funeral.