An 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 all familiar comforts in the stillness. A blanket folded back across a wooden chair. A grove outside steadfastly safeguarding a clutch of imperceptibly rustling animals. The hours here are nebulous and shift through spectral colors so slowly that any measure 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. And 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 appearing beyond 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 time, settling into the mind with the persistence of a drug, shades of a figure hiding in a hall closet, head in hands, hostage to infinitely quiet human sounds. Glittering eyes out the window. Another night approaching with such perfect 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 unbearable, the stress of bonds ever increasing until they break with a sudden snap -- the very point at which the eye begins its seizure. From beyond the door, suspended in the dark among hanging articles and occasions, awaiting the final humiliation of a death erection, the rest of the house is 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.