Her Endless Urea

The boy dreams in the way most people shoot guns or ride in cars silently on their way to dentist's appointments, a lost gamble look in their eye. He dreams of suffocating a man made entirely of copper. He commits the murder using one of the pillows from his bedroom. He muffles the copper man's last cries outside of his own bedroom, places the pillow onto a silver altar two feet to the left of his mother's door, turns around and knocks at the center of the door four times. "I'm finished, Mom!" He is proud of himself, his cheeks are warm and a trace of sweat is developing above his eyebrows. "Come in," his mother calls from within. Inside the walls are copper, the bedsheets are copper, his mother turning into some sort of statue. She is coated in algae and her tongue wags on the outskirts of her lips. "I'm so thirsty," she whines. She has evacuated her bladder, a wide snake running from her belly-button down into the mattress. He pictures a bedpan two feet below her, a single lily planted in its center, dead or dying from her endless urea. It is warm outside - the laundry will get damp on the line with this sort of humidity. "Jesus," he thinks, "my underwear will be wet." She stares at him. The entire scene is grotesque. He is terrified. He grows up to be a mediocre scientist with one son of his own. His son grows up to be a janitor. Our dreamer eventually hangs himself after his wife leaves him. For now, however, he's just a little boy, dreaming violently.