I am sitting in my red leather recliner from the 1980’s which is scored with tape and bushes of yellow wool from a sheep that died long ago. On top of me is an afghan blanket which my mother was given for her eighteenth birthday by her boyfriend who seeded my mother with me and then disappeared. I am watching a television that has JVC in the bottom margin of the monitor, and ALF is arguing with Willie about a pastry, and then the TV turns off, and then it turns on, and now ALF is my mother telling me to give back her afghan, that I smell like urine. I feel incredibly moist with perspiration. I tell her that Dad gave it to me -- my step dad -- and she starts moaning, omnidirectional, before it settles overhead, so I look up but see nothing at all except for the stained ceiling tinted with jaundice by the lamp below, but there is also snow. The snow is pulsing black to white to black, and it ebbs and flows, expands and contracts like the snow comes down then goes up, then comes back down, and I feel like I am in a monochromatic lava lamp. My head is phantasmagorically cloyed. I feel the veins pop and sizzle. And I am groaning as a bovine does, and my head rolls further back on my creaking neck so I can feel my tongue in my mouth; it feels cadaverous and tastes feculent, and I feel it roll into my plosive utterances, clog my throat, and my mother is telling me that she has missed me for so long. 

I want to go back to breakfast.

I want to say no, but my voice only inflates my thyroid. The snow beckons me upwards. Something escapes the throat. 

“Wahwoah!” I scream, and I start munching on my afghan as mother is telling me to stop that, and I am suddenly very offended, and my face burns, and I cry, and my mother tells me to quiet down. My head feels pressurized like it will explode, and I only hear high-frequency ringing with an accelerating stifled cadence. I notice the fibers on the afghan are drying my tongue and making it itchy, and Mother is crying, and someone is smacking my butt. I am still in the 1980’s red leather recliner scored with tape and bushes of yellow wool, and I take out some of the wool and begin chewing on it, but it does not taste like cotton candy, more plain, dry, gross, and that makes me cry. My face is wet. Mom says she missed me and that it has been so long since she had last seen me.