Father goes out into the world and the world squeezes its hands together to crush him. He returns, a carrier. Sickened by his encounter he retreats into the hold of his family. He begins to fade then he begins to pale then he begins to fail. The world reaches into his body and begins to unspool it. Without the strength to resist he is turned inside out by the world’s unstoppable desire for death.

His family kneel around his husk and spread their grief down their faces, across their hands, back into their mouths, mingling the salt of their horror with the sweet of his decay. By ingesting they are commemorating and keeping some small parts of him within them, alive.

In Mother, these small parts begins to grow. She feels Father’s sickness moving, making hollow space within her stomach before moving to her lungs, scraping these clean and raw. Soon her body is expelling its cloying fluid in any way it can. She feels herself folding in, becoming a ball of pre-human. As the life within her kneads the life out of her, she wonders what she is being shaped to become. And as she thinks about this she turns in on herself so tightly that she disappears.

Mother’s ball of dough begins to slowly spread itself, next to Father’s husk. There is warmth within it, movement and swelling. There is proving, but it does not rise. Eventually it begins to stretch out again, into its own slick patch.

The child survives them both and then the child simply survives. She is found by her neighbours, the friends and kin of her Mother and Father. Seeing two gone parents and one here child they condemn her as a witch who has wrenched the life out of her father and mother. They hammer closed the doors of the house and leave her to die within. At some stage she will be forced to consider eating the gone meat of her dead and gone parents.

We are an infestation. The world is the bloated corpse we are creating, ready now for collapse.