I hear your inner voice, reading the future words I must write. That damned incantation that I read before and just read again, knowing now what it does. The soil it turns and the seed it plants.

I see my story rewind, and start over. I’m in the corner of my old apartment looking down at myself as I stagger and scream. I’m wasted on stage creating distortion. A spark and I’m staring into Caspian’s severed head. The doctor with those walrus teeth. A voice now speaking inside my brain in a language I shouldn’t understand. It’s my son’s secret friend and he’s bigger than anything, than everything, and he’s ancient and wise and he says he’ll take care of us all. And he’s my son’s father, and he’s mine, and we are all his sons and daughters, and his laughter is like breaking glass, and now that we’ve created the space for him to enter he comes.

“Stop!” I’m shouting. Maybe I’ve just begun or have been the whole time Rox began making that blasphemous noise. “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Screaming like a strobe light, crying because I can never compete with the father he has now. His secret friend.

And then I’m looking through my own eyes again, and my ears are ringing, and my face is wet, and my throat is sore, and my son is staring calmly in my general direction, but it’s not my son anymore. I stop screaming. Let silence reclaim the room. Strive for words that will reverse all this – the anti-incantation – and realize I have nothing left to say.

I flattened my hands to the window, pressing my forehead against glass so hot it nearly burns. “I love you, son.”

Rox calmly nodded his head. “I know you do,” he said.

Frost expanded out from the edges of the window until the view of my son was obscured. I staggered back and collapsed in the chair. Then my side of the glass took on the reflected surface of a mirror and I was staring at myself, pale with grey stubble, gaunt with hollowed eyes.

Then I heard Rox calling from the other side of the window, “Dadda! Dadda!” The addled voice of my true son. His hands pounding on the glass. “Me, Dadda. Here! Dadda, here!”

The door opened and I looked to see grandma-Malia step through. I turned back to the mirror and saw a different face reflected on its surface. A woman of frightening beauty. Long, thick hair. Swan neck. Smooth, ivory skin and ruby lips. Furious eyes.

“Dadda, no!” Rox was shouting. “No, Dadda!”

“That’s enough for now,” she said. Rox began screeching when he heard her voice.