His parents burned to death. They didn’t suffocate, smothered between the fumes of the ignited ceiling, and walls, and boiling nylon carpet. They weren’t crushed under a collapsed beam. His parents burned to death.

And maybe it was seeing their forearms stripped of flesh like a cleaned up chicken wing, or maybe it was that the crackling fire sounded as teeth and tongue and saliva smacking around food, or maybe it was the smell of skin and fat and meat cooking in the oven the fire made of his family’s home, but he won’t eat, and he hates to watch or hear us eat. He will only take his food cold and through a straw.

He wakes abruptly from his nightmare on the little red stool, the grain of the table imprinted on his young face. He breathes hard, so I give him his motorcycle to calm him down. He picks it up and rolls it around. He relaxes, I think, but I see a heavy weight under his eyes, something tattooed deeper, more indelibly, than the grain’s imprint.

He’s had these dreams about the Earth being eaten. He says he can hear some colossal thing taking bites out of the other side of the world, like an apple made of stones and waves and people. He says he doesn’t know how many bites it’s taken, but he knows his time to be eaten is coming soon. He says the crunching in his head has gotten so loud it wakes him like the saws used to in Summer.

He says, “I’ll never eat again in my life,” and rides his toy motorcycle along the grain of the table, toward the ever-bending end of the wooden road ahead.