mateo's room

Yesterday, there were butterflies, thousands of tiny legs prickling like needles so small they can't break skin. Just slip through the cracks, find the air seeping out from my lungs, bubbling across my lips and out through my pores, steam rising from my open palms, caught beneath the ceiling. When I sleep, I dream shoe prints across my eyelids, probing fingers searching for a thinner piece of skin. He has a nose like a proboscis, curling into itself like an embryo, forehead creased with concentration, face serious, trying to focus on growing ten fingers because that's all that parents think about these days. You hear their voices muffled through fluid like you will through drywall years from now, the same wrinkled syllables leaving their harshest vowels clinging to the carpet fibers. In my dreams, I grow wings. They sprout from the backs of my hands. I feel them fluttering, curtains on breezy mornings, a discarded grocery list caught in the wind. In the winter, we use novels as kindling. I wonder why we spend all year writing so we can burn them when it's cold. My father tells me you have to destroy what you love in order to feel the flame. You look up at me from the chair across the room, tell me I'm so deep, you want to go fishing in my chest. I tell you the water there is still. You forget to listen, reaching toward me with all six of your arms.