She led the rest of them to the machine: the machine full of bones, hollow as the one she stepped on, as hollow as the ensign’s corpse. Her nose itches.
The thing that was not our mother seemed to widen. Her face remained the same, her legs thickened. As she stood from her chair her stomach seemed to suck into her spine.
The too-wide waist of the sweater scraped the fuzzy arms as I walked past the information desk, past the movies, and up the stairs to the silence zone where biographies sleep, and encyclopedias prowl.