Orin’s Phoenix morning (pp. 46–47)

Orin's recurring nightmare, and the single most literal image of the maternal enclosure in the book. After a suffocation-feeling of not knowing which way is up, the dream delivers Avril's severed head fused face-to-face onto his own, lashed on with the lamb-gut string of his own tennis racquet, "as if the Moms's head was some sort of overtight helmet Orin can't wrestle his way out of." The amputation is "clean and surgically neat," no stump, the head "a large living ball, a globe with a face" — the mother reduced to a face he must look through no matter how he twists. Everything the anthology argues about Avril's surveillance-love is dreamed here from inside the son who fled farthest: her face is not a memory he carries but a mask bound over his own, unremovable, made of the very equipment (the racquet string) the family raised him to master. The one child who cut all contact still wakes with her head strapped to his.