“Gyah, darnit,” Dale says as he closes the grill and splatters, with trademark imprecision, imbricated flecks of grease and mustard across the composite wood panels of the deck’s designated grilling area. It is barely midday, but the scene is set with a certain finality: there is a father tending grill, a son reposed behind him, a mother and daughter and dog at play in the languid stillness of the suburban idyll. All these rituals of domesticity composed as if to affect a single moment of endless bliss.

“Get the dog over here, will ya?” Dale says, but Antwerp does not respond. He looks back at his son, prostrate in front of a harvestman, trying to compel the spindly thing to climb up a crude stick bridge he’d constructed from the ground, over one shoulder, to his back. He looks down at the boy, and that odd, new contraction pinches again at the corners of his eyes.

The sky is full of sun.

Dale settles himself with a few blinks and wipes a hand across his forehead. Replaces sweat with an emulsion of thinner and thicker grease. His son has been obsessive about the freaky little things lately. Constantly cajoling them to climb on top of him, tickle his face and neck with their shivering filament legs. He’d tried to diagnose it at first. Consulted public medical sites and parenting blogs trying to differentiate between the normal and abnormal sorts of fixations for kids at that age. When he was young he was into baseball cards, but that didn’t feel the same.

“Antwerp. Go get the dog, okay?” he says. Louder this time. The boy picks himself up slowly. Looks at his father and nods his serious little face, walks in delicate, opilionine imitation to the front of the house where his mother and kid sister are throwing a wet knot of rope, and the dog is returning it to them as if each successive throw only further proves the age-old naturalistic disconnect between is and ought to be. Mabel kisses her daughter wetly, and Sophie laughs through a pair of lonely bottom teeth.

It is a postcard kind of day. Pollen hangs in the air like particulate light. And the sun is at the angle where the house and lawn seem suspended in a balm of processed honey. The clouds are sparse, and trees shift almost imperceptibly beneath their foliage as if to reject the advances of a late noon breeze.

Everything is yellow. A vulture mutes atop a tree.

The father toes a frosted petal of fat and inhales the fragrance of high-quality ground chuck. He leans around the corner of the house and watches as Antwerp stretches up to open the gate, his body held in distended contrapposto as he calls for the mutt in a voice so sweet it aches. Dale looks down at six misshapen lumps of meat and tells himself he loves his boy. And wants for him to want. To roar and claim and grab with hands whatever it is he sees and wants to seize. And he tells himself that he will always love his boy. Even if he does not yet want. Does not yet seize.

Antwerp will disappear soon, but for now he holds the gate open with one arm and stands aside and the dog trots into the backyard, still carrying the rope as it skitters up the deck steps, only setting it down to lick up the meaty effluvia of the flippant grill master and his yawning Kamado. And as he walks back to where the harvestman has remained, perched with six legs on a fallen leaf, the boy touches the nose of the dog with the knuckles of one hand, and for a moment Dale can reach him. He bends down and tousles his sun-crimped curls and imparts upon his head a faint, immiscible sheen.

Everything is yellow. All of it below the sun.

In the front yard Mabel shifts Sophie in her arms and stands hipshot: mother bent but upright, daughter cantilevered into beautiful, sun-drunk space. An old man stops at the edge of the yard and smiles out at them from behind a sagging clay face.

“How long are you here?” he asks, nodding as he says it, speaking so slowly that the mother almost asks if he can lift his arms above his head.

“Just the week this time. But we should find a night for dinner. It’s been too long since we’ve caught up.” At this, he nods slowly, and starts to tell her about all that’s happened while they were away. Lanie down the street has a grandson now. Bobby, three houses over, is trying to incubate a speckled egg.

“But what have you been up to?”

“Nothing too exciting,” she says, but she can not help but think about the offer from the university. Feel the sense of opposing temporalities trapping her between what goes on and what remains. She swallows thickly and smiles through what she’d always considered the most trite of her neuroses. The idea that if she was truly secure in her motherhood, she would not feel so endlessly stricken by the implication that any aspect of it might be sacrificed to pursue a life that was fulfilling independent of her children. The persistent worming thought that the mere presence of a life outside her children was somehow at their expense. Antwerp’s expense, really. Even time spent with Sophie took on a note of misallocation when held up to the light of Antwerp’s implicit scarcity.

Mabel coughs and apologizes and says something offhandedly about allergies. The old man nods, says it’s the price you pay for a day like this, and then they are quiet for a time and in the silence Mabel recedes a bit further within herself. The old man points a crooked finger at the tree line. He trembles.

And maybe it will be easier once Antwerp is gone, but there is no relief in the thought. Only the familiar preemption of loss, of having had and failed to hold. She can’t know that it will be so soon, but she suspects her future will one day present to her an actualization of these counterposed abstractions: a solace she will try endlessly to reject; a grief all the more terrible for its potential to be let go. The old man flutters his eyes and feels his face with both his hands. He hesitates but then remembers. He takes her hand and asks if Sophie knows her ABCs.

“Ba, ba, ba,” she replies, opening and closing her youth-swollen palms. Delighting man and mother alike with her incomplete awareness. She spits up upon her chest and babbles wordlessly about the metastasis of youth.

But the old man just keeps smiling and says that he and Ruth will be free on Tuesday. Mabel promises to pass the info on to the boys and asks if they'd received the paintings Antwerp had made with the watercolor set Ruth sent last summer. The old man’s eyes are rheumy. He blinks before and after every word.

He tells her they had. Ruth had especially liked the paintings of the sunsets. And Mabel does not mention that the only paintings Antwerp had ever composed were entomological close- ups, usually traced from ESA brochures before being liberally reimagined with colors pulled from Dale’s coffee table book on the naturalezas muertas of Rufino Tamayo. She tilts her head and squeezes his hand and tells the old man how kind he and his wife have been, and the old man seems honestly happy as he drawls on for a bit about some peppers in his garden he’d have brought along if he’d known they were in town. He rubs his thumb along her phalanx, and they stand there intermingled as he tells her again that it really is a beautiful day.

In the backyard, Antwerp is once again prostrate. Above him, the bird sorts its feathers, and uric stockings accrete upon its legs. But Antwerp does not look up. He is holding his breath and sculpting the space around the harvestman so it cannot move but toward his face. The bird thermoregulates and turns to face a dead horizon. The harvestman takes a step. Antwerp stares and does not breathe.

It is a hot day, and because of this, we are all inside it, bloating. The sun is fat and heavy. A father grills, and a mother talks politely. A dog sniffs at a bead of fat and mustard, and Antwerp is still atop his belly. He presses gently upon the harvestman with his fingers and moves for neither joy nor agony.

Dale turns his back to the grill and takes a few beats just to look at the boy, with his mother’s white-gold hair and his father’s crooked feet. The burgers are ready, but he does not tell the boy to retrieve his mother and sister because he wants this day, for Antwerp, to be one more in which he is at peace. Because no matter what he sometimes thinks, he cannot help but love his boy. Even when his head flashes so brightly in light that it seems to stab back at him; to reflect at Dale some ghostly accusation of all the fatherings not passed on. All the vigor the boy so blithely did not receive.

And for the first time, he is not scared by this realization. As he stands with one leg slightly forward and drops his arms from across his chest and breathes in every detail so deeply he can taste it. That familiar warmth on the back of his tongue. The astringent tug of jimson weed and dandelion. He looks away from his boy, and the rest of it is so real and upon him that for a moment he is empty of everything but the reality of this place--in space, in time, in whatever medium or metric by which an honest man can consider anything to be. There is a sun, a sky, a dog’s tongue wet against his hand, the sputtering chuckle of meat over open flame. There is so much more than any one of us could hope to describe. And all of it just is. On and on and on until it isn’t.

And then Antwerp asks the harvestman if the world is really yellow. Or if it is all some silly game of men in the eyes of a living pill with such delicately broken legs.

The house and yard and day are yellow. Dale cries, and Mabel waves her hand, and Sophie grabs at Mabel’s cheeks. The sky too, and all below it, and the old man wobbles as he walks away. The vulture holds horaltic pose. The harvestman is silent, and Antwerp starts to seize.