The first time you’d been introduced to her parents, the whole ordeal went terribly. The coffee was spilt, the moussaka was splattered, and at least two-thirds of the kitchen side had been destroyed in the altercation. As with everything, it starts off innocently. Perhaps a dusting of nerves around the tummy as you walk up to the door. Your mind inventing incredible amalgamations of the mother and father, going as far to convince you that they are in fact devil-spawn, with eighteen claws a hand, hearts of hot tar, and flesh made from the souls of dead babies. They feed off discomfort straight through the mouth, like a flesh hoover.

The father extends a hand, accompanied with a cordial, “Hey there.” But you peel away the artifice, letter by letter, your quick mind discovering the true language of this steaming beast: I will invert your face if you but lay a hand on her. You chuckle. He chuckles. Eye contact is not broken and now you freewheel, carnaged by a lone question in your mind: this eye contact, shall I break it? To break it now! How submissive, how timid, how utterly devoid of confidence. He wants a son in law that is a testosterone river, not a spitting spring of estrogenic weakness. To hold it now! No, such a choice would be a vain attack at the lion on the throne. Preserve his illusion of dominance.

You break eye contact and look at his shirt pocket, where you notice that he has a small bird pin. Upside down it hangs. Dead. A warning from those who have ventured this far and failed. “Nice bird pin,” you crack. He hasn’t blinked in the last five minutes, somehow he converted his eyes into pneumatic drills. You won’t leave this house alive, he tells you, telepathically.

The mother stands near the back and offers a lifeline with her warm smile and her eyes squeezed into little sweet lemons. She intercepts you in a trajectory she calculated from the minute you opened the door, her two arms sealing around you. Ah, a hug. The mother’s game is a long one and if not by the end of the night, or by matrimony, one day she will disembowel you right down to the last villi. But for this moment you bask in the reprieve she offers from the jaws of the father.

“Look at you! So nice to meet you.”

The Greek’s invented the concept of a siren, a creature with a song that threads through both ears like fishing line and pulls your every cortex right into their embrace. They use charm and lust, perhaps telling you things like, my what strong rowing arms you have. Or, you could certainly slice at least three loaves of bread without spilling a crumb or dirtying your trousers. Many a sailor was lost to the charms of these sea creatures, so the stories go. A common hypothesis is that the mother is an evolution of the siren species, their aquatic abilities displaced with further progression on the language front. She speaks to you thusly:

“So, where are you from?” You start to reply, but some noise, perhaps a smoke alarm in reverse, cracks the air for a moment like a brief audio apparition. Has she cast a spell on you? But to your horror you realize that the source of the squeak was your throat. Your mind tumbles as you try to recall your age, your grade, you stumble upon the thought that perhaps you hadn’t been certified to go through puberty by your doctor. Certification to go through puberty from a doctor? Why did my voice crack? Why would my throat betray me? But, once you calm the mind storm you remember: you’re a veteran in the field of unwarranted expulsions of the mouth. You cough a few times to indicate to everyone that, no, something was in my throat, maybe a little phlegm.

Indeed, you are a master of camouflage.

“What do you do for a living?” You feel as if his entire chest has been opened by a giant pair of pliers. This is it, you dwell upon the this feeling that squiggles around your every neuron – this must be death. The words echo like a bell of torment erected by a sadistic monk right in the centre of your cranium: Ding! What do you do for a living? Dong! Oh, your between jobs? Ding! What’s your average annual income? Dong! Isn’t that a little low? Ding! You look down and your legs are gone, replaced by a space where no space had been before.

“No!” You try to yell out, but it is too late, the void will take all of you this time and the rest of you falls and is swallowed into the empty space.

The father looks to the mother. The mother looks to the father. Two screaming red lasers connect their pupils and they begin to chant. Their daughter walks between them and is transformed into a small baby raven which flutters up to the shoulder of the mother and perches. It sends a caw at the spot of air that was you. The stovetop and the flower wallpaper become a rubber and bend around an ovular object where no ovular object had been before. Tied, laser to laser, raven to shoulder, the party waltz into the portal and disappear.

Light! It feels like you swam out of your own eye sockets, covering the span of eternity from the back of your brain to those to little peek holes in your head. Sensation returns and it feels all soft and pliable around you. You open your eyes and see a standard living room, you are on a standard double sofa.

“Your turn honey,” bellows the father. He is standing by a canvas, littered with – what you can only imagine – are the scribblings of a satan themselves. A cat mewing at a pillow, only the head of a girl in suspended animation, some sick metamorphosis of a chair clearly designed for torture. They pass the marker and the mother now stands there ready to begin a lecture. A nod to her daughter and an tiny, plastic hourglass is turned.

Since the resurfacing from your own face, not one person acknowledged your return. You start to test this reality, exploring the parts where the sofa cushion meets the frame, seeking holes or mishaps to break through. But the sound of a concrete deluge, a waterfall made of vintage china cups rattles you. The entire structural interface of your auditory system is being brought down by an hourglass no larger than a kazoo. Each grain cuts you.

And now the mother, in some disposition of stances between a surrealist painter and a hyena tracking your throat, is looking at you. She moves her arm, her hand, the black marker in her hand, with a surgeons precision towards the canvas.

The father now turns towards you, “Well, I was reading this article the other day.” The tip of the marker makes contact with the canvas like a lunar ship met a tiny pebble.

“It was said that those who played board games were ten times more likely not to develop any terminal illnesses later in life.” The birth of one black line. Such an innocent stroke but you are chilled.

“But the interesting part was the end of the article. They’d done a whole array of cross-correlations between different board games and ailments that certain people developed.” You forgot to breath and you try to start it up again. It only comes in little pricks of air. The hourglass continues to scream into your lugholes.

On the canvas is now a perfect reproduction of your face.

The mother stops and smiles. The hourglass still has half its sand to go.

“A slice of lemon loaf? I make simply the best lemon loaf.” she says. There was no plate of lemon loaf slices on the coffeee table before. It is now completely sunk in lemon loaf. You grab a slice.

“Most of the board games had a significant correlation – the participants lived at least ten years longer. But there was one anomally that the researchers said they hadn’t been able to explain. One negative correlation.”

The mother gets back to drawing, still never once having looked at the white void she is submitting to her dark scars. She attends to your face and begins drawing something protruding from the top right and the lower left.

“And do you know what game it was?” The father, the daughter, the mother, they bear six eyes upon you. You feel cognitively digested. “I bet you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Was it poke – “

“Pictionary.” The screams from the hourglass cease. The mother stands back and admires her artwork. And your throat, it swells shut. You look down at your hand, the lemon loaf. The father looks to at you. The mother looks at your. Their daughter is a salamader. The eyes of your tormentors become deep holes, the ones that are black and sit at the centres of galaxies. Holes that eat. The fireplace is pulled into a mess of brick, and with it the carpet and a hundred lemon loaves are pulled inside the holes. You feel an odd sense of familiarity as your arms stretch like warm fudge and the holes, devour you.

You are standing by the front door, looking into a frame with a mother, a father, and a daughter. There are words, of light tone and praise, coming forth from their mouth holes, but there’s nothing to hear. They smile and wave. You wave and smile. Down the steps you walk back to the road. A raven is there in the middle of it, methodically tearing apart some flat roadkill.