Child bed chicken wire cover

The chicken-wire domes are protective covers built over the children’s beds during their years in the house. Made from wire once used to fence a small garden by the backyard well, they hold cloth above the sleeping children and help enforce a life organized around closed eyes. Their purpose is sharply paradoxical: they guard the children not from being seen by the creatures, but from seeing the creatures themselves. As practical equipment and as the setting for Malorie’s most difficult routines, the domes make protection inseparable from the discipline and fear required to maintain it.

Construction and Purpose

The children’s bedroom has one window, sealed behind enough blankets to keep out even the sun at its highest point. Two mattresses sit on opposite sides of the room, each beneath a black dome. Chicken wire supports the cloth, and its old usefulness as garden fencing has been turned toward a more urgent task: creating a covered space in which the children can sleep without opening their eyes to the outside world.

The covers are secured to nails in the wooden floor. When Malorie wakes the children to leave the house, she kneels to loosen the wire before handing them blindfolds. The domes are therefore not simply left over their beds as passive furniture. They must be unfastened and moved when the children are roused, and the departure begins with Malorie managing this barrier as carefully as she checks their blindfolds.

Training and Daily Care

The chicken-wire covers belong to a wider system of learned behavior. Malorie teaches the children to wake with their eyes closed, training them from infancy in the guarded beds. She watches over them with a flyswatter: when a baby opens its eyes, she strikes its arm, then closes its eyes with her fingers; when the baby keeps them shut, she feeds it. The sequence makes the rule bodily and immediate, linking closed eyes with comfort and open eyes with pain.

By six months, the children are sleeping in chicken-wire cribs. At night, Malorie listens to their breathing, assessing their health, nourishment, hygiene, and eyes. The covers thus stand within an intimate routine of monitoring as well as protection. What might appear to be a simple measure against exposure is part of the continual labor of keeping the children alive in a household without ordinary medical support, while Malorie carries the prospect of giving birth without a doctor, medicine, friends, or family.

The domes also mark the cost of making survival habitual. When the children are four, they can tie blindfolds over their eyes with practiced ease and obey Malorie’s urgent instructions without stopping to ask why they must leave. Their competence is useful, but it is not ordinary childhood curiosity or independence. Malorie recognizes that she has trained them through fear so thoroughly that they do not disobey. The covered beds help establish that discipline long before the children can understand the danger it is meant to prevent.

Protection, Confinement, and Risk

The domes belong to a house whose spaces are continually assessed for security. When the housemates discuss where they could shelter if a creature entered, the attic’s heavy bolt seems more dependable than the delicate lock on the cellar door. Elsewhere, survival also depends on carefully controlled movement: a blindfolded trip to the well uses a rope, a marked path, and a housemate listening behind the closed back door in case something goes wrong. Against that background, the children’s covers are one part of a larger material arrangement that narrows exposure but cannot remove danger.

Their protection is also bound up with the bodily vulnerability of caregiving. Malorie’s years of raising the children alone bring close calls and injuries: she falls on the cellar stairs, trips while carrying a bucket from the well, and fears the consequences when a later journey leaves her shoulder badly wounded. With the children depending on her, even an injury is more than pain; it threatens the person responsible for their continued care. The domes cannot shield the household from every hazard, but they express the same constant work of anticipating what a mistake or accident might cost.

Removal and Lasting Significance

When the children are newborns, Malorie later approaches their protected cribs at night with a can, removes the cloth lids, and unhooks the wire lid of the Girl’s crib. In that moment, the familiar protective apparatus is opened as she considers an act that would permanently injure the child’s eyes. The episode turns the domes into more than a defense against the creatures: the same barrier that supports the children’s safety becomes part of a scene in which Malorie confronts how far she might go to preserve it.

At the household’s collapse, the covers remain part of the immediate aftermath of birth and danger. Malorie will rehang the blankets, close the doors, and use a broomstick to search the home for creatures. She will wait six hours, eyes still shut, before opening them and seeing what happened while she was delivering her baby. The domes do not offer an escape from the house’s peril, but their logic persists in these acts of re-covering, closing, and searching: protection depends on controlling sight, and that control demands continual labor.

The covers condense the story’s central contradiction into an ordinary household object. Repurposed from a garden, fixed to the floor, and lifted over children’s beds, they translate a terrifying rule into the practical choreography of sleep, feeding, waking, and departure. They protect the children by restricting what they can see, while the care that sustains them also shapes their fear and obedience. Their significance lies in that double function: the domes keep danger at a distance, but they also make the cost of surviving it visible in the children’s everyday lives.