Autism Screening Questionnaire: Abnormal Symbolic or Imaginative Play

1. Does your child flap his hands or other finer flapping? Does he self-stimulate?

In ecstatic moments it is a kind of rememberingthe body is the body. For example, these are armsfor grasping. These hands are forholding and touching the known and unknown.And how remarkable it all is—scintillate the waywonder surges towards the filaments.

2. Does he bang his head?

On the inside, the retort of feeling accumulatesas weight. It is like smoke had risento the cellar and suddenly became thick and resinous.A song heard while submerged in a pool.

3. Does he self-mutilate? Inflict pain or injury?

Huddled close against the thrum of rainfallon our roof and his fingers hookinto my eye-sockets. It is alwaysthis: his fingers seek emptiness to fill, chorusof nails pressed into my flesh thrust into the seamof our borders. My body. His pain. Our pain.

4. Does he toe walk? Possess clumsy body posture?

Foal-sure and big-footed he tumblesacross the laminate. Shakyflicker of sense up the spinal pathways.Synaptic leaps sayingmove or glide. The effort of nervesto shape the body's urgenciesstuttering into what's stuck.

5. Does he arrange toys in rows?

Because design is a prism of the mind.Because placement is in relation to.Because the polyglot of form needs order.Because blue car next to green carnext to red car all along the highway.Because the serpentine of die cast metalrelentlessly gleams. Because formis relentless, relentlessly infinite.

6. Does he smell, bang, lick, or inappropriately use toys?

Unbuffered tang. Metallic with a murmurof salt. An ersatz flavor fevering plastics.Having tasted sugar. Having knownsugar when knowing is a haunt.A shape in the mouth that is not a souffléand not a seed. This palpable fat.This gummy warmth.This tender unknown.

7. Does he focus interest on toy parts such as car wheels?

Every object has a purpose. Every purpose hums its will.Plastic tires in close orbits. Firestones nearly spuninto the eye. As if the urge to become the eyewas the tire's concern.The idea that the thingcould move beyond the membranesof the self to become fully boy. To be sewn intothe boy's mind. And having been possessed,intensely by the thing, upon the thing's cessation, grief.

8. Is he obsessed with objects or topics?

The Amanita genus is his favorite and includes the "death cap."You will know a death cap by its off-colored patches,the remnants of what was once a veil that had surroundedthe mushroom when it was young. We had livedin a place of quiet, surrounded by every manner of fungusand he would stand in the rain until drenched lookingat the same clump of mushrooms. Fairy rings. Polypore shelves.Sleek and concealed little spore bearers hidden under leaves. Lobes of chanterelles. The coral-like hemispheres of morelsthinking in their darkness.

9. Does he spin objects, himself? Is he fascinated with spinning objects?

Pinwheels staked along the sidewalk.Their abiding gyres a mess of colors. He seemsto take them as evidence ofthe refuge. An embrace behind the eyes.A wild ecstasy trammeled by a center. It homes him in.His being wound down as one winds a clock to takeample measure of what is infinitesimallydaunting and thus pulled in by the swirl.

10. Are his interests restricted? (Does he watch the same video over and over?)

In the dark. In the night. In the glow of the day. Audible fuzzof the screen like passing rain. Shuddering spray of TV light.Its pixelated filaments pierce the gloom, splits the gap that veilsin from out. The image makes a testament constantly upheld.

11. Does he have difficulty stopping a repetitive "boring" activity or conversation?

The toy truck's wheels rotate clockwise then counter.In...