Madeline was asleep now, but Josie continued to rock her. She looked at her own hand under Maddy’s tiny head and thought of Devesh’s hands. They were large and full of ropy veins, fingers that tapered at the tips, and a ring on his left pointer finger. She closed her eyes and saw his hands run down her belly, the silver of the ring glinting like a tiny explosion. Then her eyes opened. The ring. It was hers, tiny and silver, something she had picked up one day in town, but she had imagined it on his finger. Her heart quickened. She wanted to put Maddy in her crib, but she felt stuck to the chair. Her ring on his finger; so what? But it made her anxious, the idea of her hands that huge. She swallowed hard and looked at her hands. Tiny. Her hands had always been this small; that day under the quilts, with the hazy light streaming through, she had looked at her hands and thought them small. No. She had thought them huge and wished them small, and when they stayed exactly as they were, still pruned from the rainwater, she let them fall beside her thighs and was not angry but frustrated, and sad and something else, something that enabled her to go outside her quilt-bundled self, tiptoe around her body until the fuzzy images that were lurking in the background became clear—someone huge, someone enormous, was lifting her gently onto his lap, over his knee, and then he was spanking her, hard and long and mercilessly.

Now, Josie gasped. That had been the first time she thought those things, the first imagined punishment. From far away, Josie heard Tyler call her name, a hard jarring sound, and she jumped. Madeline awoke and whimpered, and Josie’s breath shortened. Now, she felt the marble in her heart throb. The fantasies had begun then. And after that, they became routine, daydreams in class and hazy nighttime images.

She stood and made her way down the stairs, and the baby began to cry. Tyler called again, and then quickly began to whine.

“Make her stop crying!” he yelled.

“You stop,” she said.

“Stop, stop, stop!” he cried, and banged his fists against his knees.

“Be quiet.”

“Stooooop!”

“Quiet!” she yelled. She held tightly onto Madeline’s torso, and the baby cried louder. Josie could feel her palms begin to sweat, could feel her body expand.

“Stoooop!”

The noise was overpowering. It grew rapidly and tornadoed around her until she felt picked up and shoved forward.

“Stop, stop, stop!” he yelled.

She took a step, and another, and then she was grabbing Tyler, yanking him up by the arm until he was stumbling before her. He cried, she held tightly, and it wasn’t until her other arm, still wrapped around the baby, crackled with the desire to slap him, that she realized what she was doing.