“Thank you, um, Kate, that’ll do,” Ursula pulled my mother’s sheets up over Harry’s shoulders.

Harry still hadn’t moved but remained poised on his fists, like a bulldog. Only his ribs continued to move, in and out, irregularly. His belly, hairy and drooping, never looked so huge.

“Thank you, Kate,” Ursula repeated. I suppose I really was contemplating the last hairs that had not yet abandoned Harry’s bald patch.

“Get lost, kid,” Harry finally barked.

I was hurt, usually he called me “Sweetie.”

Unable to think, I found myself returning to my own room. My mother was sound asleep in my bed, snoring softly. Appalled, I took back my Raggedy Ann and sock monkey and went to sleep on the sofa. But I couldn’t sleep. Ursula had said, “Eat me.” I’d heard it with my own ears. The priest had said, “Man and woman will become one flesh.” Was my father being fed upon, too, when he was killed? The firemen had found “it” in sixteen-year-old “Peggy’s” mouth.

Perhaps a fruit grows down there, I conjectured. An apple, that in God’s punishment to Adam, every woman and man must still eat. Or a vegetable? I concluded it must be meat. Otherwise, why would the priest have distinctly used the word “flesh”. Which meant it was raw. A sort of meat that probably kept growing back over and over again, like a fingernail. No wonder my mother kept forcing me to eat red meat. She was preparing me for adulthood.

CHAPTER 4

Cecilia stepped around the spray of every over-enthusiastic sprinkler, swinging her Miss America lunch box out in large arcs. I trudged along, my sighs turning into yawns. Well before dawn, the sound of my mother’s heavy urination had warned me to return to the pantry closet. I’d hardly slept. When we got to the bus stop, Cecilia squatted, opened the hatch with the bathing beauties and took out crinkly aluminum paper packages. My mother actually hand washed aluminum paper, we always had to bring it back. She bragged a roll can last ten years. Not that we didn’t have a dishwasher. My mother used it for storing lentils when they were on offer. She said washing dishes was easier by hand. And I suppose it was, since Cecilia and I were always the ones to do it.

As Cecilia undressed the aluminum forms to see what leftovers awaited her, I continued to ponder at what grown men could possibly lodge inside their trousers; and if that wasn’t the reason they permanently wore belts, to keep hands and unwanted mouths outside. I knew “it” was what separated girl from boy, but I didn’t know what “it” frankly was. Until then, I imagined it to be chain links. Unexpectedly, the chain links converted into sausage links. I almost laughed aloud, finding that utterly grotesque. Harry stood in front of a frying pan as they cooked, curling his toes into the floor. He faced Ursula with his dangling specialty. To his great pain, she ate them off, and they in this way became flesh united. But the sausages kept growing and Ursula grew sick of eating them. Maybe one grew per day. A man could not go walking around with a line of sausages trailing out of his trouser leg.