The doctor pressed my tongue with an ice-lolly stick, examined my eyes and ears with a ray of light. He told me to be still and with a fine pointed tool, pulled something yellowish out I thought was dried pus.

“How in hell did banana get in her ear?!” Most eyes squint with anger; Dr. Kreushkin’s opened wide, exposing the upper pink edges of the lower eyelids that have always reminded me of ham.

“Oh, she do anyting, dat child, no’ to eat her food. She’ll make me ol’ b’fore my time.”

My mother shrugged, then readjusted the tissue paper in her cleavage. The beads of sweat on her lip, for some reason, bothered her less. Dr. Kreushkin looked down at me with unconcealed disgust. With a crinkle of the chin, I swallowed my pride. I was not allowed to contradict my mother, which basically meant, to tell the truth.

On our way home, she stopped at Mr. Walter’s garage sale and purchased “Fool’s Stool” for one dollar. Mr. Walter had designed it for his son, Jade, long before he was the local weather forecaster. “FOOL” was written on the seat with tenpenny nails, points up. My mother declared that from now on, until I cleared my plate, I would have to sit on it. She was a persuasive woman, and more often than not I ended up giving in.

Abandoned at the table, I was facing or rather faced by, a stuffed stag’s head, and that, for hours on end. My father had eaten the rest of his forest-roaming body long ago in his bachelor days. The nails poked at my bottom until I lifted up one cheek after the other. Despite his imposing antlers, the stag had wise, benevolent eyes, like the suspended man we saw at Saint Andrew’s on Sunday, whose open sores would save me from my sins.

“This is the body of Christ,” explained our priest, and afterwards offered us some, “and this is the blood of Christ,” which we were not obliged to drink, though my mother grudgingly gave up a nickel or a dime so he would drink it out of his golden chalice instead of us. At our father’s funeral, my sister and I were each given a one inch figurine of the same man to hang around our necks on fine silver chains. I hid mine inside my dress. He was half-naked, and bleeding badly.

I think it is necessary to add that whenever my sister and I fought, my mother would throw her hands into the air and sob, “You own flesh an’ blood! Flesh an’ blood!” She repeated this phrase until, without quite seizing its meaning, the thought of my own sister as red meat made me cry as well. I would hug my sister and let her play with my Mr. Potato Head. The intensive doses of theology and genealogy did not assist my cold-blooded eating of flesh.

One evening, I was facing the stag who not only understood but granted me eternal salvation for not eating a quail that my mother had anointed with butter before baking, then baptized with whisky before setting aflame. In my mind, I called it Saint Quail, to join that space between purgatory and heaven that God reserved for Noah’s faithful pairs. There it would find Lassie and Flipper from the original series, I was sure. Stag Head agreed in silent majesty, upon which Ursula Tatta rang the doorbell and let herself in.