“That one’s just a baby!” Tommy Tatta imitated me.

“It doesn’t really matter, Kate. Mommy says we’re having them for dinner on Sunday.”

Tommy let out a violent, “Ugh! Better not be with prunes!”

The trap splashed back into the canal, the brownish water lifting the crabs just enough to give them hope before they were plunged to the murky bottom again.

Tommy, tired of swimming, knocked on the screen of our patio. He didn’t know that if it loosened, he would be subject to the medieval kind of punishment one still found within my mother’s realm.

“You aren’t allowed to go in anyway when you’re wet.”

“I gotta! Tell your mom to open up.”

“Just go behind a tree. Don’t make a big deal about it,” I advised him for his own sake as well as mine.

“I don’t want everyone to see.”

“See what?” I pried.

“My Oscar Meyer weenie.”

I thought his answer oddly corresponded to my absurdest whims and puzzled over it, with ketchup, mustard and relish. I was more convinced than ever that whatever it was, it was edible. For some unknown reason, I began to resent him. Maybe it was the hint of arrogance in his words, “My Oscar Meyer weenie,” insinuating whatever he had, I did not.

Timmy and Cecilia bent down under the dock to discern spitting barnacles and hermit crabs. The tide was high and they waved their fingertips around in figures of eight. There Tommy was standing, his back to me, with his bathing suit bottom still on, yet a long yellow arch of urine swayed left and right as though he were watering flowers with a garden hose.

“Where are you, Kate?” I should have known I could count on my sister to jeopardize my position.

Tommy turned slightly, and I saw he was definitely holding something in his hand; it was a cross between a gigantic earthworm and a small bratwurst. It had a tiny mouth and no eyes whatsoever.

“Kate?!” she called again with such insistence, as though my seeing whatever crustacean she had found were a matter of life or death.

The underdeveloped creature wriggled in dissent before Tommy hid it. I saw it thrash to the left and right. It was the embryo of a fire-spitting dragon. Just as a grape-sized egg yields forth a crocodile, it, too, would grow up into something horrendous.

A leech suckled my monthly blood until it grew teeth with which it began to gnaw a tunnel inside me. It grew scales, claws and a single horn, tools it used to scrape its way further into my flesh.

I read to Stag Head, “That is why a man will leave his father and his mother and he must cleave to his wife and they must become one flesh …” “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing, in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband.”

So I would hunger for my husband’s flesh, and he would crave for mine. I closed the Bible. Conspiracy was in the air, I could smell it like the unseen smoke of a distant barbecue. Parents hid the gruesome facts of life from their children. No wonder they always had to be alone to converse freely.