She bent towards an object and picked it up from the floor. It was a baby’s bottle, with a fitted rubber nipple on the end and a plastic body filled with milk. Don’t you do that, she said, waving the bottle like a shaking finger. Don’t you do that, you brat, or I’ll kill you.

She thrust the bottle towards something sitting in a chair by the table. All these things materialized, beginning as vague transparent forms that got stronger and stronger until it was difficult to remember that they had not been there all along. When the room first appeared, it had been spotted with blank areas that were now full. The whole thing reminded Jessie of once when she had watched a Polaroid picture slowly come to life.

The thing sitting in the chair in front of Mother was a baby. It was crying softly, the dull, steady cry of something that did not expect to be helped. Blood dripped from the corners of its baby mouth and ran down its chin. It was starving to death, but Jessie sensed, all the same, a hysterical aversion towards the bottle that the mother held, as if it contained something more horrible than even the crippling pangs of hunger. It was an ENEMY, something that could give the baby great pain, and Jessie knew that somehow the bottle was the cause of the bloody cuts in the baby’s lips and cheeks.

Mother held the bottle out in her huge, doughlike hands. Take it! she screamed. Take it, you ungrateful brat, and if you drop it again I’ll shove it down your throat.

As the child wept harder and reached for it Jessie saw something glint in the nipple. A razor blade. She was pulled closer against her will and saw the blade sticking out both sides. Don’t take oh please don’t take it, she thought but he did, because the hunger was too great to refuse with the mother’s milk in front of his eyes. He raised it to his lips.

There, Mother said, when the blades dug cruelly into the sliced and tender flesh. You suck at me like a parasite each and every day and now you’ll pay for it, won’t you. You’ve driven away everything that I love and I won’t stand for it! I won’t!

The child continued to suck at the nipple. Fresh blood ran down its chin and neck.

Get it while you can, Mother taunted, circling the chair in a horrible dizzying pattern. That’s what your father always used to say! She slapped at the end of the bottle and it twisted in the child’s mouth, slicing fresh paths along its gums. The baby screamed and dropped it, and it fell with a thud to the floor, rolling away under the table.