Somehow, heıd gotten the babyıs head off and was peering down its neck hole. The baby hadnıt been functioning properly of late, waking well before its proper time and squalling in the dark until sunrise. Its head lay on the floor beside him, still chirping feebly, the only light that of the awakening day seeping in the windows. He set the wriggling body down beside the head and removed its diaper. Perhaps there was a button or a shiny gold screw heıd jarred loose when shaking it not long ago that caused the head to fly off as it did. He found only its genitals, oversized and red, lopping side to side with the bicycling of its legs.
      A new light bloomed from the television as he realized it was 6am and time for Swallow and Slurp. This show had placated the child through many such incidents and proved, again, as he propped the head on some throw pillows, just the right diversion to buy him time enough to return the child to within acceptable parameters of form and functionality. For, without its head, when he let go of it, the body bore itself up like some cartoon turkey, waddling about bumping into furniture, pitching and lolling about as if drunk.
      He took the body outside with him so he could smoke. Smoking was no longer allowed inside as it might hurt the child, causing asthma, ear infections, allergies. Dawn had just broken over the tree line illuminating the body a ghastly blue. He sat smoking on the steps, the body clinging to him at times then trying to break away, slapping at him ineffectually, stepping all over his lap with its heels. It was here that he once more examined the belly and found something odd heıd been unable to see inside in the dark. A tiny thread had wormed its way out of the childıs navel. Forgetting, or perhaps ignoring, what his wife and mother had stressed to him about stray threads, he pulled it, kept pulling as it came out yard upon yard, until finally the whole fabric of the child had loosened to the point the limbs were flailing themselves away from the torso. But there was still more thread to come out such that it sickened him not to continue pulling. When he finally came to the threadıs knotted end, which he yanked and yanked until finally it gave with the sound of a popped cork, the whole child fell to pieces, crumbling down the steps in a trembling heap.
      No anxiety like that aroused by accidentally tearing your child to pieces except perhaps chasing said pieces about the yard as they flailed blindly about, bonny legs kicking, hands wrestling, ass wriggling along. Soon, heıd gathered these pieces together and thought he might get needle and thread and set upon refashioning the child after known paradigms as could be found on diaper packages and in photo albums. But before he could, the mother lumbered up from the fields in which she now pastured having grown 90 times her normal size, enjoying the hay and solitude as well the endowments of bulls who took to studding her with a brutality heıd never been able to muster. So prolific a lactationist had she become, her udders dragged on the ground laying a long, continuous furrow in the earth as she came. Many a morning heıd come out with the child to fasten it upon a ripe, squirting udder. The slightest touch to these engorged tits of hers caused a virulent spray in the face of the child which he always held by the foot, its body rigid as an erection, prodding the milk bag until finally the child clasped its mouth around a nipple at which point heıd let go, baby sucking like mad, standing upside down straight as a post.
      The pastures sloped behind her down to the sleep stalls and milking barn where a bull was lowing, taking form as a black stain against the greater purity of green distance. This milking mother was only the most apparent aspect of the mother who, in the process of birthing, had been torn and peeled into various segments comprising an ontological series of mother which had come to include a system of new corridors leading more deeply than ever toward the supposed center of the house.     Inside, Swallow had taken Slurpıs leg into his mouth. The child was delighted. With its cooing and slobbering, as if by remote control, the body parts leapt about in his arms until their movements became too complex to control and they spilled from him onto the floor. Then, from an enormous eye, Slurp sucked a head from void of pupil, working his face around this head like a snake around an ostrich egg—eyes bulging out his temples, his cartilaginous skull conformed oblong to the new bulk inside.
      Cımon, he said, gathering the parts once more, chasing them about the tiny, dark living room, and then placing the head beneath his arm. Down a sloping corridor, the ceilings sagging, walls buckling, he entered his wife. As things grew more and more complicated, the rounded curves, intersections and dead ends soon resolved to a vaulted, cathedral-like chamber in which a single candle burned and a goat stood tethered to a post. There appeared a woman, young, slender, setting a table before the goat. The goatıs erection was ruddy and lurid, floundering all over her back as she placed plates and bowls among candles and empty platters. She peered up from her work just a moment to smile, then, upon feeling the goatıs muzzle working its way under her crimson skirt, positioned herself to where she might grab and work its swollen pizzle with her hand while the goat nibbled upon her labia and clitoris. Grown enormous with pleasure, she pulled herself up and leapt to the table, setting her ass upon a silver serving platter and spreading herself out into a glistening pink rag. She cried, Bring it! Bring it! I want all of it! Back inside me!