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expecting to be welcomed in.
    *   *   *
    They have lived together now, the three of them, for more than a year. The creature sprawls, during the days, in the upholstered chair, beside whatever flicker of fire has been coaxed from the wet logs. When night arrives, the creature hauls itself wordlessly upstairs, clumping on each tread, where it remains in its bedroom (there’s no telling whether it sleeps) until morning comes again, when it resumes its place at the fireside.
    Still, it is their child. What’s left of him. The Whites have covered the parlor walls with every old photograph they have: their son tiny in a snowsuit, grinning among a swirl of windblown white flakes; their son somberly adolescent in a bow tie, posing for the school’s photographer; their son smiling nervously beside the unsuitable girl (the hefty one, sly-eyed and morally slack, who is now the drunken wife of the town butcher) he took to his first dance.
    The Whites burn incense to cover the smell. When spring arrives, they fill the house with lilacs and roses.
    Mr. and Mrs. manage, as best they can, a version of their former days. They joke and reminisce. Mrs. White produces a mutton stew every Friday, although the creature no longer wants, or needs, to eat.
    Usually, it stares blankly at the struggling fire, though every now and then, when some conversation has been broached, when Mother or Father asks if it wouldn’t like another pillow, wonders if it remembers that trip they took, years ago, to that lake in the mountains, it raises what remains of its head, and trains on them its single, opaquely opalescent eyeball, with an expression not so much of anger as confusion. What crime has it committed? Its jailers are kind enough, they make their attempts at offering comfort, but why do they keep it here, what exactly did it do that was so wrong?
    Days pass into nights, and nights into days. Nothing changes, either within the house or outside, where gray skies and the bare branches of trees drop their reflections into the puddles on the road.
    The effort required to continue in this altered world shows, however. Mrs. White, on more than one evening, wonders wistfully over the whereabouts of Tom Barkin, the man she might have married, and the fact that the words “might have married” mean only that she was (as Mr. White points out) one of a dozen girls with whom Tom Barkin flirted shamelessly, seems to strengthen rather than deter her convictions about renounced possibility. Mr. White finally tells her he does not like, has never liked, her habit of whistling as she goes about her duties, but finds afterward that her grudgingly obedient cessation produces a strangled silence worse than the whistling had been. The undercooked bacon is no longer consumed by Mr. White without comment. His infrequent baths no longer produce assurances that there’s something nice about a man’s natural smell. His stories are more often suffered, by Mrs. White, with an undisguised glaze of boredom.
    The creature that sits staring into the smoking and smoldering logs appears to take no notice.
    Mr. and Mrs. White remind themselves: This is still their son. They stand by him, as they must. They have that, at least, by way of virtue. They willed him into being, not once, but twice.
    And so, the fire is kept alive. The stew is prepared every Friday. The occasional visitor is discouraged—the Whites are, they claim, simply too busy to receive, these days. There are moments, though, when Mrs. White imagines how much easier her life would be if Mr. White were to die of his compromised heart, and launch her into the simpler realm of widowhood, where nobody minds about whistling, or how the bacon is cooked; where Mr. White’s sour, sweaty pungency would evaporate; where she would not be asked to feign amusement over the same story, told one more time. There are moments when Mr. White imagines his wife going away with Tom