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shreds of clothes that don’t fit me anymore, which the babies nose and trod to make little beds.
    Across the gravel lawn from the sewing room is a shackish building they say was once used as a buttery. What happens in a buttery other than butter? A milkmaid with skirts foaming at her plump neck getting pounded by the assistant gamekeeper? The company uses it for coffee and small food you can buy on your break. From tucked against the window I watch the new boy watch his own feet dig in the gravel. He doesn’t come inside. He stands scratching the ground with a toe, walks from one fence to the other, runs waving through a grist of bees outside the buttery door. I pray they won’t sting but his skin looks easy to bite. His skin looks like a newborn cougar’s pelt. He is dash, with damp curls, a pinstriped suit, a sharkskin belt. I don’t know him more than a face through fogged windows when I sit with my cup waiting to work again, but I have noticed he wears the same pinstripes every day. His face blown perfect like blue glass animals that cost a thousand dollars make my fingers throb to build a new and better than anything heart. His face looks like good work.
    I watch the dash boy dance for minutes on end. He stops when he sees nobody is watching. (He can’t know I am, from the brown window.) Done dancing, he takes off one shoe and hurls and the shoe flies where I can’t see it. Break is done and time to work but I take the long way around the back of the buttery. In the low-grown bride’s-breath hemming the wall lies his shoe. The shoe is, I notice, a creeper. It is purple and furry and, like any creeper, arrow-toed; it’s a fashion you don’t see much anymore. I see it and am glad. It means first I have an excuse for talk, a question to ask him— why did you throw a shoe into flowers? —and second that the boy knows old, good styles. Third it means he is a little trickster maybe. Nobody else in this no-talking place would raise an eyebrow long enough to play a game with shoes. The other workers are dead with their eyes open.
    Last night the wolf pup coughed up his own swallowed teeth. Kept brushing the floor with his snout, as if nervous or hunting, then coughed and coughed and spat the teeth into a little pile, shiny with stomach-juice. I washed the teeth and dried them. Now they sit, a row of yellow three, on the sill above the kitchen sink.
    The creeper sits under my jacket all afternoon. It stinks bright and I hope nobody thinks it is my body. The new boy, one-shoed, is at a table by the wall. He is making, I notice, scanty progress on his red handful of silk and stuffing—keeps lifting his head to look around, opening his mouth to talk. They won’t talk back! But, like me, he tries. He starts to sing. He whispers, chirrs, and hums. He recounts the plot of a sad movie that came out before he was born.
    Necessary? hollers the supervisor. Your loud voice? Is it?
    It’s too quiet in here, says the boy.
    And it might get even quieter, says the supervisor, once I run my thickest strung needle through your lips and pull .
    Here are my questions:
    Why do your eyes remind me of canoes?
    Who bought you that pretty suit that fits you pretty badly?
    What last thing did you think of last night before sleep?
    Mine was black stars lashed to the bottoms of canoes.
    Have you ever stayed alone in your room for more than one day at a time playing nurse with wound?
    In the gravel, after our shift, I hand over the creeper. The boy smiles and tucks it toe-first into his back pocket. I hate it, he says—meaning here , I know, because so do I.
    I miss it bad, he confesses.
    Miss what?
    The stem. The grit. The white.
    Pardon? I say.
    Those mean road. Old terms.
    He is young, so he heard them on the radio. He read them in a book. I say, You miss the road?
    Bad.
    When were you on it?
    In childhood, he says.
    He is just like the babies on shelves behind my house, except his limbs and fins aren’t broken and he can feed himself.