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several years since I’d nursed but somehow my glands could still produce. At first it’d taken some coaxing, a pinch, a punch, a howl, but eventually they had me gushing. I fed them each one after another, oldest to youngest, one by one.
    Joey came on voracious, always starving. His skin was turning yellow. He blamed me for our trouble finding food. He gripped my left breast like a baseball.
    Tum—awkward and fumbly, just near an age he might have begun to dream of women—he took my nipple in his mouth with his arms crossed over his chest, eyes anywhere but on me.
    The youngest, Johnson, was losing his baby teeth so his was the easiest to handle. His mouth was soft and loose and nuzzled my areola without pain. Sometimes, when the other brothers had run off, he even let me hold him in the parcel of my lap and coo and clasp and hum a song. He’d always been the momma’s boy beyond his brothers, the love-lump I could nudge.
    That night, though, he couldn’t keep me down. He kept hacking my milk across the carpet. His eyes were puffy. His teeth seemed slanted. He batted at my neck with fury in his eyes.
    “Stop it,” I said. “Be good.”
    He bit my nipple and I bled.
    After feeding, we went into the living room and my boys tied me to the sofa. They’d caught Dan on the escape— he hadn’t warned me even with a premonition—he’d slipped into the night . The bonds gripped tight across my forearms, causing flesh to web and redden. The TV went on screeching. Their pupils bulged in crystal puddles. The stinging waves of whir flooded and coursed all through my babies’ eyes. I watched them watch till they were giddy-tired and then they came to sit around me on the floor. They demanded I tell stories of the way things were before.
    As always, I took off on my childhood—how in the mornings behind my father’s shed I’d walk until I couldn’t see anything around me but long grass; how I’d lay down in the grass and look up at the ceiling of the sky and imagine being lifted off into the wide white
flat nothing, my hair fluttering around my head, a mask, and every thought of scratch or ache or shudder washed out of me into air.
    They didn’t want to hear about that.
    I went on about the circus— the time I saw a man remove his head —the zoo— where babies grew in cages —McDonald’s— god, their value meals, what now? —I told them about anything I could think of that had been good once—anything that made me sting.
    “Shut up and talk about TV,” Tum said, slurring, his neck bulged fat with mold.
    So I went on about my programs, before the channels all washed out. I told about our last game shows— men in mud suits, grappling for food —soap operas— stretched to ribbons, the women bright orange and super-sewn —the weather channel— fat with layers, so many minor screens embedded into that one page, so small you couldn’t see —the nightly news— I won’t even say —all the talk shows with people screaming who was whose daddy and eating pills and throwing fists.
    This they liked. This made them rowdy. Tum clenched in fits and pinched my skin. The smaller two were crawling all against me. Joey bit into my wrists. They used their scissors on my hair and poked my stomach and threw glass against the wall. They blindfolded me and made me touch things and try to guess what they were—hot kettle, steak knife, razor, something pudding-soft about which they’d only giggle. With a gag and bag over my head, they spread me on the floor and fed again.
    Through all of this I did my best to remain still. I thought of nothing. I was tired.
    We were tired, I guess I mean.
    Through the next days, locked in the bedroom, I began to try again—to try to wish or want, and yet in want of nothing, as there was nothing I could taste. The space inside the small room we’d once used for a nursery had grown engorged with dirt, the walls and carpet frittered full with raspy holes threaded by tapeworms and aphids,