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“Do you think they’ll do?” he asked.

My grandmother snatched them from his hands and put one in the largest pot. For a few seconds Dad just stood there, his head down and his hands in the air as if he was still holding some invisible towels.

“Come on, get over here,” he said to me. “Hold her leg.”

I hugged my sister’s bent knee, hiding my head behind it. I didn’t dare look. My sister screamed again.

Then Dad looked at the kitchen window. He rubbed the palms of his hands against his trousers, as if to dry them.

“Son, have you left the other—?”

Before he finished the question he ran out into the hall. My sister screamed once more, though this time she didn’t even open her mouth. The cry escaped through her teeth. She splattered me with her spit.

“Breathe,” said my mother. She was still clasping my sister’s clenched fist. She moved her mouth to the ear that stuck out from behind the mask and began to breathe in a particular way, like when she’d been on the bike for a long time. “Breathe, girl . . . Don’t worry . . . just breathe, like me.”

My sister tried to imitate her. Her knee slipped out of my arms. I had to move away to avoid a blow to the face. She kicked out, hitting the table with her heel. When she managed to shake off my brother, who stepped back, her leg slipping his grasp, she lifted her waist until the top of her belly was facing more toward the wall than the ceiling, and she let it fall onto the table. Her tailbone hit the tabletop like a hammer. A sticky sound escaped from between her legs.

“I can’t breathe with this mask on!” She screamed the words through her teeth, as if the pain and rage were phlegm stuck in her throat that she could spit out. “Get this damn thing off me!”

She continued to writhe, kicking her legs. My brother and I tried to grab hold of them and regain control. I noticed that the sheet was soaking. And slippery. A bitter smell made me retch. My mother, who’d wrapped her whole body around the fist, opened her mouth to cry out when she saw my sister lifting her free hand to the mask. She managed to snag her prosthetic nose.

My father grabbed her wrist. She stretched her fingers out as far as they would go, trying to reach the mask, until Dad’s knuckles went white and my sister’s fingers stopped moving. She screamed again. This time it was a high-pitched scream that hurt my ears. My father dropped my sister’s exhausted hand as if it was something foul. Bones banged against the table.

“Stop being stupid. Your mother gave birth here.” He glanced at me. “And she didn’t make such a fuss. You’re not a little girl anymore. At your age your mother already had two children.”

“I was even younger,” she elaborated. “Twenty-six.”

My sister’s legs relaxed. When she bent them we were able to grab hold of them again. My father stood there and looked her up and down. From feet to head. He smiled. “Does it hurt?”

My brother let out a guttural sound, one of his laughs that sounded like a donkey noise. Dad looked at him, not noticing the slow movement of her arm as my sister lifted it again.

This time she was able to grasp the entire mask. She closed her hand on it. The scrape of the prosthetic material alerted my father. Knowing there wasn’t time to stop her from taking it off, he leapt on me, held my face to his belly so I couldn’t see anything, and forced me to walk backward as he pushed me down the hall. He opened the door to my room and sat me on the bottom bunk.

“You’ve been lucky,” he said to me. Then he turned his head toward the hall that led to the living room and shouted at my sister, “If you want the first thing that your child sees to be your deformed face, then go ahead!” He looked back at me and put his thumbs over my eyes. “But I’ll decide what my son sees.”

When my eyelids closed, a spot of light danced in the darkness inside my head.

Lying facedown on the living room floor, I rolled over so I could reach the patch of sun with my hand. A handful of rays that came in through a crack in the ceiling formed a circle of light no bigger than a coin. Every day it traveled along the floor of the main room from one wall to the other.

“Where does this light come from?” I closed my fingers and grabbed the empty air.

“Ask your father,” Mom replied.

She was holding the newborn in one arm, washing it with the water she’d filled the kitchen sink with. My sister had been shut away in her room for a while, after Mom came out carrying the sewing box.

By the table, my brother was putting the dirty sheet and towels in a pile. Frowning, his tongue poking out, he attempted to line up the corners of one of them. In his hands, aligning the opposite edges of a towel seemed an impossible task. He let out a long groan before throwing it on the floor. He folded his arms.

I opened and closed my hand, caressing the band of orange light, like a jet of water that didn’t make you wet. My skin seemed even whiter and more translucent than it normally did. I could make out all the blue and purple lines of my veins.

“What’s the sun made of?”

I heard my mother take a deep breath in the kitchen. When she did so, the nostril worst affected by the fire made a strange whistling sound. Then she turned around and looked at me. “This is your nephew,” she said.

The baby was crying in her arms. The palm of my hand hadn’t even warmed up before the fading ray, a sliver of dust, disappeared. Like a butterfly in the fingers of an unpracticed collector. Pushing myself up with my arms as if I was doing a push-up, I stood and went over to my mother. She smiled, her burned cheek tugging the flesh and making her left eye close, as it always did. She stretched out her arms to hold the baby near me.

“I won’t drop him, will I?”

Mom looked at my brother, who was watching us from the table. “I don’t think so,” she replied. “Hold out your arms.”

I did. The baby, wrapped in a dry towel, was tightening and relaxing his lips. His tiny nostrils expanded and contracted, for the first time breathing in the air of the basement that would be his world. He had his eyes closed, very tightly. Under him, my arms trembled. “I won’t drop him, will I?” I repeated.

Mom supported the baby with one arm and with the other she made me bend my elbow, forming a right angle.

I held myself in that position as still as a stick insect mimicking a twig. My mother expertly maneuvered the baby until he was resting on the palms of my hands. She edged him toward the quivering cradle that was formed by my arms. “I don’t want to drop him,” I insisted.

For a moment my mother stopped. Hesitated. Then she carried on. My brother grunted. The dishes stacked in the kitchen shook every time he
took a step. He positioned himself behind me. I felt the heat given off by his body on my back. He pushed the baby back toward my mother.

To stop me from taking him.

The dishes vibrated again as he stomped back to the table, picked up the pile of towels, and disappeared down the hall. Mom’s nose whistled.

The morning after the birth, I opened my eyes earlier than usual. I knew because all I could hear was my brother snoring in the top bunk, when normally I’d be woken up by the sound of my mother making breakfast in the kitchen. I lay awake in the dark. Something scratched the walls, on the other side. There were rats in the basement.

Between two of my brother’s snores, I heard the baby whimper in the distance.

Silently I opened our bedroom door. Dad didn’t like us to go around the basement as we pleased. I stuck my head out into the hall and looked toward the living room. The patch of light was there, shining on the floor, much farther to the right than I normally saw it. It must’ve been really early.

The baby whimpered at the other end of the hall.

Dad had put the crib in the room shared by my grandmother and sister. I waited for one of them to wake up and help the baby with whatever was upsetting him, but nothing happened. The child whimpered again.

I went into the room and approached the crib. I remembered the stack of wood that’d appeared in the basement one day and how Dad, with his box of tools, had turned it into the structure that the little boy now lay in. His eyes were open. He whimpered again. My grandmother let out a single snore. I looked over to the other bed, and in the darkness I could make out the white contour of my sister’s mask, which could’ve been on her face or lost among the sheets. My grandmother soon recovered the normal rhythm of her breathing. I bent over the baby and rocked him with a hand on his little tummy, and he closed his eyes.

I thought about it for a few seconds and then picked him up. I held him against my chest, his head resting near my elbow, like Mom had shown me. I walked out and took him to the dining room. I sat on the floor, near the patch of light, crossing my legs and feeling the baby breathe in my arms. I moved him into the pale yellow beam of light. It made his face glow.

“This is the sun,” I told him.

We stayed there for a few minutes.

Until my sister woke up and began to scream.

3

“No one’s stolen the child from you,” my father said when we all sat down to eat breakfast.

My sister sniffed under the mask, which was fixed in a diagonal, indifferent stare at the ground. The eggs my mother was making for breakfast frizzled as she cracked them into the hot oil. At the time I thought they suffered when they were burned, like we do. And they screamed.

“I took the baby this morning,” I said. “I woke up early and wanted to show him—” I found the circle of light on the table, but didn’t finish the sentence.

“Since when are you allowed to come out of your room so early?” my father cut in. “Do you know what a scare you gave your mother and grandmother with your sister screaming?” Dad was pointing a finger at me. “She thought someone had stolen the child.”

I kept quiet, ashamed. My brother tried to hold in his laughter, but it heehawed out through his nose.

The frying pan banged against the kitchen sink. My mother appeared with a plate full of fried eggs. She always said they had to stay in the pan until a black line surrounded the white. That was why there was a burning smell. With her free hand she straightened the tablecloth. As she maneuvered, some hot oil dripped from the plate and fell on her fingers, beside old scars. I peered at the seven bright orange yolks.

“I wasn’t screaming because of that,” said my sister. “Who would steal him from me?”

“The Cricket Man!” I replied.

“Be quiet,” my father said.

“Who would steal him from me?” she repeated. Then she took a deep breath, and her nose made a bubbling sound. “The One Up There?”

My sister looked at Dad.

“I screamed because I can’t wake up,” she added.

The baby cried in the bedroom.

“You see?” she continued, keeping her plastic mask pointing down to the floor. “He’s still here. I can’t wake up.”

My brother’s chair shot out from under him when, without warning, he stood up and began to make his way around the table toward my sister. His stomps made little concentric waves in my cup of milk. My father held out an arm to block his path, a waist-high barrier.

“Leave it,” he said. My brother grunted. “What did you mean by that?” he asked my sister.

She didn’t respond, just sniffed. My father’s hand shot from the table to her artificial face. He forced her to look up, grabbing her by the chin. My sister looked at me first. I could see her eyes behind the orthopedic material.

“This is a nightmare,” she said.

My grandmother bowed her head. She slid her hand along the table until it rested on my mother’s. She squeezed.

“You should have thought it through better,” my father said. With a jerk he made my sister look toward the hall. “Whether you like it or not, that thing that’s crying is your son.”

My sister swallowed. The swollen veins on each side of her neck made it seem thicker. She stayed in that position until my father loosened his grip, and she let her head fall. I didn’t think she would say anything else, but then she replied: “Only mine?”

“That’s enough,” Grandma interrupted.

The hand that Dad had sent flying toward my sister again stopped in midair.

“Join hands.”

My grandmother held hers out, one on each side. Mom took her right hand, my sister her left. The rest of us did the same. When we’d formed the circle, Grandma, as she always did, gave thanks.

“We thank the One Up There for allowing us to eat each day.”

She kissed the crucifix on the rosary she wore round her neck.

Mom cleared the dishes after breakfast. She tipped one of them into the trash so that a whole egg slid off it. When she took up position by the kitchen sink, I went over to her.

“If you didn’t break them”—I pointed at the box of eggs that was still open on the countertop—“could a chick hatch from one of them?”

Mom lowered her gaze, looking for mine.

“A chick?”

She smiled from above, her left eye closing against her will. I hugged her waist, resting my cheek on her belly.

Dad laughed when he heard my question. He was the only one left sitting at the table. He was reading and passing the key that hung from his neck between his fingers. He put down his book, stood up, took an egg from the carton, and went down on one knee. He held the egg between his face and mine with three fingers.

“Let go of your mother.” He pulled me away. Then he lifted one of my hands and made me reach out. “Let’s see what’s inside.”

Dad laid the egg in my palm and closed my fingers around it. I was certain I was going to feel the chick’s heart beating through the shell. That a crack would open and lots of yellow feathers would appear between my fingers. My father closed his hand around mine. He began to apply pressure. I tried to pull away, but he kept squeezing. I couldn’t stop it. The pressure was too much, and the egg cracked open. The sticky liquid seeped out between my fingers and Dad’s. He shook it off his hand, splashing me in the face.

“You don’t want to bring anyone else into this house,” he said. “And anyway, nothing can hatch from the eggs we eat. They’re not fertilized.”

He disappeared down the hall, dragging his brown slippers along the floor.