 |
About the Author: Robert McVey is a psychotherapist in New York. Visit his website at www.robertmcveytherapy.com. |
| Excerpt
From the Book:
An abused child’s future is like considering an abstract painting, the meaning you make is particular to the way you think. I watched a mother and her year-and-a-half-old son, I’m a friend of another branch of the family. “I’ll hold it, sweetie!” she said to him on Christmas morning, holding the bottle, tipping it back so that he might drink his fill. I noticed that his hands were not trying for the bottle with the vigor I had seen even a month ago at Thanksgiving. His movements now were fitful, his body slumped into itself, the mouth a stuck-open hole as it received its milk straight, held by a strong hand. “He’d like to hold it himself,” I remarked. She looked at me wonderingly. “What child wouldn’t like his mother to hold his bottle?” The baby whimpered. “Oh, are you alright, sweetie?” the mother asked. Her vowels were elongated, her consonants were gluey. By the Christmas tree, the year-and-a-half-old sat staring into space and made its sound with the mother, having gone to a side table for a salted nut, crying and breaking through people to get to him. “He seems very attached to you,” said an appalled guest. “Yes, it’s very flattering,” she said. She’s flattered? We watched the baby lose life. It was possible her son would grow up and be a pro-wrestler, but not with that increasingly translucent skin. Does a network of veins at a baby’s temple increase in visibility as its spirit fades? I know that the mother sleeps with the baby in the bed, and the father parked on the sofa. If it weren’t for those gluey consonants and elongated vowels, I might have attempted a pardon, but no, she wants to entomb her child with herself, infanticide, not with a golf club, ball peen hammer, rug beater, male member, it’s shapeless, moist, enveloping, it’s a mist upon my vitals. I am at risk this Christmas morn. Nor am I alone. A four-year-old visitor lurches in terror to escape from all people, change species, if she can. The father begins to call his son “sweetie,” a nascent quick eunuch bloomed in time-elapsed photography screech. A woman feels she has an incurable food addiction, back of a slice of fruit cake. A young cousin loses his purity at table, craves drugs, wants to talk dirty, direct music videos. The baby’s eyes are now only half-open. It’s emitting a sound that doesn’t rise to the level of whimper. She says “swee,” but doesn’t get to the second syllable. I reach for a knife blindly. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
