Удушье (Choke)

big woven thing. You know. A basket thing.

Denny says, can he come live with me?

'We're talking plan Z here,' Denny says. 'I'm only asking you as a last resort.'

Because he doesn't want to bug me or because he's not nuts about living with me, I don't ask.

You can smell corn chips on Denny's breath. Another viola­tion of historic character. He's such a shit magnet. The milkmaid, Ursula, comes out of the cow shed and looks at us with her stoner eyes just about filled with blood.

'If there was a girl you liked,' I say to him, 'if she wanted to have sex just so she could get pregnant, would you?'

Ursula grabs her skirts up and comes stomping through the cow poop in her wooden clogs. She kicks a blind chicken that's in her way. Somebody snaps her picture, kicking. A married couple start to ask Ursula to hold their baby for a picture, but then maybe they see her eyes.

'I don't know,' Denny says. 'A baby's not like having a dog. I mean, a baby lives a long time, dude.'

'But what if she wasn't planning to have the baby?' I say.

Denny's eyes go up and then down, looking at nothing, then he looks at me. 'I don't understand,' he says. 'You mean like sell it?'

'I mean like sacrifice it,' I say.

And Denny says, 'Dude.'

'Just supposing,' I say, 'she's going to scramble its little un­born fetus brain and suck the mess out with a big needle and then inject that stuff into the head of somebody you know who has brain damage, to cure them,' I say.

Denny's lips hang open a crack. 'Dude, you don't mean me, do you?

I mean my mom.

It's called a neural transplant. Some people call it a neural graft, and it's the only effective way to rebuild my mom's brain at this late stage. It would be better known except for problems get­ting, you know, the key ingredient.

'A ground-up baby,' Denny says.

I say, 'A fetus.'

Fetal tissue, Paige Marshall said. Dr. Marshall with her skin and her mouth.

Ursula stops next to us, and she points at the newspaper in Denny's hand. She says, 'Unless the date on that's 1734, you're fucked. That's a violation of character.'

The hair on Denny's head is trying to grow back, except some is ingrown and trapped under red or white pimples.

Ursula steps away, then turns back. 'Victor,' she says, 'if you need me, I'll be churning.'

I say, later. And she slogs off.

Denny says, 'Dude, so it's like a choice between your mom and your firstborn?'

It's not a big deal, the way Dr. Marshall sees it. We do it every day. Kill the unborn to save the elderly. In the gold wash of the chapel, breathing her reasons into my ear, she asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

The whole pyramid scheme of Social Security.

She said, with her breasts wedged between us, she said, I'm doing this because I care about your mother. The least you could do is your small part.