4.  Feral children are fatty, complex and rigid.  When you captured the two children, you
 had to brush the knots out of their hair then scrape the comb free of hard butter.  Descent
 and serration.  No.  I don't want to ask primal questions.
  

5.  Kamala slips over the garden wall with her sister and runs, on all fours, towards the
 complex horizon between Midnapure and its surrounding belt of sal.  The humanimal
 mode is one of pure anxiety attached to the presence of the body.  Two panicked children
 strain against the gelatin envelope of the township, producing, through distension, a
 frightening shape.  The animals see an opaque, milky membrane bulging with life and
 retreat, as you would, to the inner world.  I am speaking for you in January.  It is raining.
  Amniotic, compelled to emerge, the girls are nevertheless re-absorbed.  I imagine them
 back in their cots illuminated by kerosene lanterns.  I illuminate them in the
 colony—the cluster of residences, including the Home—around St. John's.
  No.  Though I've been there, it’s impossible for me to visualize retrieval.  Chronologies
 only record the bad days, the attempted escapes.

 

d.  I was almost to the gate.  I was almost to the gate when a hand
 reached out and pulled me backwards by my hair, opening my
 mouth to an O.  The next day, I woke up with a raw throat.  The
 cook gave me salt in warm water.  I waited until she was gone and
 then I bit it.  I bit my own arm and ate it.  Here is my belly, frosted
 with meat.  Here are my eyes, bobbling in a tin.

 

6.  It's Palm Sunday and Kamala, with the other orphans in a dark, glittery crocodile,
 walks from Home to church.  Her two arms extend stiffly from her body to train them, to
 extend.  Unbound, her elbows and wrists would flex then supinate like two peeled claws.
  Wrapped, she is a swerve, a crooked yet regulated mark.  This is corrective therapy; the
 fascia hardening over a lifetime then split in order to re-set it, educate the nerves.


e.  The cook fed us meats of many kinds.  I joined my belly to the
 belly of the next girl.  It was pink and we opened our beaks for
 meat.  It was wet and we licked the dictionary off each other's
 faces.



7.  Is this the humanimal question?  No, it’s a disc, transferring light from corner to
 corner of  the girl's eye.  Like an animal tapetum.  The way at night an animal.  Animal
 eyes, glinting, in the room where he kept her, his girl, deep in the Home.