had been a hateful child from the day he was born. He was colicky, and his screams echoed through their father’s caverns. He screamed from the moment he emerged and Alan tipped him over and toweled him gently dry and he didn’t stop for an entire year. Alan stopped being able to tell day from night, lost track of the weeks and months. He’d developed a taste for food, real people food, that he’d buy in town at the Loblaws Superstore, but he couldn’t leave Davey alone in the cave, and he certainly couldn’t carry the howling, shitting, puking, pissing, filthy baby into town with him.

So they ate what the golems brought them: sweet grasses, soft berries, frozen winter fruit dug from the base of the orchards in town, blind winter fish from the streams. They drank snowmelt and ate pine cones and the baby Davey cried and cried until Alan couldn’t remember what it was to live in a world of words and conversations and thought and reflection.

No one knew what to do about Davey. Their father blew warm winds scented with coal dust and loam to calm him, but still Davey cried. Their mother rocked him on her gentlest spin cycle, but still Davey cried. Alan walked down the slope to Carl’s landmass, growing with the dust and rains and snow, and set him down on the soft grass and earth there, but still Davey cried, and Carlos inched farther and farther toward the St. Lawrence seaway, sluggishly making his way out to the ocean and as far away from the baby as possible.

After his first birthday, David started taking breaks from his screaming, learning to crawl and then totter, becoming a holy terror. If Alan left his schoolbooks within reach of the boy, they’d be reduced to shreds of damp mulch in minutes. By the time he was two, his head was exactly at Alan’s crotch height and he’d greet his brother on his return from school by charging at full speed into Alan’s nuts, propelled at unlikely speed on his thin legs.

At three, he took to butchering animals—the rabbits that little Bill kept in stacked hutches outside of the cave mouth went first. Billy rushed home from his grade-two class, eyes crazed with precognition, and found David methodically wringing the animals’ necks and then slicing them open with a bit of sharpened chert. Billy had showed David how to knap flint and chert the week before, after seeing a filmstrip about it in class. He kicked the makeshift knife out of Davey’s hand, breaking his thumb with the toe of the hard leather shoes the golems had made for him, and left Davey to bawl in the cave while Billy dignified his pets’ corpses, putting their entrails back inside their bodies and 

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