When I was the age of my youngest boy, I took to gutting the kitchen cupboards and arranging their odd porcelain occupants into a three-dimensional diagram of the human intestinal tract. Our porcelain was not a set with larger ideas than to eat off; rather, a mishmash my mother had stolen from a withering aunty she visited each year on Epiphany. The serving plate with an iridescent peacock became the stomach. The seven butter dishes and their lids, transparent and scratched into flurries, were piled into an ophidian bundle. The twelve tea cups, each with its pleasure center of roses, were stacked over one another in a lumpy tuber. It all tapered down into a silver pitcher that dribbled out the detritus of everything I’d been absorbing in that house.

I sat at the kitchen table, forking frozen grape juice into my mouth, waiting for morning to signal the clanking. My father, who had grown up in the storage room of a museum dedicated to paranormal sightings of veterans, was uncharacteristically impressed; he suggested shellacking the thing to the floor, then remembered his hatred for museums. My mother, a Jew by birth, ordered me to 7am Mass, checking my eyelids for the requisite fear as I crossed my forehead, lips and heart. My sister shrugged past without saying a thing. She was nine by then, three years my senior, immersed in turning her attic bedroom into an embryonic hashish den.

Upstairs, we had a neighbor who’d lost his legs when he tied himself to a railroad track to protest nuclear weapons. Before the incident, he’d spent his days tacking newspaper articles to his back door and fermenting weeds in a kiddie pool in the driveway. His hair was matted as an old cat and his fingers and breath reeked of rotting vegetation. Legless, he got laid several times a week. The women—middle-aged divorcees—would pass beneath my bedroom window on their way upstairs, giddy and buoyant. I’d lie on my bed, eyes closed, listening to our porcelain clank together with each thrust.