Frankenstein

not.”
    “I thought you were.”
    “I’m not dead either.”
    Stepping out of the closet, he said, “Jim James cinnamons?”
    “Six each,” she confirmed.
    He grinned at her.
    When she’d first known Jocko, she recoiled from his grin, which contorted his already unfortunate face into a fright mask that gavepause even to the wife of Victor Frankenstein. During the past two years, however, she grew to love this disastrous expression because his delight so touched and pleased her.
    He had suffered much. He deserved some happiness.
    Motherly love made beautiful what the rest of the world found grotesque and abhorrent. Well, perhaps not beautiful, but at least picturesque.
    Jocko scampered to the kitchen table, clambered into a chair, and clapped his hands at the sight of the white pastry box.
    “Wait until I get dishes and napkins,” Erika warned. “And what do you want to drink?”
    “Cream,” said Jocko.
    “I think I’ll have cream, too.”
    Victor was responsible for untold horrors and disasters, but perhaps the one thing he got right was the metabolism he designed for his creations. They could have consumed nothing but butter and molasses while remaining in good health and without gaining an ounce.
    Erika set out two plates and forks, and he said, “Can Jocko eat one now?”
    “No, you have to wait.”
    As Erika put napkins and two drinking glasses on the table, he said, “Now can Jocko have one?”
    “Not yet. Behave yourself. You’re not a pig.”
    “Jocko might be pig. Part pig. Who knows? Lots of weird DNA in the mix. Maybe it’s natural for Jocko to hog down Jim James cinnamons
right now
and oink like a pig.”
    “If you eat one right now, then you’ll only get one, not six,” she said as she put two quarts of cream on the table.
    As Erika filled a glass from her quart and then filled a glass from hisquart, Jocko watched her, smacking the flaps that were his equivalent of lips. She took a plump, glistening roll from the box and put it on her plate, and then put another on his plate.
    He began to make snorting noises.
    “Don’t you dare.” She sat across the table from him, opened her napkin, smoothed it across her lap, and regarded him expectantly.
    Jocko tucked one point of the napkin under the neck of his Buster Steelhammer T-shirt, smoothed it across the wrestler’s face, and sat up straight in his chair, clearly proud of himself.
    “Very good,” Erika said. “Very nice.”
    “You’re a good mother,” he said.
    “Thank you, sweetie.”
    “You taught Jocko manners.”
    “And why are manners important?”
    “They show we have respect for other people.”
    “That’s correct. They show that you respect your mother.”
    “And they teach us self-control.”
    “Exactly.”
    As Erika used her fork to cut a piece from her cinnamon roll, Jocko snatched his off the plate and crammed the whole thing into his mouth at once.
    In proportion to his body, his curiously shaped head was bigger than that of any human being, and in proportion to his unfortunate head, his mouth was bigger than Nature would ever have made it, but Nature had no hand in Jocko’s creation. All eight or ten ounces of the big Jim James roll disappeared into his mouth without leaving a trace of icing on his lip flaps.
    But then the trouble began.
    The roll pretty much occupied all the space from bulging cheek tobulging cheek, from his palate to his tongue,
solidly
occupied it, making it impossible for Jocko to chew with his mouth closed. If he opened his mouth, however, mastication would force at least a third of the mass forward, and it would fall onto the table or the floor.
    In part to discourage such exhibitions of gluttony as this, Erika strictly enforced a rule forbidding the reintroduction to the mouth of anything that dropped onto the table or the floor.
    Acutely aware of this rule, Jocko was determined not to be denied such a significant part of the pastry. He sat for a moment, wide-eyed, contemplating his dilemma, breathing so noisily and forcefully through his peculiar asymmetrical nose that had a fly been in the kitchen, he might have inhaled it.
    His eerie, arresting yellow eyes began to water as if his entire head had filled up with saliva. Perhaps he thought the roll had become so saturated that it would dissolve into sweet cascades as it went down his gullet, for his throat flexed as he tried to swallow.
    Evidently a portion of the cinnamony mass moved backward into the pharynx but not as far as