•All the time, through the years, as the

baby bobbed up and down in its own

cramped world, it was slowly being
destroyed. And no one could do anything
about it.
•During the first few months and on the
end of that first year, the bottle had
seemed too small for the baby/ it looked as
though it needed a glass jar with a lid
instead of that bottle with a wide mouth.
And then the bottle didn’t seem too small
for the baby anymore because now the
baby’s shrunken body was completely
confined. The bottle fully contained it.
•Mr. Libre’s wife was a plain woman with
high cheekbones and a sad mouth, who was
only twenty-nine years old but whose eyes
were no longer young. Mr. Libre himself
was thirty-three but graying hair and some
thick coded veins on his hands made him
look older.
•One afternoon, in the last busy week of
January, Mr. Libre was looking over some
old files in the recorder’s cubicle when all of
a sudden, he remembered that on the day
the baby in the bottle was five years and
seven months old.
•The tiny half-black thing was drifting and
circling as always in the green alcohol. But
now he saw that the bottle and the alcohol
and the long years gad gnawed it and little
by little by little the baby was shredding and
peeling of flesh.