spider would be smashed, but she believed that the act should be performed with conscience. Gabriele did not subscribe to the idea of civilized man that life was ranked into a hierarchy of importance. A human certainly could not get by without killing, or picking up killed produce from a grocery shelf, but the idea that there should be a real distinction between a can of beans and the entrails of a local senator seemed absurd, although she did not think that being put in an electric chair for having eaten her local senator ranked very high up there in the chances of probability. Yes, she again told herself, the child was a gift and a responsibility but she would not dote him. The world flattered itself that doting mothers carrying their worms to the baby birds exuded such a profound love by this thoughtless emotional instinct of proud and adoring pampering. They thought that pampering the pleasure-seeking savage was the acme of nurturing motherhood and the making of good human beings. She thought to herself that such mindless bitches, doting as Aunt Peggy had done with her children, were an embarrassment to this word love. Love in its purest sense (what little one was humanly capable of) would be a selfless caring of another without such instincts to keep one's genes replicating for all eternity. It was not suffocating one's children in dependency so that one could have the role of mommy to avoid rolelessness and void. It was not needing a child. Being a doting mother was as far from her instinctually as those bizarre apathetic ones who could toss a child on a relative or an ex-husband himself before joining the military. The other day, on page 2 of the Ithaca Times she saw that there was an article on some such oddity although much bigger stories with more bizarre and sadistic ramifications were buried each day on page 1,999 of the New York Times. She would always read voraciously and thereby find their cadavers. "Piaget, Piaget, go away, go away," she mumbled inaudibly to herself slurring and babbling the consonants and vowels as if she were now beginning to imitate the language of her son atavistically.