Absolute Instinct

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The boy sat cross-legged, scrawny at a mere forty-eight pounds in seven years, big-headed, awkward, sickly at birth and all his life, and now set on a path to cure himself, to fill out the flesh, to strengthen muscle and tissue, to raise the sunken eyes as in his drawings of himself, but now he had gone too far. Thin and sticklike, his body battled the diseases of his father, evil curses he'd never be rid of. His mother believed it with a certainty after seeing what he'd done to harmless, inoffensive little Squeakums.

Giles had been in and out of hospitals all his life, but tests always proved inconclusive, and no one could tell Larina Gahran why her son remained only half formed. Giles's body was his enemy-the overactive metabolic rate kept him pinched and angular. He looked like an Eastern European WWII refugee, a survivor of Auschwitz, or one of those dead-eyed children on TV ads about Africa or South America. She fed him and fed him, but Giles's frail body somehow remained malnourished and starved-looking. And now he was seven years old and defying her, not eating any-thing she put in front of him anymore. He was now living on Coca-Cola and junk food filled with sodium and calories but nothing substantive.

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