When he reached them, he desperately clasped the metal frame near the child’s feet, like a drowning man, and he tried to embrace Chloe around her waist. But the red-haired woman had emptied herself of her own substance, as though, like insects, the baby had occupied her entire body and emerged through a longitudinal split in Chloe’s skin, pushing her head out of the woman’s head, her body from her body, her legs from her legs, her arms from her arms, leaving behind her a nude exuvia, a lifeless simulacrum, a translucid shell meant to be shredded and scattered in the wind.
