When Crazy Susan was twelve, her dear Papa told her now that dear Mama was dead, they would no longer be attending the beautiful Presbyterian Church down the street from their mansion.

Instead, dear Papa would read an appropriate quote to her from the Bible each morning at breakfast, and then they would meditate upon it.

This upset Crazy Susan; she loved the beautiful stained glass windows and elderly Reverend Boyle who always had a kind word for everyone. However, Crazy Susan was a good girl and kept this to herself - dear Papa would not have been pleased had she voiced any dismay at his decision.

When Crazy Susan was thirteen, dear Papa took away her pretty dresses in shades of yellow and pink and locked away her dolls. "You are a woman now," he said as he handed her a pile of her dear, departed Mama's dresses, "You need a woman's clothing, you must wear your hair as your dear mother once did and never cut it."

This upset Crazy Susan, as she loved her bright colored dresses and her pretty dolls, and wanted to have her long golden curls bobbed like the Irish maids. However, Crazy Susan was a good girl and kept this to herself; dear Papa would not have been pleased had she voiced any dismay at his decision.

When Crazy Susan was fourteen, dear Papa dismissed all the servants, the ones that hadn't left one by one since dear Mama died. Her English governess had been the last to go, holding Crazy Susan tight, mouth pressed in a firm line while giving Susan's dear Papa a strange look as she took her suitcases out to the waiting taxi, leaving Crazy Susan and her dear Papa alone in the echoing mansion that had been her home since birth.

This upset Crazy Susan: she loved the hustle and bustle of the Irish maids as they tended to the large house with its old-fashioned turrets, gables and polished marble floors. The sight of Miss Chadwick leaving made Crazy Susan want to run after the woman, the hem of her dear Mama's long skirts raised high so she wouldn't trip over it, calling, "Come back, come back! Don't leave me here all alone in this horrible place!"

However, Crazy Susan was a good girl and kept this to herself. Dear Papa would not have been pleased had she voiced any dismay at his decision…

…instead Crazy Susan sat at one end of the gleaming dining room table, night after night, dear Papa at the other, eating the meals she cooked, as he lectured her on what he deemed important, at what he deemed proper, so that one morning many years later, Crazy Susan, while poking around the tide line in New York Harbor knew what to do with the large, rough oval with a cross on one end she found washed up on the filthy shoreline among the empty beer cans and fast food containers: she took it home with her.

Home was still the large, echoing mansion her father built so many years ago that she inherited after he died: from rough stone cellar to rusting wrought iron weather vane, it was now Crazy Susan's, lock, stock, and barrel.

It was a little worse for wear, the once manicured lawn now overgrown with weeds and the cast-iron deer adorning it was a slowly dissolving four-legged mass of rust. The slate roof tiles were dropping out one by one like rotting teeth and the windows were still shuttered just as her dear Papa had left them after her dear Mama had died.

Still, as much as Crazy Susan loathed the place with a dull, habitual loathing, where else could she go?

She pushed the wobbly shopping cart and its eclectic cargo of found objects up the cracked flagstone sidewalk that meandered brokenly through the weeds until she reached the front stoop where there had once been stone lions.

The lions disappeared one Halloween night years before. Crazy Susan didn't miss them much – they had been dear Papa's– and as dear Papa was dead, the Italian marble beasts and their loss didn't raise all that much of a fuss. What did bother Crazy Susan was that somebody had entered her dear Papa's collection and taken something.

Had he been alive, dear Papa would not have been pleased.

Crazy Susan parked the shopping cart amidst the trash that had blown against the front portico during last night's storm, gathered up the things that she had placed in it and hobbled up the uneven steps, pausing only to wrestle with the six different locks on the double front doors with their matching brass knockers shaped like the slim hands of elegant women, before going in, the mahogany door slamming shut behind her with a bang followed by six clicks of differing volumes as Crazy Susan refastened the locks behind her, leaving the outside of the house to blankly contemplate the unkempt grounds that insulated and isolated it from the newly gentrified brownstone neighborhood which surrounded it.

When Crazy Susan was fourteen, dear Papa told her that as she was now a woman, she must do a woman's work. She was up from dawn to dusk cooking and cleaning just as the departed servants once had as her dear Papa endlessly worked on his collection. Crazy Susan really wanted to write letters to her favorite cousins and visit the neighbors the way her dear Mama once had. However, Crazy Susan was a good girl and kept this to herself, as dear Papa would not have been pleased had she voiced any dismay at his decision.

Crazy Susan stepped over and around the tottering ceiling high stacks of newspapers and magazines, the record albums, the spill of empty picture frames that filled the once fine front hallway. Dear Papa had built a marvelous collection, and Crazy Susan had added to it in her own dutiful way over the years, which would have pleased him. She had not only added to the collection, but like dear Papa she had meticulously cataloged every piece of string, every fragment of broken china, every chicken bone, discarded newspaper, banana peel, empty matchbook, pretty stone, pigeon feather and hubcap: she even knew exactly how long the spliced together strand that made up the 500 pound ball of string that dominated the second-best parlor was, as well as where every empty bleach bottle was stored because all of this had been numbered, described, and recorded in dear Papa's big book, the one in his now overflowing study which was filled with baskets of bottle caps and bales of old Montgomery Ward's catalogs dating back to 1929: nothing must be wasted, nothing must be discarded.

Dear Papa would be displeased, otherwise.

Eventually Crazy Susan wended her way through the dining room (old fur coats and trophy heads), the pantry (burned out light bulbs), and into the kitchen where she lived most of the time when she wasn't out finding things to add to dear Papa's collection in the early hours of the morning so that she wouldn't have to speak to anyone because even though he was dead, dear Papa would not have approved if she ever so much as met eyes with the pimple-faced young man who delivered her groceries every Friday morning at ten sharp, leaving them by the back door: 21 cans of generic cat food in assorted flavors, day-old bread, and dented cans of fruit and vegetables that had lost their labels– after dear Mama died, this was what dear Papa always ordered; Crazy Susan never saw any reason to do otherwise though she had never owned a cat – it was cheaper than people food - dear Papa would have been displeased had she dared spend any more than she had to of his money.

Anyway, you could eat cat food cold – which saved Crazy Susan a lot of time and money, time which could be spent on adding to Papa's collection, and money which could be stuffed into the walls, just as dear Papa had in the years before he died.

Crazy Susan lit a candle end in the dim room with its orderly heaps of old chairs, broken dolls, and empty Coke bottles and studied the strange oval with a cross on one end that she had found down on the seashore after last night's storm.

How perfectly odd – she leafed through dear Papa's book. There was nothing like it recorded there, nothing like it at all unless you counted the six dozen flaccid footballs which languished in the coal bin by the long cold furnace; even those paled in comparison…

Crazy Susan didn't know if she should be elated or terrified by this. Dear Papa loved his collection, but he hated change unless he was the one making it.

When Crazy Susan was fifteen, dear Papa came to her bedroom one night and told her, "As with your mother whom you so resemble, I will make of you my wife." He lay atop her doing things to her that were painful, leaving Crazy Susan bleeding between her legs without looking at her when he finished. After a while Crazy Susan got used to this so that dear Papa's visits became more annoying than painful.

If only dear Papa would look at her when he made his visits…

Crazy Susan poked at the mystery she'd found where it rested on the cluttered kitchen table. It gave a little, like one of the old footballs in her inherited collection, with a pebbled translucent muddy green surface decorated with barnacles.

Crazy Susan knew they were barnacles because she had an entire drawer of them in the butler's pantry, labeled and dated - just as dear Papa would have wanted them.

The mystery had something inside it, which sloshed and gurgled as Crazy Susan rolled it one way and than the other – Crazy Susan held her candle stub to it; something twitched within.

When Crazy Susan was sixteen, dear Papa beat her, weeping after she complained of a sour stomach every morning, calling her "Jezebel!" Later when the baby came she lay alone in the darkness of her room listening to her dear Papa argue with the doctor, "She is my daughter. I did not raise her only to give her to other men!" The doctor was extremely unpleasant about it, calling Susan's dear Papa dreadful names that Crazy Susan did not understand until dear Papa shouted, "All right, you hypocrite! How much will it take to keep you quiet???"

After that, whenever a baby came, Crazy Susan's dear Papa took care of the matter himself.

Crazy Susan propped the strange thing she'd found on the shore up among the stacks of magazines and newspapers on the big coal fired range and opened a can of cat food. She looked thoughtfully at it as she mechanically dipped an old spoon from dear Mama's wedding set into the container and chewed without tasting the contents.

Was it a seed?

Was it an egg from some exotic bird, blown in by the storm?

When Crazy Susan was thirty, she lost track of how many babies dear Papa had taken care of for her – each one tagged and cataloged in the basement as they should be even as dear Papa's collection grew and expanded into every room of dear Papa's fine house with its marble floors and dark wood walls while outside the shuttered windows and the rusty iron fence, the world went on, indifferent to what played out in the slowly dissolving house. Crazy Susan still wished dear Papa would look her in the face after he visited her, so one night she left her room beside the kitchen and moved into the attic where rats cavorted and spiders spun in silence. Dear Papa raged up at her, too old and stiff to climb the ladder while Crazy Susan enjoyed the first undisturbed night's sleep she'd had in years.

Really, the egg, as this was what Crazy Susan in her countless layers of dear Mama's and dear Papa's clothing had decided it was, was fascinating. Dislike of change or not, it would be added to dear Papa's collection. Crazy Susan, meal finished, gently shook the egg. It gurgled - whatever rested inside twitched harder.

When Crazy Susan was forty, she pushed a wobbly stack of encyclopedias over upon her dear Papa in the formal parlor because she was tired of him touching her whenever she came down from her attic fortress to help him with his collection and make his meals. The large, heavy books caught him squarely- knocking him over as tower after tower of books followed, obliterating him while Crazy Susan locked the parlor door behind her, only opening it years later after the moans and then the dreadful stench died down to something bearable. Crazy Susan, like the good girl she was, cataloged and tagged dear Papa, storing him in the cellar with the babies, free at last except that she still heard his footsteps behind her in the maze of books and bicycles, of bird cages and bridles that dear Papa's fine home had become.

Crazy Susan tried to leave, but the daylight world outside the house had changed too much: the brownstone homes on either side which had once held the families of lawyers and businessmen now housed black people who jeered at her as she made her slow, gray opossum's way down the street.

It was all too much - Crazy Susan fled back behind the rusting iron gate and tightly closed shutters: as much as she loathed dear Papa's collection, Crazy Susan was part of it.

Crazy Susan turned her attention to the end decorated with a fissured cross- how queer!

It was even queerer when the cross silently split open as she leaned over it, lank, greasy hair trailing in the dust decorating the knife-scarred table.

Crazy Susan put on her dear Papa's gold rimmed spectacles and squinted through them at it...

Whatever it was flew out of the egg and grabbed her face, whipping a bony tail about Crazy Susan's withered neck before sliding a fleshy tube down her throat.

When Crazy Susan was fifty, she was so much a part of her dear Papa's collection that she began venturing out to add to it before the world awoke – only garbage men, prostitutes and drug dealers saw her – a silent, hunched figure pushing a shopping cart in the pre-dawn glow that gilded the distant towers of Manhattan – which scuttled back to the house that festered silently among the weeds with loads of things gleaned from trash cans, from gutters, from alleys.

The whores, the garbage men, the thieves, that replaced the lawyers and tradesmen of her childhood, left her alone.

Crazy Susan fell over backwards to the hard tiled floor in among the stacks of cookbooks and empty cat food tins, dreaming, dreaming…

(…dreaming of babies, babies who crawled up the stairs of the cellar where dear Papa had stored them, boys and girls, toothless, dusty and naked except for the tags around their twig-thin ankles stating the time and date in dear Papa's precise lawyer's handwriting, of their addition to his collection. They cooed at her from shriveled lips, cuddling up to her so that Crazy Susan was covered in a dry, dusty blanket of fragile skin and bones, forgiving Crazy Susan for dear Papa never letting her keep one of them for company in his slowly rotting tooth of a house because the Collection that they were part of came first and always…)

When Crazy Susan was seventy, the developers came, driving out the whores, the pushers, and the dog fighters; replacing them with cyber cafes, wine bars, art galleries and studio lofts with high ceilings and higher rents.

They resented dear Papa's house, which stood out like a rotting, jagged tooth in the smile of a supermodel amidst their upscale retail paradise.

A lawyer was sent.

Crazy Susan pushed a business card at him through the tarnished mail slot without ever speaking to him. On it was the name and phone number of her dear Papa's law firm.

The lawyer came back to his clients with the appalling news that Crazy Susan was their landlady – the eyesore that was Crazy Susan and Crazy Susan's house would have to stay.

And stay they did, deliberately overlooked by the cell-phone junkies and drivers of SUVs; a dirty wad of chewing gum on the face of the Mona Lisa.

Crazy Susan awoke a few days later, throat raw, but exultant: the babies had told her that she would have one more, one that even dear Papa couldn't take away from her.

How absurd, who ever heard of an old woman like her having a baby?

Regardless, Crazy Susan hummed a lullaby to herself as she picked up the strange, dead spidery creature that lay beside her on the floor of her dirty kitchen for cataloging. A baby would be nice; she could feel it kicking, just like all the others – wonderful!

It would keep her company – she would find and unlock the trunk of little dresses that dear Papa had taken away from her so many years ago when he declared her a woman too old for dolls. There would be bright colors, she would bake cookies, the servants would return and the house would be full of light.

And dear Papa, dear, dear Papa – his collection would go away, replaced by toys, and dolls, and music boxes, not broken ones like she'd added over the years, but new, bright with paint and ribbons.

Yes, a baby would be a lovely thing.

Crazy Susan dropped the now cataloged and tagged spidery dead thing into a kitchen drawer full of pickled centipedes and closed it with a smile on her face: the kicking within her was growing stronger, she cradled her swollen belly, eyes closed in ecstasy, soon, oh yes, soon!

Crazy Susan shook her head, there was work to be done: she tagged and cataloged the empty egg before eating all the canned goods she could find – she was, after all, eating for two…

Crazy Susan screamed, falling to her knees, toppling stacks of green bottles, which shattered on the floor around her, blood trickling from her mouth where she'd bitten through her tongue, clutching at her distended old belly…

Labor, that's what it was; you can't have a baby without labor… panting, Crazy Susan stiffly lowered herself to the floor.

Yes, that was it, it was coming… coming… coming… there was a tearing sound; blood now stained the cocooning layers of dear Mama and dear Papa's clothes…

Crazy Susan writhed, screaming, "Dear Papa, you can't have this one, this one is MINE!!!" as her ribs bulged before snapping outward with a sharp report.

Crazy Susan fell back among the rubbish of dear Papa's Collection as what emerged from Crazy Susan's body squealed and hissed. Half-blind with pain, she reached out to it, it was perfect and it was hers… hers, "Do you hear me? MINE!!!"

Laughing, Crazy Susan fell back among the broken bottles and stacks of newspapers, broken vases, and cracked china plates, screaming "MINE!!!" up at the mildewed ceiling as the child long denied her scuttled hissing down the dirty cellar stairs into the darkness, in a trail of old woman's blood.

When Crazy Susan was dead, her house caught fire, the newspapers, the record albums, the old clothes, and the stuffed tiger's heads going up in one glorious cleansing burst amidst the weeds of a neglected yard.

However, the world outside the burning shutters and rusty iron gate paid Crazy Susan's house no mind, being too busy with Crazy Susan's grandchildren to notice.