i was three, and already familiar with my mother's inability to take care of living things. she came in from the cab carrying the baby carrier and plopped it down on the table to light a cigarette.

"there are two things you don't do to this baby, heather," began my instructions on baby care. "you don't pull that scab off of her belly button and you don't push in this soft spot on her head." i had my mother demonstrate for me several times how not to push the spot in.

not five minutes later she jogged off to the kitchen to do something or other, leaving me with a small window in which to kill the baby.

reaching up as far as i could (i was a small child, probably due to my early diet consisting only of top ramen and mayo and sugar sandwiches), i grabbed for the disgusting brown and red scab on the baby's belly and pulled like i was opening a can of schlitz. the scab came off with an almost audible *schwick* sound and the baby started screaming. to cover my tracks, i put the scab back on to her bleeding bellybutton and ran over to sit in front of the tv.

she is lucky i wasn't tall enough to moosh her soft spot.

it wasn't that long after the belly button incident that i started to think about injecting my sister with poison. i didn't know anything about household poisons, but i did have the knowledge of one poisonous substance that all kids are born with: dog poop.

every kid in the world knows that if you touch dog poop or step in dog poop that you will instantly die a very painful and stinky death. we sometimes used to collect the poop (of which there was a lot in our neighborhood) on sticks and chase each other around.

i knew that if i smeared dog shit on the baby it would surely kill her. i also knew that if i did so my mother would probably figure it was me. i had been watching a lot of quincy jones on tv and decided that injection was the best way to go. when no one was looking, i stole a safety pin from the diaper bag and went looking for a fresh pile.

once i dipped the pin in the lethal poop, i was ready to do the baby in. she was sitting in her usual place, the playpen situated about 2 feet away from the tv. i grabbed one of her wriggling tootsies and positioned the safety pin for the kill.

even after repeated stabbings in the foot, the baby failed to die. it would seem that my sister was the only child in the world who naturally produced the antibody to counteract the poop poison. lucky her.

one day, when she was about 6 months old and teething, i decided it was once again time to kill the baby.

it was nap time for me and my sister (nap time around our house started right after breakfast and lasted until almost dinner) and she was screaming her head off in her crib. i had decided that i had enough of the screaming and went to get my mom, who was nowhere to be found. once i was sure she wasn't actually hiding somewhere, i hatched my evil plan.

the plan was pretty simple, actually: force the baby's head through the crib bars.

it was a lot more difficult than i thought it would be, since by this point the baby had gained some muscle tone and motor control and was trying to wiggle away from me. with a little time (and a lot of spit) i did manage to get her head most of the way through. i don't believe this actually hurt my sister, since she soon stopped crying and was even sort of cooing and drooling in that way that babies and the mentally retarded do.

even though i was unable to get her head all the way through the bars, i felt i should still somehow record my victory. i knew my mother kept a polaroid camera under her bed, along with some other interesting things, so i went to get it. after some searching through all the jumbled crap, i finally found the camera. i brought it and some other stuff i found under there into my room and began to artfully decorate the baby with the found objects.

which means, of course, that somewhere there are several pictures of my sister surrounded by different sized dildos with her head smooshed between the crib bars.

i couldn't get her head unstuck, but i did manage to convince my mom that the baby had done it to herself.