The baby was tiny: fitted into her cupped palm. He lay back, head against her finger pads and smiled.

Miriam carried him through to the lounge and popped him in the fruit bowl beside the bananas and a wizened Satsuma.

Returning to the kitchen she stroked Two-Stroke the ginger tom and poured him the top of the milk. She eyed the cat flap and marvelled that the baby appeared unharmed; wondered if she hadn’t been sat here shelling peas the cat may have tossed the foundling about like a vole.

She went and fetched a box from the garage that held toys and tipped it onto the table. She gathered up some doll clothes and went to get the baby. She couldn’t find him, even after lifting out the fruit. Miriam checked behind the cushions on the settee, crouched down and looked under the furniture but he wasn’t there. She brought a chair from the kitchen, stood on it ran her hand along the top of the display cabenet - nothing but dust that shimmered in the slatted- blind light. Stepping off the chair she noticed him - the baby, leaning out of the silver christening mug that had passed down on her maternal Grandmother’s side.
His little eyes were bright blue but he looked cold pressed against the tarnished metal, his flesh as pale as velum.
Even the doll’s clothes were a bit big, and she blew on him to warm him up. She tried feeding him with an eye dropper but he grizzled and twisted his little head this way and that, so she let him be and he snuggled down and slept in a sheep skin slipper Miriam had placed in her desk.
She felt like a bad Mother sliding down the louvered front and turning the key in the lock.
She put the cat out and jammed the cat flat shut.

In the morning he was gone. Miriam searched the house, the garden: peered along the brassica lines and shoved about in the potato patch. She bullied about in the rhubarb but he wasn’t clinging to any of the stems under the big leaves so she ran down the road wailing then stepped into the path of a steam roller.