We like scabs. We pick them off—there isn’t room for a whole arm or leg under the microscope—and turn the magnification up as high as it will go. The scabs look like rocks, bumpy, with a sheen like silica; or else like some kind of fungus. If we can get a scab off a finger we put the finger under and watch the place where the blood oozes out, bright red, in a round button, like a berry. Afterward we lick off the blood. We look at earwax, or snot, or dirt from our toes, checking first to see that there’s no one around: we know without asking that such things would not be approved of. Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.

This is what we do on Saturday mornings, while our father attends to things in his office and our mother goes grocery shopping. She says it keeps us out of her hair.

The building overlooks University Avenue, which has lawns and some copper-green statues of men on horses. Right across the road is the Ontario Parliament Building, which is also old and dingy. I think it must be another building like the building, filled with long creaky corridors and shelves of pickled lizards and ox eyes.

It’s from the building that we watch our first Santa Claus Parade. We’ve never seen a parade before. You can listen to this parade on the radio, but if you want to actually see it you have to bundle up in your winter clothes and stand on the sidewalk, stomping your feet and rubbing your hands to keep warm. Some people climb up onto the horse statues to get a better view. We don’t have to do this, as we can sit on the window ledge of one of the main labs in the building, separated from the weather by a pane of dusty glass, with blasts of heat from the iron radiator going up our legs. From there we watch as people dressed like snowflakes, like elves, like rabbits, like sugar plum fairies, march past us, strangely truncated because we’re looking down on them. There are bands of bagpipers in kilts, and things like big cakes, with people on them waving, that slide past on wheels. It’s begun to drizzle. Everyone down there looks cold.