If You're Not Yet Like Me by Edan Lepucki Read Free Book Online Page A

need it quite yet. Toby found the smock dresses, and the shirts like parachutes, sexy.
    For some reason, taking a bath temporarily cleansed his wife of any physical self-loathing. In water she was weightless, and afterwards, she put on the same extra-large t-shirt, its size dwarfing her, making her feel thin. The baby inside her, (a boy, though neither Toby nor Margaret knew this yet, or wanted to), liked the sound of the running faucet, and the shaking and groan of the pipes. He heard everything, and tucked the information like loose change into his forming brain.
    T he sound was like a handful of paperclips scattering across the hardwood floor. A scampering. From the kitchen Toby yelled, “Holy fucking shit!”
    Margaret stood up, feet in bath water. “What was that?” she called, her ear toward the door. She heard the rustling of paper bags—the two next to the garbage, used for recycling. “Are you okay?” she yelled. The baby moved, but he was too small for Margaret to notice.
    “There’s a fucking rat in here!” Toby cried. Boyish cowardice tugged at the edge of his voice. Margaret heard a kitchen chair slide across the floor and she imagined Toby standing on it.
    She grabbed her towel from the rack, pulling it so strongly that it hit the candle, tipping it over, onto the book. The book caught fire.
    “Fire!” she yelled.
    “Possum!” Toby yelled. He hadn’t heard his wife in the bathroom.
    The possum, a baby, ran back and forth across the kitchen, butting its head against the cabinets and the fridge. It did look like a rat, but an obese one, pink-eyed, with that same root-vegetable tail.
    The book’s pages went first, curling black with the lick of fire, then disintegrating. The covers were hardbound, and thus more stubborn, but it didn’t take long for the flames to cover the entire book, eating it. The room turned orange with the glow, and Margaret thought first of that Ray Bradbury novel, then of the Nazis, then of death, then of the first cake, which had also burned, then of the baby, oh not my baby, then of death again.
    As the possum ran for the living room, Toby realized what had happened. Abandoned by its mother, the animal needed food, and the burnt cake smell had been inviting. A coyote might be next in the hunger parade, might come skulking through the front door, which was still open.
    The possum ran behind the couch. Food, food, food!
    Margaret plunged her towel into the tub of water, and, once soaked through, flung it over the flames, suffocating them. The book stopped burning. Where was Toby?
    “Fire!” she yelled again, testing him.
    Toby smelled the fire just as he heard Margaret’s call. Burnt book wasn’t the same as burnt cake. At seven years old, he and his brothers had thrown a lit match to a pile of their mother’s collection of romance novels. The flames leapt from the paperbacks to a nearby bush, swallowing it with a roar of heat. Later, when the firefighters were leaving, one of them said to him, “Be careful there, Moses,” and Toby had nodded, confused. Who was this Moses?
    Toby wasn’t thinking of this as he ran for the bathroom—only of his actions: the jumping off of the chair, the pushing in of the bathroom door, the reaching out for Margaret, who was naked and dousing something charred in the sink. The breathlessness of, “Are you all right, babe? What happened?”
    Margaret laughed. “Oops,” she said. “Guess I won’t be reading this.” All crises, once averted, become jokes.
    “Did you burn yourself?”
    “I’m fine, I’m fine.”
    Toby kissed his wife on the mouth and on the belly. “There’s a small beast in the living room.”
    The timer shrilled. Cake.
    “Come quick,” Toby said, already out of the bathroom. “I might contract rabies.”
    T oby pulled the cake out of the oven before attending to the possum, whom he could hear rustling behind the couch, scratching at the walls. If the possum couldn’t behave like a human being, why not run