No Such Creature by Giles Blunt Read Free Book Online Page B

reached: the boys would alternate bunks every other day until they learned civility. The experience left Owen with a lifelong aversion to bottom bunks.
    Terror and loss were with him day and night, and yet Owen behaved with the utmost calm and politeness to his social worker and foster parents. But every night, when Buzz was asleep, he wept, clutching his pillow to his face in a hot, soggy mass.
    After a few days in the land of Buzz, Owen was taken to visit a prospective foster home. Melanie Prine, his social worker from the Department of Children and Families, drove him for miles and miles outside of Norwalk, so that he really had no idea where he was. She was pretty, and yet he couldn’t bear to look at her. To him she consisted entirely of the ten red fingernails that gripped the steering wheel and the chirpy voice telling him about the Tunkles, his prospective foster parents, but his heart was too thick with grief to take anything in. Owen, strapped into the passenger seat as the ever-bleaker countryside rolled by, felt a heavy numbness travelling upward from his ankles until it encased his whole body.
    The Tunkles were waiting on the front porch. Melanie Prine gave them a cheery wave as they drove up, five scarlet fingernails flashing in the sun. They were nice enough, and their house was a nice-enough house. Owen could see that it was a comfortable place, a house where people could live with each other, but it was not his house. He did not live here. He did not know anyone here.
    The family had an older daughter of sixteen, a blonde girl who said hi and then vanished, and a still older son who was away at college. Melanie Prine abandoned Owen there for the afternoon, leaving the Tunkles to try to interest him in farm life. He was shown to his room, a nice-enough room to be sure, but not his. Just as the bathroom was not his bathroom, the kitchen not his kitchen, the basement not his basement, the front yard with its single stunted maple not his yard. It was as if everyone was playing a game: Let’s pretend this is normal. Let’s pretend we know each other. Let’s pretend we care.
    With each minute that ticked by, Owen was exiled deeper into an inner Siberia. The worst moments were when Mr. Tunkle, a bony little man whose skin looked parched and stiff as if he’d been salted and left to dry in the sun, took him by the hand (a hand rough as a plank) to show him the pigs, the chickens, the fields, the cows. Owen had never seen anything so dreary.
    Norwalk is not a big city, but it is not a small town and it is most definitely not the country. To Owen, farms were something you drove by to get somewhere interesting—a river, an aquarium, a museum, a campground, an airport. You didn’t stop at farms. The sunlight beat down on the place in a way he had never experienced in shady Norwalk. The chickens were repulsive, the cows somnolent, the pigs appalling. Owen was not afraid of manual labour; he had enjoyed helping his father fix things around the house, and he earned pocket money shovelling snow and raking leaves. But the idea that he would be expected to spend time with these creatures made his heart shrivel.
    He would be required to change schools, the nearest neighbour was a mile away, and he would probably never see his friends again.
    “Well, what did you think of the Tunkles?” Melanie Prine asked when they were on the way back to the receiving home. Her fingernails had dimmed to carmine in the late afternoon light.
    Owen couldn’t answer.
    “They’re nice, don’t you think?”
    “They’re okay.”
    “And isn’t that farmhouse incredible?”
    “I don’t want to live there.”
    “So much to do out here, don’t you think?”
    “I don’t want to live there.”
    “Open space everywhere. Lots of fresh air. Did you see they’ve even got a swimming hole?”
    “I don’t want to live there.”
    Five of the ten red fingernails lifted off from the steering wheel and travelled toward him as Miss Prine