Sheep and Wolves by Jeremy C. Shipp Read Free Book Online

Remades eat brains? Is it such a horrible existence?”
    “No, man. Being dead is cool.”
    “Then why do you eat brains?”
    His expression changes to one that I’ve never seen on him before. It’s one of the looks my mother used to give me, when she was disappointed in me, but showed sympathy at the same time. “Figure it out yourself, man,” he says, very quietly.
    “Fuck you!” I say, standing.
    “Let go of me.”
    I realize my hand is squeezing his arm. My other hand, it’s in a fist.
    “I think you should go, man,” he says.
    Part of me wants to stay and beat the non-living shit out of him. I want to blame him. Not just for how I’m feeling right now, but for everything. My mother’s death. The state of the world.
    Everything.
    Instead, I release him and say, “Yeah.”
    *
    Say you’re lost in the orange groves behind your apartment complex because you’re not ready to go home again, and you find three guys dragging a tied-up young woman toward a hole in the ground, with three shovels nearby. They’re alive and she’s not. You tell yourself that if they were dead and she wasn’t, the scene wouldn’t be so disturbing, because it’s supposed to be the dead who do things like this. Deep down you know that’s not true.
    You think, “Get your fucking hands off her.”
    Say all of this happens. You’d be here too, like me. You’d crouch down behind the nearest trunk you can find, waiting and watching, with a wrenching knot in your gut.
    For a moment I consider racing out into the clearing, bellowing and swinging my fists. But these guys, they’re not like Porter. They’d fight back. They’d kill me.
    So I watch them bury the poor girl. I listen to her muffled screams.
    They dump her in the hole and start shoveling.
    They say things like, “You like that dirt in your face, don’t you, bitch?” and “Fucking zombie whore.”
    I try to study their faces, so that I can identify them later, but it’s so dark. And I’m crying too much.
    When they finish with the dirt, they pound the backs of their shovels against the grave, over and over and over. They laugh, and high-five.
    Finally, they leave.
    I dive onto the ground and start digging with my bare hands.
    What I’m uncovering isn’t just a young dead girl.
    From deep within myself, I pull out a truth that I’ve always known but never wanted to admit. Remades don’t eat brains because of the pain of being dead. The real pain comes from how the living treat them. How I treat them.
    I pull her out of the hole. I remove the gag.
    She looks at me with fear in her eyes.
    I’m afraid she’s going to scream.
    I’m afraid she thinks I’m one of them.
    But her face changes. It’s one of the looks my mother used to give me, after I did something bad and then made things right. “Thank you,” she says, very quietly.
    I put my arm around her, and in my heart I’m embracing Hafwen at the same time.
    I see her when I close my eyes.
    She’s beautiful.
    I’m ready to go home.

Devoured
     
    I jab the carving fork into my thigh, and start cutting off another slice.
    “Thicker than that,” you say.
    So I move the knife over another inch, and saw through the flesh and bone.
    It’s painful, of course. But the worst part is that you don’t hold my hand or touch my eyes with your gaze. You only stare at the piece of me that’s slowly becoming yours.
    “Is this good?” I say, and hold out the circle of meat.
    “We’ll see,” you say. “Feed me.”
    “What shape would you like?”
    “A car.”
    “I’m not sure if I know how to make it like that.”
    You point your finger at my face. “Just do it, Jessica! Or I’ll find someone else who can.”
    And so I attempt to mold the meat into a car. It takes me a good two hours, but I finally get the job done.
    “Do you know what time it is?” you say, tapping your watch.
    “7 o’clock,” I say.
    “That’s right. And I’m fucking starving.”
    I uncover the platter with the flesh car on