The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen Read Free Book Online Page A

CHAPTER TWO
    She remembered interrupting her father and asking him what the part about Emperor Rat meant and how they would keep him away, since everyone in Creatureville was so afraid of him.
    Her question was followed by such a long silence that she thought he must have tiptoed out of the room. But hehadn’t—when she opened her eyes, he was still sitting there. He was pondering her question seriously—with such fierce concentration, in fact, that she started to feel afraid and regretted that she’d asked it.
    “It seems to me,” her father finally said with a sigh, “that Emperor Rat is one of those things that we’re supposed to forget about. He’ll come if he’s going to come, but we shouldn’t start dwelling on it, and we certainly can’t start actively expecting it to happen.”

    Autumn seeped into the grass, plants and trees and gushed from the treetops up into the sky to cover the landscape.
    Ella and her mother hunkered indoors out of the rain. The house felt grey and huddled tight. It was colder than usual for this time of year. Neither of them felt like lighting the old tile stove that they used to supplement the electric heat.
    Ella told her mother about the memory that had come to her so suddenly. Her mother was watching a television show called
The Last Sixty Years of Our Lives
. Without turning her head, she told Ella she had remembered it wrong: “As far as I know your father never read aloud to you. It must have been me.”
    When the show was over, her mother started writing a shopping list for the next day, which was a Monday. Monday had always been the family shopping day. Her mother always said that writing shopping and to-do lists made it possible to keep things under control that would otherwise have weighed on her mind.
    Ella sat next to her. There were crumbs and coffee stains on the kitchen table. Ella was tired. She had been up late trying to grade papers, but nothing had come of it. She was tired. Two hours earlier she had started to listen to her own breathing,and then her mother’s breathing, and now she couldn’t stop no matter how she tried.
    The air rasped in through her mother’s nostrils and flowed through her windpipes into her lungs, then came back out again with a weary puff and a drawn-out wheeze that had a faint rattle in it. Now and then she sort of wolfed all the air in at once and snorted it out so quickly that there was no way her lungs had any time to absorb the oxygen into her bloodstream.
    Breathing was somewhat complicated when you really thought about it. Ella wondered whether people die sometimes from starting to think too much about things that you’re not supposed to pay any attention to, like breathing.
    She looked at her mother’s shopping list and forgot her ponderings for a moment.
    POTATOES
    CARROTS
    TISSUES
    SOME KIND OF MEAT (CHICKEN STRIPS?)
    WHEAT FLOUR
    POTATO FLOUR
    TOMATOES
    FUNERAL (COFFIN FOR PAAVO, ETC.)
    LAUNDRY SOAP (FOR COLOURS)
    HEADSTONE
    COFFEE
    Her mother looked at her intently, her eyes dry.
    “Might as well get everything taken care of,” she said, and rapped her knuckles on the table. She was sitting up very straightin her chair, but her neck was bent backward somewhat, her head tilted feebly to one side. “Let’s go to the florist, too. I’m sure Kuutti knows how to handle these cemetery sorts of things. You’ll never hear a word of complaint about Kuutti’s Flowers. Satisfied customers, living or dead. By the way, do you want to be next to your father and me at the cemetery? I need to know so I can order the right size headstone.”
    Ella didn’t answer.
    “I’m not trying to force you into the same grave,” her mother said soothingly. “I was just thinking that if we’re going to be taking care of these sorts of things I might as well ask you about it so that you wouldn’t complain about it later—tell people you hadn’t even been invited to share a plot with your family. I’m trying to take everything into