The Venging by Greg Bear Read Free Book Online Page B

beleaguered cat, was white and square and comfortable. The stairs were rich dark wood overlaid with worn carpet. The walls were dark oak paneling up to a foot above my head, then white plaster, with a white plaster ceiling. The air was full of smellsbacon when I woke up, bread and soup and dinner when I came home from school, dust on weekends when we helped clean. Sometimes my parents argued, and not just about money, and those were bad times; but usually we were happy. There was talk about selling the farm and the house and going to Mitchell where Dad could work in a computerized feed-mixing plant, but it was only talk. It was early summer when I took to the dirt road again. I'd forgotten about the old man. But in almost the same way, when the sun was cooling and the air was haunted by lazy bees, I saw an old woman. Women strangers are less malevolent than men, and rarer. She was sitting on the grey rock, in a long green skirt summer-dusty, with a daisy-colored shawl and a blouse the precise hue of cottonwoods seen in a late hazy day's muted light. "Hello, boy," she said. "I don't recognize you, either," I blurted, and she smiled. "Of course not. If you didn't recognize him, you'd hardly know me." "Do you know him?" I asked. She nodded. "Who was he? Who are you?" (29 of 197) "We're both full of stories. Just tell them from different angles. You aren't afraid of us, are you?" I was, but having a woman ask the question made all the difference. "No," I said. "But what are you doing here? And how do you know?" "Ask for a story," she said. "One you've never heard of before." Her eyes were the color of baked chestnuts, and she squinted into the sun so that I couldn't see her whites. When she opened them wider to look at me, she didn't have any whites. "I don't want to hear stories," I said softly. "Sure you do. Just ask." "It's late. I got to be home." "I knew a man who became a house," she said. "He didn't like it. He stayed quiet for thirty years, and watched all the people inside grow up, and be just like their folks, all nasty and dirty and leaving his walls to flake, and the bathrooms were unbeatable. So he spit them out one morning, furniture and all, and shut his doors and locked them." "What?" "You heard me. Upchucked. The poor house was so disgusted he changed back into a man, but he was older and he had a cancer and his heart was bad because of all the abuse he had lived with. He died soon after." I laughed, not because the man had died, but because I knew such things were lies. "That's silly," I said. "Then here's another. There was a cat who wanted to eat butterflies. Nothing finer in the world for a cat than to stalk the grass, waiting for black-and-pumpkin butterflies. It crouches down and wriggles its rump to dig in the hind paws, then it jumps. But a butterfly is no sustenance for a cat. It's practice. There was a little girl about your agemight have been your sister, but she won't admit itwho saw the cat and decided to teach it a lesson. She hid in the taller grass with two old kites under each arm and waited for the cat to come by stalking. When it got real close, she put on her mother's dark glasses, to look all bug-eyed, and she jumped up flapping the kites. Well, it was just a little too real, because in a trice she found herself flying, and she was much smaller than she had been, and the cat jumped at her. Almost got her, too. Ask your sister about that sometime. See if she doesn't deny it." "How'd she get back to be my sister again?" "She became too scared to fly. She lit on a flower and found herself crushing it. The glasses broke, too." (30 of 197) "My sister did break a pair of Mom's glasses once." The woman smiled. "I got to be going home." "Tomorrow you bring me a story, okay?" I ran off without answering. But in my head, monsters were already rising. If she thought I was scared,
    wait until she heard the story I had to tell! When I got home my older sister, Barbara, was fixing lemonade in the kitchen.