Velveteen by Saul Tanpepper Read Free Book Online Page B

seen my Mama.
    please
    But her scream startles me, wakens
    hunger
    something deep down inside of me that I haven’t felt in
    forever
    so long, and I’m not expecting it when she pulls her arm away and disappears back into the hallway. The memory of
    blood
    sadness fills me, but all I can seem to feel is
    hunger
    hollow.

    I stare at the open door. It doesn’t close. It must be time to
    bite
    find Ben Nicholas.
    Behind the shed.
    And then
    cure
    No!
    First things first.

    My swing set chatters at me when I pass it, and the moonlight shines down like everywhere and everything are nothing but a faded photograph. Everything looks so much older than the last time I saw it. The dead grass is up to my knees, my waist, brushing the insides of my thighs and the tops of my arms.
    I don’t feel it.
    I don’t smell it.
    I can’t even
    taste
    smell myself anymore.
    I notice that the window in the shed is broken. It wasn’t before I died and was cured. The door is broken and hanging open on one hinge.
    Daddy should fix that.
    The darkness and spiders inside don’t scare me no more.
    Mister Sam’s house is dark and the fence Ben Nicholas dug under leans over into our yard. I can see the frame of the chicken coop, bleached white in the moonlight, the wire overgrown with dead ivy.
    champion laying hens
    Their bones scattered and moss-covered. No feathers left.
    Not Real. Nobody loved them enough to be Real. Certainly not Mister Sam. He just left them behind and forgot about them.
    How long have I been waiting?
    forever
    Standing?
    hungry
    All the houses around me are dark, all except mine. There’s a light inside mine and
    food
    the rancid sick smell of the living. They need light to see by, but I don’t. Not anymore. I see with my skin, hear with my skin, taste.
    first things first, cassie
    I have to dig through the old leaves and branches before I find him, my bunny, Ben Nicholas. He is no longer white, but all brown now, like he was dipped in chocolate and not washed off. And he is nothing but skin
    meat
    and bones.
    Hungry
    “‘By the time you are Real,’” Daddy reads, “‘most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.’”
    I look up, expecting to see him, but he’s not there. It’s just a memory on a breeze, a memory of a book he once read.
    Oh, my Ben Nicholas. You are very, very shabby. Yes, you are.
    I pull him gently from the sticky ground where he has been sleeping all this time. His hair has been worn off, and his eyes have dropped out, but at least his joints aren’t loose. And he’s a little
    Hungry!
    flat.
    Ben Nicholas. My Ben Nicholas. You need to be cleaned off.
    His fur doesn’t taste anything like chocolate. It tastes like nothing at all.
    HUNGRY!!
    The shout inside my head jerks me to my feet. I look blindly up again at the house and turn toward it.
    First things first, Cassie!
    I’m only half finished. I hug Ben Nicholas close to me and tell him, “ Shh. ” His feet poke stiffly out to the side, but he’s very light and very quiet. He’s a good rabbit.
    Soon I’ll fill this aching urge growing inside of me. But first things first, as Daddy always used to say. First things first.
    I push the gnawing feeling back down into the dark hole where it must have slept all this time, hiding.
    Beneath Ben Nicholas’s bed is a board. Beneath the board, a hollow in the ground.
    Mama and Daddy will be so proud.
    My unfeeling fingers find what they’re looking for.
    Stop crying, Mama. Please stop crying.
    I reach in. Deep, deep into the midnight hole.
    hair loved off
    Right where I left him, the night I was cured.
    loose in the joints
    Ah, yes. His old clothes
    very shabby
    worn nearly to nothing. But he is here. He’s Real.
    eyes dropped out
    My dear, sweet little brother Remy. I’m sorry I hated you when you were just beginning.
    That’s okay, my dear. You didn’t know. But now it’s finally time, time to heal.

    Everyone was sick in