Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (story books for 5 year olds txt) 📕

“Why someday and not now?”

“I can’t.”

I clenched my fists. “I’m sick of everything here. I hate it. I want to go.”

“You’re not fifteen. I told you that you can go when you are.”

“He can’t be that bad.”

“You don’t know how bad he can be. He told everyone that I left because he was going bankrupt, but I left because he was crazy. I always told myself I’d know when it was time. Then one morning he was reading an article about a man who went bankrupt and killed his wife and children and himself. He said it made sense to him. That’s why I took you so far away. I told him that a psychic said I should leave, about the earthquake and that stuff. If I’d said he was crazy, he might have hurt me. But I gave him another reason.”

I understood. Nobody wanted to hear that something was his fault. But I didn’t believe he’d have hurt us. People talked all sorts of shit when they were angry. He hadn’t meant it. My fondest memories were of times with him, his wildness, our adventures.

She put her head against my shoulder. Cars passed on Route 28. Pods from the maple helicoptered down with each gust of wind and disappeared in the dusk, on the shingles of the roof.

✴

A LEATHER JACKET came in the mail, but it was the wrong kind, glossy and thin, the seams making a V in the back. It was something a European rock star would wear. I’d wanted the heavy, armored look of a biker, but this would have to do.

At school, Elizabeth told me that we weren’t girlfriend and boyfriend. Though she was thirteen, she said, “Sorry. You’re just a kid. I like men.”

Every day, Travis and Brad wanted to know how we’d get the motor-bike frame. I said we had to wait—that it would be soon. But I could hardly wait myself. This seemed the longest year of my life, and to take the edge off my impatience, I led us on a crime spree. We prowled farmland, smashing the windows of old cars on blocks, taking rusty pipes and knocking out headlights and reflectors, gouging the few still-inflated tires with our pocketknives. We broke into a house and took tools and cassettes, spare change and more knives. We broke into a storage unit, disappointed that it held only boxes of old Christmas decorations and one of smoke detectors, which we stole, thinking they might be worth something.

I saw crime everywhere. My brother kept to his room, curtains drawn, the only light his computer screen. He was pale, with etiolated hair, but surely a hacker breaking into government databases, taking over the world like the computer in The Terminator. I still sneaked into the vaultlike silence of his room to read his stories. Longing was in the dark canyons between the towers of the future, in the galactic space between alien nations. But the men never did anything. They watched. They calculated. Women paced before them in black skirts and high boots.

I wondered if he felt what I did, if he burned with the same obsessions.

From time to time, he went into the kitchen and took a jar of hot peppers from the fridge. He slouched at the table, eating them until tears gathered in his eyes.

✴

TWO DOZEN PEOPLE sat on a basement carpet before a medium, a woman who communicated the wisdom of a celestial being.

I was next to my mother and Dickie, who had his knees pulled to his chest, his eyes wary. Over the years, my mother had tried to convert him to her vision of the unpolluted palate, but he still smoked and now he was drinking again, watching shoot-’em-up action flicks and eating dinner before a TV loud enough to drown the steady and unconscious smack of his chewing. The séance was a victory for her, and for me, a return to childhood magic.

The medium sat, spine straight, palms on her knees. Her facial muscles slowly relaxed, becoming lugubrious, like those of a drunken man. With half-lidded eyes, she surveyed the audience. Her assistant announced that she was ready, and someone asked about a recurrent nightmare.

“This dream,” the medium said in a deep, masculine voice, “it is an expression of fear, but there is no real fear, only the unknown. There is no danger …”

Her words on life and death and the currents of pain and the fractured, dissatisfied selves that haunt our sleep struck me as obvious. But I, too, had a recurrent dream. In the valley, I went to the shed where my father had built the pen for his German shepherds. A man stood inside, covered in matted hair, his hands on the two-by-four slats. I could hardly see him or decipher his rough, muddled language, but I understood that he was asking to be let out. I fled, knowing that sooner or later he’d break free and find me.

All that night, after returning home, I read a bulky novel. Dawn reached my window as I began the last chapter. The hero accepted his destiny and trekked to a tower in desolate mountains to face a being so evil that its origins were a mystery. This was his purpose, to destroy the source of evil itself. But the confrontation was inconclusive. The being vanished. There was an unforeseen glitch in the prophecy, some mystical red tape that the hero would have to sort out in the sequel. My mother was already reading it.

I tossed the novel on the floor and stood. Blood buzzed in my ears. I shuffled to the bathroom and peed. Then I stared in the mirror: a pimply boy with a bad haircut and not nearly enough muscle. I went out the front door. The highway swayed like a rope bridge, and I stumbled alongside it. I recalled how, years before, my father had told me that if I