Victims: Part 1 eBook by Preston Lingle

Author:Preston Lingle [Lingle, Preston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IngramSpark
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

The scene was set before I awoke. Chris left early in the morning to bury his friend. Billy awoke sometime after Chris’s departure; he assumed Chris wanted to be alone. Instead, Billy tried to make breakfast.

Chris and Billy got the supplies they needed from the bakery the previous day, and Billy was anxious to get started. He went upstairs to see if he could figure it out but only learned how to light the fire. Melody tried to help him; he couldn’t read the cookbooks. At first, Melody taught Billy how to read from the book—recognizing words and associating them with objects—but it didn’t go well. He was not a fast learner and a lousy student; Melody said me much later—he wanted to run before he could crawl, she put it. He would only want to make the food and didn’t want to learn to read, per se. Melody eventually got fed up with him. Her solution was to get some paper and draw images of exactly what he needed for each recipe/dish. She wrote little notes next to the pictures, though her penmanship was sloppy; she could read, but I didn’t teach her to write properly. She included simple numbers in her notes, such as “x3 (image)”, or what-have-you. Billy picked up on the numbers quicker than he did the words.

I awoke to her exasperated grunts—so loud it echoed through the building and woke me from my half-asleep state. I waddled my crust-covered eyes up the stairs, my primordial brain following the scent of cooked food—something I hadn’t known since leaving my father. Upstairs, a nearly-completed breakfast was laid out on mostly clean plates. We ate burned bread and seared peaches. They didn’t pair well together, though the toast had a somewhat pleasing taste to it. Overall, it was a decent first attempt—but not great.

After breakfast, I watched Melody teach Billy how to read the various cookbooks and help him understand what each utensil did. They would bicker, and I would laugh. Their interplay between a desperate teacher and a slack-off student who wanted the C average was like a choreographed stage play. The symbolism of her tone toward each word she read from the book—flawless, with a wet, wispy rasp in her voice—represented the diverging direction of our state; she would glance at me, then angrily return to the book. The student became the teacher, though her teaching was flawed—an enthusiastically steadfast, guileless devotee.

Chris returned around midday. Melody noticed him while she looked out at the city from the sizeable tilted windowsill on the top floor. He entered, leaving the shovel covered in dirt and sand by the door. He called together a meeting in the main foyer. Billy offered him some of the burnt bread from earlier, now cold. Chris took a bite, winced, and watched while the crumbs fell to the floor.

“How is it?” Billy asked.

“Well,” Chris said, attempting to minimize the sound of his crunches, “It’s something different.” Billy got a chuckle from that.

Chris finished his food, and everyone gathered around him.

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