Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard Page B

sometimes it strangles them. He took it off and blew into my mouth, and then I began to breathe.”

    â€œOh,” she said quietly, as if expecting something else, but I couldn’t think of what came next. My story seemed to have started well, but what happened after my birth? Feeling vaguely irritated, I got up and walked away. The next day, after school, she asked me to tell another story, but I said I was busy and left her in the musty silence of the house.
    As I crossed the frozen fields, I wished for spring and that first breathless warmth that was no warmth at all but seemed it after so long in the cold. Dandelions would bloom, like when I was very small and everything was perfect.
    I sat in my favorite place, a grove of oaks that were larger than the other trees. The ground beneath was without weeds, soft and dark and always in shadows in the summer, though now I stared up through the naked branches at the colorless sky. Everyone I knew had died. The house had burned down. The school had been incinerated. I was the hunter, the loup-garou transformed by the forest and the animal power of solitude. In nature, I would survive. The world would end, and when it began again, I’d still be here.
    But when would that happen? My brother liked Dungeons & Dragons, and his Monster Manual described lycanthropy, which turned men into werewolves. Though I’d thought of my father when I read it, I knew that it was too simple—that nothing, not even the end of the world, would happen the way I wanted it to.
    Eventually it grew dark, and my mother’s voice called across the valley from the back porch, my name echoing off the mountains. I started home.
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    The snowmelt came suddenly, flooding drainage ditches, covering the fields, water gathering toward our backyard until it shone in a crescent around the slight rise where our house had been built. The sun blazed day after day, and I forgot my frustration and boredom and loved the sense of expectation and change, of possibly having to survive a natural disaster.
    I’d read a book about young people who bonded after society’s collapse. The abandoned cities sent shivers up my spine, the vines that
grew through cracked concrete and broken windows, the mountains where the youths sheltered beneath overhangs, staring out over the desolate landscape for a flicker of light.
    Reading made me feel as if I’d swigged my father’s vodka. Did my brother or sister experience this? My brother loved video games, and my sister sang constantly so that her location in the house could be determined according to her volume. My mother always told us to read, but did she know that books made me want to run outside and breathe the air rolling off the mountains, smell the wet fields and drying mud, hear the crunch of onion grass under my feet? Stories seemed like paths. If you went outside and looked, there was the world, just the world, but if you went and looked after reading a story, there was a world where anything could happen, as if beyond the mountains were a hundred countries to which I might go, a hickory cane over my shoulder and my few possessions tied in a red bandanna.
    But there would be no escaping this time. The flood hemmed us in, our house like a frog on a lily pad. Neighbors put out sandbags, and in a few places the water on the road was so high that my father had to drive through it very slowly, afraid of shorting out his engine.
    My mother had gotten two horses a few years earlier and checked on them and on her bedeviling goats. She cooked restlessly, baking crumbly bread in coffee cans so that each loaf came out with the can’s seams printed on it. She made flat, hard cookies that looked like very wet mud thrown at a wall.
    As I studied the flood, imagining all the ways to cross it, she joined me on the back porch.
    â€œWe’re going to leave soon,” she told me, and my heart beat with an excitement so involuntary, so sudden,