Read Online The Listeners by Leni Zumas - Free Book Online

worried.
    â€œI’m not,” I said.
    â€œYes you are because you’re scared of the colors and noises.”
    â€œI just don’t want them in my head.”
    â€œThat’s because you’re afraid,” she reasoned. “If you don’t be afraid, then it’s not bad if they’re there.” She cuddled two squirming tubes in her palm.
    And fat bled from her head. It was the color of blood but also of fat: whitish yellow. It had brains mixed in. When the medics turned her over, brains and fat in a lace of red globbed onto the pillow. Her brain had many things in it: the length of a giant squid, the way to the library, the story of Lacustrina who lived in a lake and had a silver heart no boy could break.

DATE ON MILK was two months prior. I opened the soft triangle mouth: it had gone penis-cheese. But something about the stink was relaxing, a proof of nature’s workings—the reliable progress of decay. While my body collapsed, cell by cell, the milk was dying even faster. The rat, too, would meet its maker long before I did, unless it managed to infect me with twenty-first-century plague. The rat carried, I was certain, all manner of disease into the apartment, dropping flecks from his tiny brown lips; when he chewed newspaper his saliva dried to spores. Scamper, scamper, bump. I’m going to hammer out your brains. Are rat brains the same color as human? (When the little rabbit cut its foot on a nail at Belfry Street I’d been shocked that its blood looked just like a person’s.)
    The day was warmish. I stood naked in the kitchen, sweat nipping between my thighs. When I scratched, my shoulder felt padded—with defrosted burritos and maple doughnuts. The red-eyed doll, the dragon, the sailor sat over notched scars. Before I’d gotten all the
work done, the scars had been tiny bottle caps under the skin. Mert had sent me to the dink after she barged in—I’d forgotten to lock the bathroom—and saw. We did not talk about it; Mert simply made an appointment and said she would pick me up from school at two thirty. The dink asked me to roll up my sleeve and I said no and the dink waited, then asked again, and I said no again. Your mother tells me you’ve been hurting yourself, said the dink.
    I brought the candy bar, my old knife, and sandwich bags to the couch and began to slice. Octy counted with me: one, two, three on up to thirty-nine. Each sandwich bag received six slices, which made six bags, and I was allowed to eat the remaining three right away. As I brought the first tiny piece to my mouth, I heard a whistling.
    Let me back in!
    Whistling turned to howling. Teeth hit the glass.
    I ate the second and third pieces and gathered up the bags. “Stop it,” I said.
    But please.
    â€œStop it, I can’t let you in!” I bumbled toward the kitchen, eyes closed so I wouldn’t see my sister.
    The whistling quit and I opened my eyes. On the counter, next to a can of cheese, the hammer waited for its chance. Just show your face, I told the rat, and the floor’ll be wearing your brains! I was talking out loud again. The first sign. Not of mental illness—those symptoms usually appear by late youth—it was something worse, not glamorous at all. Crumble-brain .

MY SISTER MADE her mouth an O and puffed at Riley. “What does it smell like?”
    He shrugged. “Your mouth, I guess.”
    â€œIs it bad?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œIs it like onions?”
    â€œWhy, you ate some?”
    She blew into her palm and sniffed. “There’s this thing called period breath and I want to know if I have it. Some women give off an oniony smell during their menstrual. If it happens to me, I’ll—”
    â€œKill yourself?” I suggested from across the room.
    â€œGo to a breath doctor,” she said.
    Riley leaned to smell again. “It might be a little oniony,” he admitted.
    This