Free Velveteen by Saul Tanpepper Page A

Don’t feel anything, don’t remember what anything feels like. Being comforted or being frightened, for example. Just the memory of those things filling me. That’s part of what happens when you get better. It hollows you out. But I’m not sorry about it.
    Still, sometimes, I just wish I could feel a little. Just a little tiny bit.
    Hot or cold, happiness, loneliness. Even fear.
    Anything.
    Sometimes I even miss the hunger that used to eat away at me inside my mind until I thought it would swallow me up for being so big when I was just so small. Just to feel, I don’t know, something?
    Right before I was cured, I could smell the infection inside my mama. I think she brought it home with her from the hospital. I could smell it on her skin, eating its way into her bones where it slept so quietly, pretending to not be there. I didn’t smell it in my father at first, but it came, later. Mama gave it to him, the disease. I’m pretty sure about that. Or maybe he took it for himself, like I did because
    nursery magic is strange and wonderful
    he knew he’d be left behind if he didn’t. He took the sickness and then went to get the cure.
    The smell of the sickness about me and Ben Nicholas was the same, but it was different from their’s. Different from everyone else’s. And when Ben Nicholas died and stayed dead no matter how much wishing and crying I did, that’s when I knew I wouldn’t come back neither.
    For us, Ben Nicholas and me, the sickness didn’t sleep inside like it did in Mama and Daddy. It didn’t wait and hide and pretend. Instead, it rose up inside of me, burning and biting. It raged and screamed until I finally — finally — understood why Ben Nicholas had acted the way he had on his very last day of life. The sickness chewed away at the insides of my head and grew big and dark and ugly, like one of those scary, angry, snapping dogs.
    (Not Shinji, though; Shinji was never like that.)
    It made me scream and bite at all the things outside of me with a crazy mad fury, and I was so angry all the time. Until I wasn’t angry no more.
    I still wanted to bite then, but it was a different wanting. It was different because I was finally all better and had gotten my appetite back.
    But even that, too, has faded away. I’m not hungry no more.
    I’m so sorry, Ben Nicholas. I wish I had known sooner. I would have protected you better.
    How long have I been standing here?
    forever
    I don’t know. The darkness here is everlasting. But I’ll stand here until Mama and Daddy come back for me. When it’s time. They’ll know. The door will open. Their arms will open. And we’ll all be together again. A family. All of us.
    forever and forever and forever
    together
    That’s how it works, Ben Nicholas, because magic is
    strange
    the only thing
    wonderful
    that works anymore.
    He’s waiting for me behind the shed, where I made a nice bed for him in the leaves, hid him beneath the board so nobody will be able to take him this time.
    First thing’s first, honey.
    Ben Nicholas.
    I didn’t want Mama to bury you again in the dirt. Twice is too many times to be put into the ground. To be dug up. Twice is enough.
    I bump against the wall for what seems like the millionth time, not even aware I’ve taken a step. I keep forgetting where I am. I step back with a sigh that sounds like
    breathing
    leaves rattling in the gutters.
    I’m patient. I’m not going anywhere, waiting for
    the door to open
    Ben Nicholas to finish becoming Real.
    A part of me wishes I could sleep. But I know I can’t. If I do I’ll never wake up. So I listen to the roaring silence inside of me instead. Like music. It keeps me from ever growing tired. The sound of it carries me along as if I was a wind over the ocean in a painting on the wall. Time and silence eat at my insides. They tear apart my memories until I find myself clutching at them with my mind as tightly as I used to hug Ben Nicholas in my arms. I don’t want to lose a single one of