when edmund was made meat he screamed for a long time, screamed through the rags we stuffed into his mouth, screamed for days and days. of course all of us do that (tyrone tells me that even he did it when he first became meat) but not so loudly and not for so long. edmund only stopped screaming when he had his first drink, but i think before he stopped he had screamed out most of what had made him edmund. now he does not speak very much.
tyrone and i try to help. tyrone lets him drink first and i try and find things for him to play with, bits of plastic from all night bodegas, toys for babies that are left sometimes with the books i find. neither are of very much use. i would say that i do not think edmund is sane anymore but i do not think that any of us are. still he is worse off.
some days i think about the sun, of setting up one morning from the basement to see it. of course bill would stop me, not because he cares if i am here but because if i did it than i think he knows that we all would do it, and he is a coward as well as an idiot. so far i have been a coward also, but if i ever grow brave i will make sure to carry edmund up with me.
the meat that does not move is starting to pile high up in the closet where we keep it, and a man in a uniform came around and knocked on the door the other day, of course we were all in the basement but still we could hear it. meat can hear very well but meat cannot smell, cannot smell fresh cut grass or rat droppings or skin scent. meat cannot smell meat but flesh can smell meat, and i think perhaps the neighbors have started to complain.
we will have to migrate. it is not difficult. in this part of baltimore most of the houses are vacant, and a few days before hand we will all go out to scout for a new home. i like to go scouting very much, i like it the most of anything besides drinking. we split up and wander all night, from sundown to near sun up. edmund and i go out together and walking side by side for so long we sometimes even forget that we are meat, we might even be a brother and sister walking together, like i used to do with my real brother. of course edmund is pink and i am brown but without a reflection it is easy to forget that our meat is not the same color.
we are supposed to stay in the east part of the city, where most of the houses are empty or filled with people who would leave them if they could, but i cheat and walk north into the suburbs that i did not even visit when i was flesh. there there are houses with corners that look a bit like castles and red brick walkways and fine green grass if it is summer. at the very pretty ones i stop and ask edmund if it is nice enough to live in, as if we were flesh and rich flesh at that. sometimes he even answers.
we can walk anywhere in the city if we please and never need to feel fear. there are cruel men in the city but we do not need to worry about them. that is one of the good things about being meat. we do not need to worry about anything except for that the night will end, although of course it will. it always does.
tyrone did not come back from scavenging last night, and we are all very frightened.
bill pretends that he is not. he spent the day rambling and cursing tyrone and saying that we are better off without him, but he did not go out that night to look for drink, and he did not let us go out to scavenge.
bill says sometimes that there are men hunting us but i do not think this is true. it is hard to imagine we are important enough for someone to spend so much time looking for us. then again there are people whose job it is to hunt rats and cockroaches so perhaps i am wrong.
maybe one of these men have gotten tyrone. i have heard the same stories that you have about wooden stakes but i cannot say if they are true or not. they say many things about being meat but most of them are false. i suppose it would be possible to cut the meat enough that it could not work anymore, and there have been times walking past the trash can fires that the bums light in the winter when i have stared into the flames and felt the promise of release, turned away before i sought it.
but i do not think anything like this happened to tyrone. i think he just decided that he would like to see the sun again. i am trying to remember if he said anything to me yesterday as a warning or farewell, but if he did i cannot remember. Perhaps I was not paying attention.
bill is very frightened still, and so he yells a great deal and sometimes hits us. of course there is no point in meat hitting meat but i suppose it makes him feel better. he is still insisting that there are men watching us but i cannot see them. if they were there i think i could see them. at least i think i would be more likely to see them than bill. really i think it is just that the fear has gotten to be too strong. of course at some point his thirst will become stronger than the fear. the thirst is stronger than everything.
Two nights ago bill brought home flesh bound tightly, and he said that we would keep it upstairs in one of the empty rooms, and that we would feed the flesh and get our drink from it. i thought this was a bad idea and told him so. flesh yells and attracts attention. flesh shits and flesh weeps. flesh is trouble. i was right of course but bill did not listen. when bill drank from her she had a look in her eyes that i had to turn away from. of course when it was my turn i drank anyway.
still all next morning I could not forget the look in the flesh’s eyes and I decided that I would need to find a way to make her into meat, not meat like we are meat but empty meat. but then we went to feed the next eveniing I found there was no point, the flesh had become meat all on its own. maybe she choked on the rag that bill stuffed into her mouth or maybe her heart stopped working, i am not sure. flesh is very fragile.
juana raged and gnashed her new teeth until bill grew angry and hit her. then juana whined and panted a while and even sort of pretended to cry, although she soon realized how stupid she sounded and stopped. then she took bill’s hand and went downstairs into the basement even though it was still night, and they slapped their meat against each other, and juana told bill the things that bill likes to hear.
after they were done they spent a long time whispering. juana told bill that it would be easier if they did not have to worry about feeding me and edmund, that there would be more drink for the two of them. they must have known that we could hear them. i suppose they did not care.
later i went out scavenging down by the water, which is a long walk but offers good pickings. there was a pretty white girl drinking a beer on a street side table, and while edmund was asking her directions i snatched up her purse and fled into the evening. inside was a small computer and eighty dollars in cash, and i hid sixty of them beneath a loose floorboard in one of the other vacant houses on the block. i will do the same tomorrow.
bill was waiting for me when i got back from scavenging last night. he was sitting on the couch inside. juana was sitting next to him. at first i thought he knew about my hiding the money and i was frightened the way you are frightened when you have done something wrong, even though i had not. i mean it was not wrong to have hid the money. of course i have done very many wrong things.
bill asked for my take and when i gave it to him he said that it was not enough. he said that edmund and i were useless, two extra mouths to feed, that he was tired of having to put up with us. i told him that edmund and i were doing more good scavenging as he was hunting, and that he ought not complain.
bill said that he was thinking about leaving, or expelling me. i could tell then that he did not really want to leave, but only for me to not want him to leave, and to let him know that.