Velveteen (8 page)

My swing set chatters at me when I pass it, and the moonlight shines down like everywhere and everything are nothing but a faded photograph. Everything looks so much older than the last time I saw it. The dead grass is up to my knees, my waist, brushing the insides of my thighs and the tops of my arms.

I don’t feel it.

I don’t smell it.

I can’t even

taste

smell myself anymore.

I notice that the window in the shed is broken. It wasn’t before I died and was cured. The door is broken and hanging open on one hinge.

Daddy should fix that.

The darkness and spiders inside don’t scare me no more.

Mister Sam’s house is dark and the fence Ben Nicholas dug under leans over into our yard. I can see the frame of the chicken coop, bleached white in the moonlight, the wire overgrown with dead ivy.

champion laying hens

Their bones scattered and moss-covered. No feathers left.

Not Real. Nobody loved them enough to be Real. Certainly not Mister Sam. He just left them behind and forgot about them.

How long have I been waiting?

forever

Standing?

hungry

All the houses around me are dark, all except mine. There’s a light inside mine and

food

the rancid sick smell of the living. They need light to see by, but I don’t. Not anymore. I see with my skin, hear with my skin, taste.

first things first, cassie

I have to dig through the old leaves and branches before I find him, my bunny, Ben Nicholas. He is no longer white, but all brown now, like he was dipped in chocolate and not washed off. And he is nothing but skin

meat

and bones.

Hungry

“‘By the time you are Real,’” Daddy reads, “‘most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.’”

I look up, expecting to see him, but he’s not there. It’s just a memory on a breeze, a memory of a book he once read.

Oh, my Ben Nicholas. You are very, very shabby. Yes, you are.

I pull him gently from the sticky ground where he has been sleeping all this time. His hair has been worn off, and his eyes have dropped out, but at least his joints aren’t loose. And he’s a little

Hungry!

flat.

Ben Nicholas. My Ben Nicholas. You need to be cleaned off.

His fur doesn’t taste anything like chocolate. It tastes like nothing at all.

HUNGRY!!

The shout inside my head jerks me to my feet. I look blindly up again at the house and turn toward it.

First things first, Cassie!

I’m only half finished. I hug Ben Nicholas close to me and tell him, “
Shh.
” His feet poke stiffly out to the side, but he’s very light and very quiet. He’s a good rabbit.

Soon I’ll fill this aching urge growing inside of me. But first things first, as Daddy always used to say. First things first.

I push the gnawing feeling back down into the dark hole where it must have slept all this time, hiding.

Beneath Ben Nicholas’s bed is a board. Beneath the board, a hollow in the ground.

Mama and Daddy will be so proud.

My unfeeling fingers find what they’re looking for.

Stop crying, Mama. Please stop crying.

I reach in. Deep, deep into the midnight hole.

hair loved off

Right where I left him, the night I was cured.

loose in the joints

Ah, yes. His old clothes

very shabby

worn nearly to nothing. But he is here. He’s Real.

eyes dropped out

My dear, sweet little brother Remy. I’m sorry I hated you when you were just beginning.

That’s okay, my dear. You didn’t know. But now it’s finally time, time to heal.

Everyone was sick in those days, sick and dying. But soon we’ll all be better.

I received my first request to tell Cassie’s story literally within hours of publishing the GAMELAND series episode in which she makes a fleeting appearance. It would be the first of many such appeals. As her creator, the connection I’ve felt with Cassie since first meeting her in
Sunder the Hollow Ones
has been both deep and personal. Nevertheless, for a character whose entire contribution to the nearly half-million-word series occupies just eight of those words — a single gesture — her impact on readers continually impresses me.

To me, nothing is more compelling than a tale of sadness and strife told from the unique perspective of a young child. How might tragic events be differently depicted when seen through the prism of adolescent preoccupation and naiveté? Given the exact same set of circumstances, which are the forces that propel youngsters to make their fateful decisions, and how are they different from those which impel adults? This distinction is what I have tried to highlight in
Velveteen
.

Cassie’s ideation of a world in which the recently monstrous are now considered mundane reflects her limited perspective and experience. The relatively new “technology” of Reanimates (zombies) as civil servants harbors an inherently destructive potential, to which her parents are sensitive, but which Cassie is only marginally aware. But like the pre-rabid dog which will inevitably turn on its owner — or perhaps more aptly, a machine with the capability to be misused as an instrument of our annihilation — all it takes is one mistake or individual with an agenda to unleash that potential. Even as her parents’ fears become reality, the consequences remain primarily in the background for Cassie as she struggles to deal with her own issues using a belief system apropos to her age.

Despite her overprotective mother’s attempts to shield Cassie from the harsh world (admittedly for her own selfish reasons), the tragic irony is that she and Cassie’s father unwittingly create an equally immediate and harmful environment in their own home through their squabbling.
Velveteen
tells the story of what happens when these two destructive forces begin to collide.

Velveteen
is a standalone novelette, but the story is very much a part of the dystopic world of GAMELAND. If you haven’t already read the series’ first season, you can get a sense of it in the included
short excerpt
where Jessie encounters Cassie shortly after entering Gameland.

I have also included brief excerpts of two upcoming novels from the same world:
Jessie’s Game
, a continuation of the GAMELAND saga (due out fall 2013), and
A Dark and Sure Descent
, a bridge between the original series and
Velveteen
.
Descent
tells the story of the Long Island outbreak and the role which Cassie’s parents, as animal researchers at the controversial Laroda Island animal research laboratory, play in it (due out winter 2013).

For those interested in the vampire rabbit story referenced in
Velveteen
, the title is
Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery
,” by Deborah and James Howe.

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Tanpepper Tidings
, my ~monthly newsletter. Opting in and out is easy, and your contact information is never shared or sold:

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FROM THE WORLD OF GAMELAND

Sunder the Hollow Ones
Episode 4, Season 1
(
available in digital and print
)

As I make my way down the hallway, my eyes wander over the framed photographs hanging on the wall. It looks like a young couple used to live here, mid-twenties, their daughter of about five years old. She’s blond, pretty, wearing a white dress with a crimson sash around her waist and a crimson bow in her hair. She’s standing beside a metal swing set, her arms wrapped around an undeniably overfed white rabbit, which seems not to mind that its bottom half is dangling completely unsupported. It’s even got that same happy smile the girl is wearing.

The pictures sadden me. Here is a family ripped from their home by the outbreak. I wonder where they ended up. I guess the girl would be about my age now, seventeen or eighteen.

Out of curiosity, I wander around the corner and toward the unlit back of the house and strain my eyes to see if the swing set in the picture is out there. The faintest glow leaks from the hallway and out through the sliding glass door and onto the grass. And there it is, the ghostly metal skeleton, a pair of swings, a slide, all stained brown by rust and covered in vines. In the darkness with the breeze blowing the grass, the image wavers and for a brief moment the little girl is out there, sitting on one of the swings, the rabbit on her lap, and suddenly I’m so very homesick.