Arcadia Read Online Free Page A

says, What’s bitch?
    A girl dog, Hannah says, and bites her lip and puffs out her cheeks with air.
    Oh, Bit says. Pets are not allowed in Arcadia. Bit doesn’t ask what he knows in theory from picture books but longs to understand better: what, exactly, a dog is, or why people want to keep them. Jincy once nursed a baby bunny with soymilk for three days until her mother, Caroline, found it and made her leave it in the woods. When Jincy cried and cried, Caroline said with a shrug, Come on, Jin. You know personal property’s not allowed. Besides, you really want to enslave a fellow creature?
    Petey wasn’t my slave, Jincy sniffled. I loved Petey.
    Petey will grow up to be a big strong bunny hopping through the meadows, the way he’s supposed to, Caroline said firmly. The next day the squirmy pink thing was gone from the little pallet of leaves where Jincy had left it. Now the children make a game of scanning the underbrush for their tiny friend. Often someone runs shouting back to the Kid Herd, sure that they’ve seen Petey from the corner of an eye, rosy as a lump of flesh, swift in the brambles, a creature miraculous and tender, their shared secret.
    Hannah has brought Bit in the predawn to the squat stone Bakery, and he wakes on the flour sacks in the corner. It is hot; loaves plumpen on the shelf. The flesh of the dough makes Bit hungry, makes something warm rise up in his sleep-swimmy head, and he creeps to where Hannah stands, hip against the mixer, talking to Regina and Ollie. Bit tugs Hannah down, and she bends absently, and he lifts her teeshirt, and latches his mouth to her breast.
    Hannah slides her nipple away, pulls the shirt over her body, hugs it to her, pushes his cheek gently with her hand.
    You’re too old for that, baby, she says, and stands.
    The room trembles in Bit’s eyes. Ollie murmurs something about Astrid nursing Leif until he was eight, Regina says something and hands Bit a soft pretzel. Hannah says Something-something-can’t, but Bit doesn’t hear her words exactly, his sorrow a too-loud wind in his ears.
    When it’s too dark to work, Abe comes home. His coat and overalls and workshirt shed sawdust. When his gloves come off, his hands are nicked and chapped. During dinner, Hannah yawns. Bit and Abe can see the tiny man bobbing in the cavern of her throat. She says, I’m bushed. Sometimes she washes her face and brushes her teeth with baking soda before she falls asleep, sometimes she doesn’t. The nights are long. Abe picks Bit up and reads aloud whatever he’s studying at the time ( New Politics, Anarchy and Organization, Mad magazine). Bit can pick out sentences, can follow along the swoops of emotion in Abe’s voice, can sound out headlines to himself. Parts of the world click into shape, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. But the puzzle is alive; it grows; new pieces appear for him to fit together faster than he can gather them in his mind.
    He fights sleep to think about it all. His father washes dishes and fetches water from the stream so they don’t have to in the morning, and when he unbuttons his shirt with heavy hands, he falls, already sleeping, into bed.
    There is, Bit knows, what happens on the surface, and there is what pulls beneath. He thinks of standing in a river current, the wind strong in the opposite direction. Even in the happiest times—Cockaigne Day in the middle of summer, Blessing Day at the end of the year, the Harvest Festival, the spontaneous gigs—even during all that dancing and happy arguing, the Slap-Apple, the banquets, in the corners there always sit a few muscled young men with a badness in their eyes. There are murmurs when they come to Arcadia, dodger, four-eff, rather . . . jungles . . . bayonet babies? There is old Harriet, whose braless breasts waggle at her navel, who hoards food under her bed ( Poor thing, he overheard someone once say, watched her parents starve to death in the siege of Leningrad ). There is Ollie, one of the original